This paper analyses the determinants of sovereign spreads in the euro area from January 2002 to May 2012. The objective is to disentangle the role of country-specific fundamentals, driven by fiscal and macroeconomic factors, from what is referred to as contagion. Following the existing empirical literature, the work estimates a model of the determinants of 10-year yield spreads relative to Germany for ten euro zone countries. The results show that since the eruption of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, sovereign spreads have shown a time-dependent contagion component. On average, such a component explains almost one third of the spreads dynamic in 2009-2010 and almost 10 per cent since 2011. However, results at the country level are quite different between core and peripherals.