The spallation of $^{56}$Fe in collisions with hydrogen at 1 A GeV has been studied in inverse kinematics with the large-aperture setup SPALADIN at GSI. Coincidences of residues with low-center-of-mass kinetic energy light particles and fragments hav
e been measured allowing the decomposition of the total reaction cross-section into the different possible de-excitation channels. Detailed information on the evolution of these de-excitation channels with excitation energy has also been obtained. The comparison of the data with predictions of several de-excitation models coupled to the INCL4 intra-nuclear cascade model shows that only GEMINI can reasonably account for the bulk of collected results, indicating that in a light system with no compression and little angular momentum, multifragmentation might not be necessary to explain the data.
