No Country for Travellers? : British visitors to Spain and Portugal, 1760–1820

Abstract

No Country for Travellers? explores the rise and nature of British travel to Spain and Portugal between 1760 and 1820, across a region that is conventionally overlooked in studies of British travel to Europe. Drawing on extensive archival and printed sources left by travellers in the period, Rosemary Sweet and Richard Ansell reveal the unheralded significance of the two countries to eighteenth-century British culture, and their attraction as destinations long before the Peninsular War and nineteenth-century romanticism. Along the way, the book’s compelling narrative reveals the realities of Iberian travel, the different itineraries that travellers followed, the place of Spanish and Portuguese cities in the British imagination, and the importance of mediators in cultural exchange, on the Iberian side as well as the British. The travellers’ memoirs reflect changing perceptions of Spain and Portugal as modernisation raised new hopes that vied with pessimism and ancient prejudice, and also the persistence of cultural stereotypes, while the counterintuitive relationship between civilian travel and armed conflict emerges through a case study of the Peninsular War. Finally, focusing on contemporary fascination with the Alhambra in Granada, the authors examine the rise of British interest in Iberia’s Islamic history, with its significance for contemporary understandings of ‘Europe’.