Encountering Spain: The Basque Country

This series of talks will explore three diverse parts of Spain, from the perspective of 19th- and early 20th-century British travellers and ex-pats who encountered a country they found surprisingly different from the ‘Sunny South’ of Romantic legend. Using their own words and images, we will follow in their footsteps to discover what drew them off the beaten track, which of the sites and sights they experienced they found most noteworthy, and how they made sense of their encounters for their audiences back home.

First talk: The Basque Country

Most Victorians travelling to Spain by train would have seen Basque mountains and meadows whoosh by as they whizzed towards Castile, but how did the handful of tourists who stopped there make sense of the striking contrasts between its urban industry and remote countryside?

Kirsty Hooper is a Professor of Hispanic Studies at Warwick University, and a specialist in Spanish, Anglo-Spanish and Galician cultural history since 1800. Her books include Writing Galicia into the World (2011), Mondariz-Vigo-Santiago: A Brief History of Galicia’s Edwardian Tourist Boom (2013) and The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession (2020). She currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for the project Hispanic London: Culture, Commerce and Community in the Nineteenth-Century City (2020-2023).

Online activity

Activity in English.

For more information, please contact [email protected]