I spent two weeks in Spain and read these books along the way. The best texts are marked with ✷.
This was the clear highlight of my reading in Spain. Brenan — who lived in Spain from 1919 — offers deep background, centuries of background, for the Spanish Civil War. Though there are centuries of ideological division, the key thing to understand is the “agrarian question:” even in the early 20th century, Spain’s peasant farmers lived in bitter precarity. On the eve of the revolution, a bourgeois Republican government collapses because they can’t switfly redistribute the land. Their coalition bungles the election, which benefits the Falange and the Communists in turn; in the chaos of their contest, Franco rallies forces in Morocco and invades. The rest, as they say…
This summary omits everything impressive in the book. The War is just a motivating conclusion for Brenan’s general history of Spanish politics, an ancient mass of overlapping tensions.
Spain has a host of local nationalisms and national identities (most pronounced in Catalonia and the Basque Country). The agrarian question had distinct regional characteristics, thanks to regional conventions for landownership and leases. Spain also has unusually sharp differences between particular cities, thanks to an old royal tendency to grant monopolies — important industrial monopolies to Bilbao and Barcelona; a monopoly on early trade with the Americas to Sevilla — in addition to the natural concentration of political and military power in the capital, Madrid. There are universally recognizable class struggles, but even these are more nuanced. The agricultural worker is typically an anarchist, the industrial worker a syndicalist.
This web is further tangled by Madrid’s tendency to pit local factions against each other to weaken them. Memorably, Brenan argues Josep Dencàs — nominally a Catalan separatist and effectively a local breed of fascist — must have been an instrument of the ascendant Right in Madrid: why else would he disband his paramilitaries and escape to France via Barcelona sewer within ten hours of forcing a Catalan secession?
I put my money where my mouth is and bought a personal paper copy of this book, which will stand next to my Robert Caro biographies. I look forward to reading Brenan’s memoirs; apparently he once tried to walk to China.
Gilmour’s introduction is important. Spain, he argues, doesn’t have a historically primary city the way France and England do; nor does it have historically independent city-states, as in Italy. The cities of Spain have distinct characters and specializations. Over the centuries, cultural and political hegemony shifted from place to place. Toledo is home to Church and Court until Phillip II moves to Madrid. Sevilla enjoyed a monopoly on American trade that was loosed by the shifting sands of the Guadalquivir. Córdoba was capital to the most developed civilization in Europe… then, suddenly, it wasn’t.
This system is ideal for travel book: you too will see Spain one city at a time. Gilmour’s depictions are a little romantic, but he roots the present vibe of a place in its historical development. If you need to convince someone who travels to “live like a local” that they should also care about history, Cities of Spain is a strong argument to that effect.
The book covers Toledo, Córdoba, Santiago de Compostela, Sevilla, Salamanca, Cádiz, Barcelona, San Sebastián, and Madrid.
One complaint: Gilmour overquotes the impressions of earlier British travelers, especially when they comment on the character of Spanish women. I’ll read his earlier book on Lebanon, but I hope it’s in a different style.
It’s hard to find a good travel guide. It isn’t a Schwab family vacation unless someone complains about how hard the Rough Guide series fell off. The universal teal-and-orange color schemes, smeared with full-color photos, scream “please steal my passport, I am hapless.”
The Blue Guide can’t fall off because it’s out of print. The Blue Guide, despite the name, is barely blue, and it has text instead of photos. Usually the text is small, but the “asides” are truly microscopic. The Blue Guide doesn’t say “shake me, take currency;” it says “do not talk to me; I am a vicious, unapologetic pedant.” (This is a joke: you will not meet anyone who recognizes the Blue Guide.)
Unfortunately, this book is organized for a tour by car (which I didn’t do). Also, because it predates your smartphone by several decades, its walking tours are described verbally, not mapped. This is a hopeless proposition in the most interesting neighborhoods — the oldest, and therefore the most mazelike.
Nonetheless, I was impressed! It’s nice to have a guide that’s dense and brainy. If I had thirty minutes on the train before the next Andalusian city, I spent those thirty minutes cramming the Blue Guide.
Find a copy of the Blue Guide if you’re interested in Spain’s churches. Harvey’s Cathedrals of Spain focuses strictly on the cathedrals, and only on their architecture; Robertson, with saintly patience, describes even the art and decorative details of relatively minor buildings. These interior walking tours (chapel by chapel) are indispensable justification for the €4 to €10 entry fee the Church just squeezes out of you at every entrance.
Finally, Robertson’s pithy city histories serve better as reference texts than do the chapters of Cities of Spain, and of course the Blue Guide histories cover Spanish cities more comprehensively.
The young John Hooper Harvey was a prominent member of the Imperial Fascist League in the 1930s, a British political movement founded by a camel doctor because the nascent British Union of Fascists wasn’t, uh, fascist enough. This connection is mentioned on Harvey’s Wikipedia page and alongside his brief mention in Gothic Architecture in Spain (below), but neither describes the extent of his commitment, the viciousness of his writings, or the sheer fucking weirdness of his friends as clearly as Graham Macklin’s article, “The Two Lives of John Hooper Harvey.”1
After the end of the Second World War, Harvey wrote prolifically on English architecture and history, especially of the late Middle Ages. His 1948 book The Plantagenets was widely used as a textbook, despite a passage repeating a blood libel and endorsing Edward I’s decision to expell all Jews from England in 1290. It seems there were minor controversies along the way, but Harvey enjoyed public respectability as a historian until his death in 1997. His fascist sympathies were widely publicized after his death.
The overt racism and nationalism espoused in Harvey’s early writings make him a strange author for any foreign architectural history. This is especially true in Spain, where so much historical architecture (and so much of what makes up its “national style”) is originally Islamic or Jewish. The Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba is one clear example; any good walking tour of Toledo, through church and mosque and synagogue, is another. Spain was ruled by Franco’s fascist dictatorship when Harvey wrote the book; I can’t help but wonder if that made it subtly more appetizing.
Thankfully, The Cathedrals of Spain stands out in Harvey’s oeuvre for its even-handedness. Harvey is straightforwardly sympathetic to Spain’s Jews and mudéjar (those Muslims who stayed in Iberia after the Christian reconquest), and he credits the erstwhile Islamic government of Al-Andalus for its religious tolerance in comparison to the Catholic monarchs who ousted them. The editors of Gothic Architecture in Spain concede Harvey’s “prejudices,” at least, “do not surface clearly.” Macklin wonders if Harvey had “moderated his opinions” by the time he wrote this book. At the same time, be ideologically on guard — while his work to popularize an idea of Spanish “national style” here seems benign, his project to do the same for Britain (in other volumes) is more politically, and racially, tinged.
The book’s organization is ungainly. Buildings are described by region. Regional sections are apparently meant to be read through linearly, but then comparative references are scattered throughout. The index is thorough, but it’s a headache. Imagine a reader in the Catedral de Sevilla tries to read about that building; the index directs them, no joke, to pages 57, 58, 59, 102, 103, 183, 206, 217, 223, 227, 230–6, 239, 242, 260, 8, 120, and 146–8.2 I think Harvey is writing for a popular rather than an academic audience (his callout of “Dr. Pevsner” suggests Harvey addresses a reader familiar with Pevsner’s Architectural Guides3), but he lands in awkward middle ground.
This book’s primary strength is its breakdown of the major, architectural elements — when a feature of a cathedral was built or rebuilt, by whom, and so on. Its secondary strength, in my opinion, is Harvey’s taste; I think he’s unfair to Zaragoza’s Catedral basílica (an “extraordinary pile,” in his words), but his groans about La Almudena in Madrid and the cathedral in Granada are apt.
The book’s primary weakness as a travel companion is its ignorance of art and interior details; for these, refer to the Blue Guide.
Interestingly, neither the Blue Guide nor The Spanish Labyrinth have anything nice to say about Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, by now one of the main tourist attractions in Spain. (Cities of Spain, for its part, quotes Brenan.) I expected Harvey, archconservative as he is, to join their criticism; instead, he calls Gaudí “the most profound architectural genius of modern times,” and his masterwork “at once the culmination of the Spanish cathedral and the link which holds together its past and future.”
Tremlett’s memoirs as a foreign correspondent are most enthusiastic when he’s explaining some salacious aspect of “the Spanish character.” This tendency isn’t meanspirited, but it can feel condescending. Certain chapters are strong — the one on flamenco is heartfelt — and Tremlett is often genuinely funny, but this book, only loosely organized by locale, wasn’t useful to this traveler.
This one is for the fanatics! Gothic Architecture in Spain is academic, not fun. If you’re interested, it rewards with references to some off-the-beaten-path structures (e.g Sevilla’s Atarazanas [shipyards], currently under restoration); good documentary photographs; and a documented picture of France’s stylistic influence.