I went to the Cervantes Institute on Friday for the first of a series of conversations between Paul Preston, historian of the Spanish Civil War, and British writers who have lived in Spain.
He started with Michael Jacobs (a contributor to the Telegraph’s Saturday magazine and our travel pages), who laid into the stereotyping that fills so much travel writing about Spain. He said he would “rather die of poverty” than reinforce some of those stereotypes, among them the notion that “the real Spain is Andalusia” or that the country as a whole is fundamentally Moorish. He had no time for mysticism, and found duende “a particularly irritating concept”.
I thought he was a little unfair to newspaper travel sections, which may perpetuate some of the clichés but have also given space in recent years to those who challenge them — including himself.
But he’s right that many who go in search of the “real Spain”, a place they perceive as rural and unchanged, have failed to record and reflect the effect that immigration is having on the country. Jacobs said he had grown used to the sight of shepherds in out-of-the-way parts chattering into mobile phones. But on a walk recently in the footsteps of El Cid, he was startled to meet a shepherd who didn’t understand Spanish — he turned out to be Romanian. In Jacobs’s own corner of Andalusia, Frailes, he was living in a community that included not only Romanians but Moroccans, Ecuadoreans and Bolivians.
The conversation touched on the legacy of the Civil War, on the question of whether Spain is one country or many, and on the largely one-way movement of travel writers between Britain and Spain.
When asked why he did not write more about the Basque Country, Jacobs said that it was a lovely part of the world but that when he had last written about it he had received emails telling him that he wouldn’t be welcome to return. “On top of my Jewish-Catholic paranoia, the prospect of being threatened by a Basque is not particularly appealing.”
Someone in the audience asked why no British writers were interested in the Canary Islands, prompting Jacobs to point out that Galicia, too, had been neglected as a subject. And why, someone asked, were Spanish writers not examining the weird ways of the British as energetically as everyone from Richard Ford to Chris Stewart had reported on the Spanish.
Jacobs said: “The Spanish have taken a great interest in what the British say about them, but the British have taken no interest whatsoever in what the Spanish say about them.”
Preston noted that there was a similar imbalance in academic study. “There are Spanish academics who think they know about Britain,” he joked, “but this takes the form of wearing dicky bows.”
Judging from this one, the next couple of sessions should be worth hearing. On February 26 Professor Preston will be talking to Jason Webster (writer, among other things, of a bestseller entitled Duende) and on March 18 to Chris Stewart, author of Driving Over Lemons. For details see the Cervantes Institute website under “Cultural Events”.