Below you will find a running list of travel books about Spain. This list does not include travel guides. Instead, the books you will find in this list are literary, first-person accounts of travelers through Spain.
The article has two sections. The first is “Our Picks,” which lists our top five favorite travel books about Spain. After that, you’ll find an alphabetized list of all travel books about Spain we’ve come across.
While we are primarily interested in first-person, non-fiction travel narratives, the list has a few works of fiction and romans-à-clef that have a strong autobiographical bent (noted below). It also lists older travel books.
It is difficult to keep lists like these updated, so please email us or let us know if we’re missing something in the comments section. Before reaching out to us, please note that we do not include guidebooks or self-published memoirs/travelogues here, especially ones written about walking the Camino de Santiago, unless they are notable or of a high literary merit.
Don’t forget to see our other lists of travel books.
Our Picks
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning – Laurie Lee
In the early 1930s, Laurie Lee leaves his Cotswolds home and heads for Spain, where he drifts around the country playing his violin in squares and in front of cafes. He makes his way with the small change he earns and the hospitality of Spaniards on the eve of the Spanish Civil War.
Death’s Other Kingdom – Gamel Woolsey
A heart-rending account of a Spanish village torn apart by the coming of the Civil War by a rare female voice on a war that has otherwise been dominated by male voices. Woolsey, a poet, was married to Gerald Brenan whose book “South from Granada” is listed below.
Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past – Giles Tremlett
The appearance, more than sixty years after the Spanish Civil War ended, of mass graves containing victims of Francisco Franco’s death squads finally broke what Spaniards call “the pact of forgetting”—the unwritten understanding that their recent, painful past was best left unexplored. At this charged moment, Giles Tremlett embarked on a journey around the country and through its history to discover why some of Europe’s most voluble people have kept silent so long.
Homage to Catalonia – George Orwell
In 1936 George Orwell travelled to Spain to report on the Civil War and instead joined the fight against the Fascists. This famous account describes the war and Orwell’s own experiences.
Leaving the Atocha Station – Ben Lerner (fiction)
Adam Gordon is a smart and unreliable young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid who struggles to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam’s “research” becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by?
Other Travel Books About Spain
- A Romantic in Spain – Theophile Gautier
- Barcelona: The Great Enchantress – Robert Hughes
- Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucía – Chris Stewart
- Everything but the Squeal: A Year Pigging Out in Northern Spain – John Barlow
- Grape, Olive, Pig: Deep Travels Through Spain’s Culture – Matt Goulding
- Iberia – James A. Michener
- It’s Not About the Tapas – Polly Evans
- Madrid Tales – Helen Constantine (editor)
- My Midsummer Morning – Alastair Humphreys
- Snowball Oranges – Peter Kerr
- South from Granada – Gerald Brenan
- Spain in Mind: Three Centuries of Great Writers Entranced by Spain – Alice Leccese Powers (editor)
- Spanish Recognitions: The Roads to the Present – Mary Lee Settle
- Sunrises to Santiago – Gabriel Schirm
- Tales of the Alhambra – Washington Irving
- The Pilgrimage – Paulo Coelho
- The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway (fiction)
- The Tomb in Seville – Norman Lewis
- The Train in Spain – Christopher Howse
- Travels with My Donkey: One Man and His Ass on a Pilgrimage to Santiago – Tim Moore
- Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalusia – Penelope Chetwode
- Voices of the Old Sea – Norman Lewis
Please email us or let us know in the comments section below if we’re missing any travel books about Spain.
If you’re interested in purchasing any of the books listed here, please consider supporting your local independent bookstore or using our affiliate links below. At no extra cost to you, Travel Writing World will receive a small commission if you purchase an item using our affiliate links.
Buy on Amazon or Buy Used: Abebooks.co.uk or Better World Books USA
Last Updated on 13 September 2020 by Travel Writing World
