Spain, The Search Continues

Since early 2009, as part of our own Grand Tour of Europe, we have been drawn time and again to the Iberian Peninsula in search of the real Spain and in November 2010 we returned once more, flying to Madrid and planning a short three night stay in the city of Ávila about one hundred kilometres north west of the capital city.

Spain was not, generally, part of the traditional European Grand Tour and until the twentieth century only caught the attention of the braver or more rugged of travellers and writers. For many it was too primitive, too mountainous and just too dangerous, prone to violent upheavals, inhospitable weather and without acceptable restaurants or decent amenities. ‘To travel in Spain you need three francs a day and a gun’ said one Frenchman who accompanied Alexander Dumas on a mid nineteenth century trip to the peninsular. For the sons and daughters of the English Aristocracy Spain did not have the sophisticated allure of France, the Renaissance treasures of Italy or even the ancient charm of Greece and very few people ever considered crossing the Pyrenees into a land perceived to be full of fanatical Jesuit priests and lurid tales of bandits and cut-throats.



What a pity because, as I have now discovered over the past two years, they were passing up on the opportunities of marvelling at Baroque Seville, the Hanging Houses of Cuenca, the walled fortresses of Ávila and Ciudad Rodrigo, the historic cities of Toledo and Salamanca, the numerous Royal Palaces that surround Madrid and the rich heritage of Roman and Moorish Spain with the largest remaining Roman aqueduct at Segovia and what was once the second largest Mosque in the World at Cordoba.

Right up until the 1950s Spain was considered to be a place for the courageous because it was different and mysterious with a hostile geography, haughty aristocratic grandees and destitute peasants, Romany gypsies and blood thirsty customs. Travellers and visitors were often inclined not to regard it as part of Europe at all and it was often considered, on account of its Moorish heritage, dark skinned people and unfamiliar customs, as part of Africa or of the east. The Spanish themselves understood this perception of their peninsular and in the 1960s “Spain is different“ used to be the slogan of Spain’s international tourism campaign.

Sadly, even today, for many, Spain means only a fortnight’s karaoke holiday spread out on the golden sands of the Costas with a bottle of sun cream and a jug of sangria without any real attempt to understand the geography, the history or the culture of the country. But for those with imagination and an appetite for an experience of real Spain then the airports of Valladolid, Seville, Santander and Madrid are the places to begin a quest to find the Spain of the shrines, the Spain of the Knights-errant, the Spain of the Mosques, castles and mighty cathedrals as well as the Spain of the real castanet clicking flamenco dancers, Spanish guitars and matadors and bull fights as opposed to the ersatz versions of the holiday resorts.

The Easyjet plane flew over the Spanish coast at Santander and we could see the snow capped Picos de Europa Mountains soaring majestically through the low cloud which then immediately closed in and smothered northern Spain and Castilla y Leon completely. The land was completely obscured from view breaking only over the peaks of the Sierra Guadarrama and briefly revealing mountain towns and villages, rivers and shimmering blue reservoirs. A few minutes later around mid morning we landed in a misty Madrid where the temperature was struggling to reach double figures and after the formalities of border control went straight to the Sixt car rental desk.

Since my complaint about Sixt and winter tyre charges in Germany earlier this year I have been in regular correspondence with the Company Customer Services Manager for the UK and this led to the issue of a Sixt platinum account which gives me certain privileges such as discounted prices, speedy pick up service and on this occasion an upgrade from a Volkswagen to a BMW and we were delighted when we took possession of a shiny white 1 series, left the airport and pointed it in the direction of the mountains and the sunshine.

The Grand Tour of Europe

People have always travelled to other parts of the world to see great buildings and works of art, to learn new languages, to experience new cultures and to enjoy different food and drink. As long ago as the time of the Roman Empire, there were popular coastal resorts such as Sorrento and Capri for the rich. In 1936 the League of Nations defined a foreign tourist as someone travelling abroad for at least twenty-four hours and its successor, the United Nations amended this definition in 1945 by including a maximum stay of six months. In early 2010 the European Commissioner for industry and entrepreneurship, Antonio Tajani, unveiled a plan declaring tourism a human right and introduced it with the statement that “travelling for tourism today is a right. The way we spend our holidays is a formidable indicator of our quality of life.”

Young English elites of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Rahs really) often spent two to four years travelling around Europe in an effort to broaden their horizons and learn about language, architecture, geography and culture in an experience known as the Grand Tour.



In fact the word tourist has its origins in what used to be more correctly called the Grand Tour of Europe, which was a term first used by Richard Lassels in his 1670 book ‘Voyage or a Complete Journey through Italy and after that it came into general usage to describe the travels in Europe of wealthy young men and women in the years of the Enlightenment where it was quite normal to take a gap year (or four) in the quest for a broader education. Lassels was a Roman Catholic priest and a tutor to several of the English nobility and travelled through Italy five times. In his book, he claims that any truly serious student of architecture, antiquity, and the arts must travel through France and Italy, and suggested that all “young lords” make the Grand Tour in order to understand the political, social, and economic realities of the world.

The primary purpose of the Grand Tour lay in the exposure both to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to the aristocratic and fashionably polite society of the European continent. In addition, before museum collections went on tour themselves, it provided the only opportunity to view specific works of art, and possibly the only chance to hear certain music and it was commonly undertaken in the company of a Cicerone, a knowledgeable guide or tutor. The Grand Tour had more than superficial cultural importance as the historian E.P. Thompson observed, “ruling-class control in the 18th century was located primarily in a cultural hegemony, and only secondarily in an expression of economic or physical (military) power.”



While the general objective of the Grand Tour was essentially educational (and this probably what mum and dad thought that they were forking out for) they were also notorious for more frivolous pursuits such as getting hammered, partying heavily and sleeping with as many continental lovelies as possible and so began a tradition that thousands of holiday Brits continue to this day in the party hotspots of Europe.

When young men on the Grand Tour weren’t misbehaving like people on a stag weekend to Amsterdam they were mostly interested in visiting those cities that were considered the major centres of culture at the time, primarily Paris, Rome, Venice, Florence and Naples were popular destinations. The Grand Tourist would travel from city to city and usually spend some time in smaller towns and up to several months in the three main cities on the itinerary. Paris was considered the grandest and most cultured city and was usually first en route and tourists would rent apartments for several weeks at a time and would make occasional visits to the countryside and adjacent towns.

From Paris, they travelled south either across the Alps or by a ship on the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and then they would pass on to Rome or Venice. To begin with Rome was initially the southernmost point they would travel to but when excavations began at Herculaneum and Pompeii in 1738 the two sites also became additional major destinations on the Grand Tour.



Other locations sometimes included as part of some Grand Tour included Spain and Portugal, Germany, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Baltic States. However, these other spots lacked the cultural and historical appeal of Paris and Italy and the substandard roads made travel much more difficult so they were not always the most popular. Some of them didn’t have vineyards either so I suppose that might have reduced their appeal somewhat.

The British it seems have always been rather keen on travelling abroad and we have left our mark all over Europe (and not just through football violence either) in Nice one of the first and most established holiday resorts on the French Riviera, the long esplanade along the seafront is known to this day as the Promenade des Anglais and in many other historic resorts in continental Europe, old well-established palace hotels have names like the Hotel Bristol, the Hotel Carlton or the Hotel Majestic, reflecting the predominance of English customers.



In fact there are nearly 300 hotels around the world called Bristol. They take their name from Frederick Augustus Hervey (1730-1803), the 4th Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, who spent most of his life travelling around Europe enjoying the best hospitality money could buy.

This sort of thing really appeals to me; both the finding out about things and having a really good knees up at the same time and I have become determined to travel as much in Europe as I possibly can. The problem with that is that I have full time job and I certainly cannot afford to take a four year sabbatical break so I have developed an alternative Grand Tour method and that is to take absolutely full advantage of the low cost airlines.

There are forty-six countries in Europe and I have only so far been to twenty-five so I am just over half way towards my objective of visiting them all.

Ryanair was Europe’s original low fares airline and is my favourite which is lucky for me because the airline has over eleven hundred low fare routes to one hundred and sixty-one destinations in Europe and North Africa. In the last three years I have flown thirty times at a very reasonable average cost of £40 return all inclusive. Not all of these flights were with Ryanair of course and I have been forced to use others but I generally find that these work out more expensive. A return flight to Athens with Easyjet for example costs £120 and my biggest bargain so far was with Ryanair to Santander in Cantabria, Spain at just £10.02 return. To put things into some sort of perspective it costs over £80 to go to London on the train from Peterborough with National Express and for that you are not even guaranteed a seat. That is about .90p a mile and on that basis it would cost approximately £1,800 to go to Santander and back by train!

In 2008 the most visited country in Europe was France, followed by Spain, Italy, United Kingdom and Germany. Spain made the most money out or tourist revenues and on average the Germans spent most while away from home. The most visited city was London (although as usual France disputes the official figures) and the most visited place was Trafalgar Square, followed by the Eiffel Tower and then the Vatican. The United Nations World Tourism Organisation, which has its headquarters in Madrid, produces the World Tourism Rankings and is a United Nations agency dealing with questions relating to tourism. For the record I visited Trafalgar Square in 2008, the Eiffel Tower in 2005 and the Vatican in 2003.