Spanish Highways and Byways

Katharine Lee Bates wrote 'America the Beautiful.' That fact alone should tell you what kind of travel writer she is: a poet with an eye for the sacred in landscape, the telling detail that makes a foreign place feel both strange and intimate. This is her account of traveling through Spain in the late nineteenth century, and it reads less like a guidebook than like a series of luminous sketches. She arrives in Spain from Biarritz and pushes inward, through the Basque country where fishermen haul dawn catches while the old stereotypes about Spanish indolence crumble against the reality of hard-working, salt-weathered hands. She visits Pasajes, a fishing village where the sea smells of brine and sacrifice, and aristocratic San Sebastian with its own quiet contradictions. What emerges is not the Spain of bullfights and castanets that Victorian tourists expected, but a country of fierce regional particularity, of landscapes that stun, of people whose complexities defy easy characterization. Bates writes with warmth and sharp observation about a Spain that was already vanishing even as she documented it.