Romantic lady travelers of the 19th century

One of the places in the world with the highest number of visitors and stories of travel, adventure and mystery is Spain, especially the region of Andalusia. George Barrow, Wasington Irving, Prosper Merimée, Ernest Heminway just to name a few of the most famous.

However, in this extensive list there are also many women who, brave, courageous, went through with their presence, often clandestine, the picturesque and risky south of the Peninsula.

In fact, some had to go unnoticed, dressed in men’s clothing, and were even armed in case they had to repel an untimely attack from bandits in the area.

Well, yes, these female testimonies were missing from the British, French, European and American travelers who lived the Andalusian adventure, in their desire to see with their own eyes what these places were described by romantic gentlemen travelers and some of them even dreamed of being intercepted by some bandit, as the female travelers had a romantic image not only of the landscape but also of their characters. Learn about the fascinating history of some of the most representative and daring women of this nineteenth-century era.

Marie Bashkirtseff: this young Ukrainian by birth, but who lived in France, will spend a month and a half in Spain, and twelve days in Andalusia. By the fall of 1881 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She knew she had no time left and she wanted to enjoy the last days of her to the fullest. She visited the jail before the Alhambra and there she painted the portrait of an inmate that she titled Antonio López, sentenced to death for murder, October 1881.

Noémi Cadiot: Francophone journalist, writer and hurried tourist. She is a faithful defender of gender issues who, along with the Swiss Madame de Gasparin, a scholar of the Arab-Andalusian myth, also resolutely joined to travel the roads of Andalusia in a clear desire for otherness, that is, to be someone else. She remains in the region for 20 days and hence she writes her work with the name “Twenty days in Spain“

Countess Juliette de Robersat: Belgium saw the birth of Countess Juliette de Robersat who, in her Andalusian journey, makes an evocative description of her country of origin, specifically in Cádiz. There she warns that some streets “seem to end in a void, to the point where one would say that they go up to heaven when they face the sea.”

In Cádiz she met Madame Fritz, a photographer passing through the city in 1844, famous for imposing the fashion for photographic cabinets. Hers was located on Comedias Street, in the Plaza del Cañón.

Madame de Brinckmann: Josephine de Brinckmann was perhaps the first French traveler to step on the territory of the convulsed and warlike Spain of the 19th century. Between the years 1849 and 1850 she had the opportunity to tour a large part of the country. She is the paradigm of the woman who entered the Pyrenees during those years. For her, the trip was in itself a science, rather than a leisure time. She wrote Walks in Spain.

Madame de Suberwick: she dressed like a man to go unnoticed during her travels. She arrives in Spain in the mid-nineteenth century and writes the book Picturesque, artistic and monumental Spain. Local manners, uses and costumes. She proposes a literary exercise in which the writer Edgar Quinet or Manuel Galo de Cuendias, a liberal Spaniard exiled in France, would also participate.

The Marchioness of Léziart: captivated by Puerto de Santa María, described it in her work Impressions of a lonely woman in Spain, from 1878, perhaps with her gaze lost in the distance and a glass of wine in her hand: “I’m in love with heaven of southern Andalusia, of the horizons that are discovered from the city of Puerto de Santa María… ”.

Lady E. Mary Grosvenor: Marchioness of Westminster, she traveled for the first time to Malaga in 1840, visited the Church of Santiago, the Catholic cemetery and, on her route to the Convent of Victoria, she made a stop at the English cemetery. She was an adventurer who traveled to the Peninsula and the Balearic Islands by yacht, and went to the cities in a buggy with her husband and her servants, laden with provisions.

Lady Louisa Tenison: born in 1819 into an Irish family of the pro-English aristocracy, she challenged the artistic, cultural and scientific patriarchy prevailing at the time.

She traveled to remote places, especially, she walked through Andalusia, between October 1850 and the spring of 1853, being Granada, Seville and Ronda the main places of worship of her. However, her true bustle through Andalusia is condensed in her work Castilla y Andalucía, published in London in 1853.

If you are interested in taking the route of romantic travelers, with an emphasis on female characters, please .