ABSTRACT
From 1901 until the First World War, alongside its principal business of shipping rubber and leather to and from the USA and Northern Brazil, Liverpool's Booth Steamship Company ran a portfolio of highly successful holiday tours to Madeira, Portugal and Galicia. Despite the rhetoric of contemporary journalists, this is not the first time that Galicia, its landscape and culture have been 'discovered' and marketed to tourists tired of the overcrowding and over-familiarity of the 'sunny south'. During the five years between 1909 and 1914, these men headed a pioneering project to attract British tourists away from the established destinations of Andalusia, the Canaries and Madrid, and into this unfamiliar northern region of the Peninsula. Alfred Allen Booth's aim was to research the possibility of creating tourist links between Galicia and England, on the model of the successful tours to Portugal and Madeira that his company had been running since 1903.
