ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century Spain was shaped by an intense competition between different national projects aimed to modernize the structure of the state according to their distinctive understanding of national identity, which was negotiated progressively through numerous publications by national and foreign authors who described the country’s landscape and heritage in traveller accounts, guidebooks, and artistic voyages. These debates informed new national histories, and this, in turn, contributed to defining ideological discourses, national monuments, landscapes, and sites. The tension between the early centralist attempts to modernize the administration of the Spanish state, inspired by the histories of the country by Juan de Mariana and Modesto Lafuente, and the dream of a federal kingdom by Victor Balaguer, was followed in the upsurge of different nationalist movements in Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. The struggles between these different national projects contributed to the exponential growth of the symbolic capital of the sites and landscapes relevant to them—like Montserrat and Covadonga—as they had a strong impact upon debates on architecture and preservation. The analysis of these modern media—illustrated publications, guidebooks, and panoramas—and ideological struggles, constitutes an illuminating observatory into the complexity of competing national constructions in the nineteenth century, as they reveal the entangled relations between politics, intellectual production, and popular culture in the modern nation-building process.
