Best books about Spain – history, culture, and much more

Looking for the best books about Spain?

You’ve come to the right place.

I’ve been an obsessive reader basically since I was in Kindergarten, and since moving to Spain more than 20 years ago I’ve done plenty of reading about it.

Here are some of my favorite books, which you might like as well…

This list was originally inspired an article that caught my interest a while ago. It was, actually, a list of books to read about Spain.

Unfortunately, I had only read one of them: The Sun Also Rises. And I felt a bit bad about it.

But I’ve read plenty more, and my tastes just might not be very mainstream – The Shadow of the Wind, anyone?

So if you’re looking for a few things you might not find on everyone else’s list, read on.

But first…

Books from Spain, and books about Spain

Spain has had a certain literary appeal for English speakers since at least the time of Lord Byron.

Ernest Hemingway is just one in a long line of Brits and Americans who came to Spain and found their literary inspiration in the hot Iberian sun.

Hemingway’s debut novel, The Sun Also Rises is a bullfighting book, originally published in 1926. I think I first read it in high school, because I was going to be tested on theme or symbolism and that book had a lot of it.

Spanish people sometimes complain about guiris and their obsession with Hemingway, but the reality is that Pamplona would probably be nowhere today without that book. There’s a “Running of the Bulls” type festival in a thousand other Spanish towns… and nobody knows about them.

At the very least, Hemingway put Pamplona on the map for foreigners – that’s a fact.

Probably Restaurante Botín in Madrid would be much less known also, if it weren’t for Hemingway. At the end of the book, Big Papa mentions Botín and their suckling pig, which you should definitely try if you’re in town and you’ve got the money.

(Botín is the world’s oldest restaurant as well. Their oven has – allegedly – been burning for 300 consecutive years. So they’ve been around for a long time. But Hemingway’s recommendation certainly helped.)

Equestrian statue of Felipe III here in Plaza Mayor, Madrid. Photo by Daniel Welsch.

All this to say, literature has had its impact on Spanish society. Also, there are plenty of books about Spain that might be pretty good that I haven’t read. And there’s a whole Spanish literature that I’ve barely scraped the surface of in my years here.

If you’re moving to Spain you might want to get some idea of the history, but don’t complicate your life too much.

You’re not going to be quizzed on the Habsburg monarchy by your barber or anything.

Anyway, here are a few of my book recommendations…

The best books about Spain

You should be able to get these books in Spanish at any reasonable bookstore in Spain.

Check out the Casa del Libro on Gran Vía for the biggest one in Madrid. Barcelona has a few Casas del Libro as well. And there are a lot more.

And you can definitely get them by clicking my (affiliate) links to Amazon.es right here on the blog.

So read on!

“Ghosts of Spain” by Giles Tremlett

I was worried this would be another boring Spanish history book. You know the type: starting with the cavemen up in Altamira (with their famous paintings) and moving to the Phoenecians in 800 BC, etc.

Well, Ghosts of Spain is nothing like that. It actually starts with the laws about historical memory passed around 30 years after the end of Franco’s dictatorship, when people started digging up the bodies of their family members who’d been left in mass graves.

It goes on to talk quite a bit about modern Spain: the legacy of Franco and the transition to democracy. A lot of stuff that Spanish people talk about from time to time that’s a bit puzzling to an outsider. 

Giles Tremlett has a few other books, but I haven’t read them. Ghosts of Spain, though, is really good. 

I talked more about the book in this video

Follow me over there on Learn Spanish with Daniel for much more.

It’s not a full history, but it’ll give you a bit of an idea about how Spain got to be the way it is now.

Moving on…

“La Colmena” by Camilo José Cela

Next up is La Colmena, by Camilo José Cela.

La Colmena story about poverty and society in postwar Madrid. It’s one of these hyper-realistic novels that takes place over a few cold days in January, at some point in the 1940s. You can go to some of the places mentioned in the book, it revolves around a café that’s a lot like Café Comercial in Glorieta de Bilbao.

The author, Cela, received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1989. And I liked the book. It’s a classic, and it gives you an idea of what Madrid was like in the post-Civil-War period, which was no picnic.

On the other hand, a lot of left-leaning Spanish literary types aren’t big fans of Cela because he was a spy for Franco during the 60s. I don’t know. It’s a long story. Check out this article for more.

La Colmena is in English as The Hive, but I don’t know if Cela has ever been popular in the English-speaking world. The list of Nobel Prize-winning authors is something of a who’s who of people I’ve never heard of.

“Feria” by Ana Iris Simón

This book by a younger author was written with low expectations and then became something of a phenomenon.

Ana Iris Simón, from Campo de Criptana in La Mancha, wrote Feria about her family and and her town, and the transition from the old-timey Spain of her childhood to the current high-tech European economy we now live in.

Even though Simón is about as leftist as it’s possible for a person to be, the book was picked up by some on the right because it talks about small towns, family and church in a way that’s not totally dismissive.

As a person who’s from the middle of nowhere myself, I understand the dynamic.

You can move to the big city, but if you write about where you’re from without denouncing the “backwardness” or apologizing to the elitists in every sentence, you’ll eventually be branded far-right by people who have never been out of their little bubble. Believe me, I’ve been there.

So I liked Feria a lot, for that and for other reasons, but there’s one problem: it doesn’t seem to be in English yet. Or maybe it is and I haven’t found it. Either way, check it out.

“Leaving Atocha Station” by Ben Lerner

I only kind of liked this book, but it’s certainly popular.

Ben Lerner was on a Fulbright Scholarship in Madrid, just a year or so before I showed up.

The novel is about a stand-in character, but it’s understood to be autobiographical.

So here’s the deal: the narrator, Adam, writes poetry (or pretends to write poetry) because of his scholarship. He also spends time smoking weed, shagging his Spanish teacher, and generally being a neurotic.

From time to time, he goes to fabulous parties at rich people’s houses, where he cries in public to get attention from cute girls, and then somehow people decide he’s a brilliant visionary genius for objecting to George Bush’s war in Iraq. Or something to that effect.

The ending is even douchier, but I have a certain affection for the kid, because I recognize the type.

If I had been born to rich parents, and then been encouraged to sit around having feelings rather than earning a living, I could have ended up being similarly self-involved and annoying.

In real life, Lerner gives interviews about his “white male rage”, whatever that means. Like I said: Leaving the Atocha Station is popular, but not really my sort of thing.

(This morning I reread the first bit to see if maybe my opinion had changed in the last few years. It starts off well but by the end of Chapter 1 I just dislike the guy. Thankfully, the book is short.)

Moving on…

“Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes

I’m not sure if I really recommend reading Don Quixote (full Spanish title “El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de La Mancha) but you should probably have a look at the Wikipedia page and get a summary.

In any case, I read it, back in about 2005. They were celebrating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Volume I at that point and I got the new English translation. It wasn’t bad, and I’ve tried rereading some of it since in Spanish. The Spanish is difficult, but Cervantes was definitely a genius. His style is just incredible.

Only tangentially related, but I went on a bike tour last year that was the Route of Don Quixote.

Out with the windmills in La Mancha.

Still, life is short, and if you don’t have time for 900 pages of the zany adventures of don Quixote and Sancho Panza, I understand completely. It’s a lot to get through.

“La Voz Dormida” by Dulce Chacón

One of my personal favorite books about Spain is La Voz Dormida by Dulce Chacón.

This is maybe the best Spanish-language novel I’ve ever read. I don’t know. I read a lot of books, so it’s a tough call. But this one is really good.

Maybe I just read it at the right moment in my life to appreciate these kinds of things…

Anyway, it’s about the resistance to the dictatorship, also after the war.

At that time, a lot of families had people in prison, a lot of leftists went into exile, and there were a few people up in the mountains trying to carry on the Civil War even though it had officially been lost years before. The book is also a good love story.

Unfortunately, the author died shortly after writing it, so she doesn’t have any follow-up novels. Check it out, though, I liked it a lot.

(I gave my copy to this girl I was hoping to date back in the 2010s. I never saw the girl again, but I hope she enjoyed the book. It’s translated to English as The Sleeping Voice.)

“The Battle for Spain” by Anthony Beevor

A friend (who’s a history teacher) told me years ago: “Don’t even bother reading Spanish authors when they write histories of the Civil War. They’re all way too biased.”

She recommended I start with Hugh Thomas’ huge volume The Spanish Civil War, which I have on my shelf but haven’t yet read.

Almost as large is Anthony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain.

I have read that one, and enjoyed it. It doesn’t seem too ideologically biased (though maybe it is in some way I didn’t pick up on) and was easy enough to read.

The funny thing about Civil War histories is they also have to give quite a bit of background before actually getting around to 1936. The setup really begins in 1492, because all the causes of the war are very complex.

So The Battle for Spain (and Thomas’ book as well) will give you a basic outline of Spanish history leading up to the Second Republic, which is probably easier than reading about every single King named Felipe over the last 18 centuries or so.

And talking about the Civil War, let’s finish strong with some Orwell…

“Homage to Catalonia” by George Orwell

Finally, we’ve got Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell.

Full disclosure time: I first read this because it was at the top of some list of the best nonfiction books of the 20th century. It was the week before I was planning to move to Spain – back in 2004, o sea, a long time ago – and I picked it up without even realizing it was going to be about Spain.

Catalonia? What’s that?

I actually thought it was going to be about catatonics in a mental hospital or something. Catalonia, catatonia, whatever… That was the extent of my ignorance about what I was getting into.

Anyway, the story is that George Orwell came over as a war correspondent and ended up joining the fight against fascism. And I suppose a lot of people miss the point of the book just like I did: even though he starts out fighting fascism, he ends up fleeing Spain when the totalitarian left (read: Stalinists) take over the war effort.

Most people (myself included) get the part where fascism is bad. Seems obvious enough, no?

But then they (or we) completely miss the part where he discovers that leftist totalitarianism can be just as bad or even worse. That’s where his later novel 1984 came from.

I’ve got more to say about the Spanish Civil War (and actually, a long article about Orwell if you’d like to read it) but the fact is, the idea that it was a few scrappy bands of noble peasant farmers fighting against international fascism is something of a myth.

That was maybe the story for a couple of weeks in July 1936. Afterwards it was much more sinister.

Anyway, Orwell’s descriptions of sitting in a trench, covered in fleas, and with just a few bullets every day and a rifle that barely worked anyway give you a pretty good idea of why the Second Republic didn’t last long.

Great story, despite the bad ending.

More Spanish awesomeness… 

If you’re moving to Spain or visiting soon, I’ve got some other recommendations.

My friend Lauren started a company called Devour Tours back in the day and the article that originally inspired this one was from their blog.

Her company is awesome and you should go on one of her tours when you’re in Madrid, Barcelona or anywhere else in Spain. Click that (affiliate) link up there for all the options.

Also, for culture buffs, their sister company Walks Tours does things like Private Tours of the Prado Museum before the regular opening hours. I went last year and it was fantastic. You can sign up for that right here.

Also, for people who enjoy cardio, Raul at Bike Tour in Spain organizes routes in various places. I mentioned his Route of Don Quixote earlier, which was nice. But the (less literary) Extremadura Bike Tour was even better.

Check out his full list of offerings at biketourinspain.com and tell him I sent you. He’ll appreciate it.

Keep it real, y’all. Thanks for reading.

Yours,

Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.

P.S. I’ve also got an article about some of my favorite books about writing. So you can check that out as well. Like I said, I read a lot. If there are any other books about Spain you think I’ve missed, leave me a comment… Thanks!

P.P.S. Honorable mention goes to Mine Were of Trouble by Peter Kemp. I wrote a long article about him as well, and I think his book is actually better than Orwell’s. He fought on the fascist side of the Civil War, and saw a lot more action than old George did. I don’t know if Kemp’s memoir is a popular book you’ll find in shops, but I got the Kindle version on Amazon and it’s very good.