El enredo de Carmen y el primer turismo en España (1830-1875)

The invention of Spanish cliché in the 19th century has been studied from an exclusively cultural perspective and with a very broad chronology, when it occurred in the years 1840-1848, a very specific period of the Spanish historical evolution and of relations with France and the rest of Europe. Accounts of foreign travellers in Spain proliferated after the Carlist civil war of 1833-1840, but they did not trigger the influx of a minority of travellers to the country by themselves. This required the intermediation of royalty and very high nobility, who formed courts that also integrated some prominent writers. This network was ripped during the period 1865-1875, because political conflicts and wars on both sides of the Pyrenees. Elite tourism would take root in Spain only after this new parenthesis, and it would consume a consolidated folkloric image of the country.