'Their pursuits are cigars and siestas'. How British authors forged our view of Spain

Almost 200 years ago, the pioneering British travel writer Richard Ford offered an observation that has been happily ignored by the legions of authors who have traipsed in his dusty footsteps across Spain, toting notebooks, the odd violin or Bible, and, of course, their own prejudices.

- Sam Jones

"Nothing causes more pain to Spaniards", Ford noted in his 1845 Handbook for Travellers in Spain, "than to see volume after volume written by foreigners about their country."

Given some of his waspish pronouncements, the pain in Spain was thoroughly justified. Catalonia, to Ford's mind, was "no place for the man of pleasure, taste or literature... here cotton is spun, vice and discontent bred, revolution concocted". He found Valencians "vindictive, sullen, fickle and treacherous", while reporting that the "better classes" in Murcia "vegetate in a monotonous unsocial existence: their pursuits are the cigar and the siesta".

Ford, whose often acid nib belied a deep love of all things Iberian, is one of 20 British authors profiled in a new Spanish book, Los curiosos impertinentes ("the annoyingly curious"), that explores the UK's enduring fascination with Spain and reflects on how two centuries of travel writing have shaped the country's image abroad.

The book is prefaced by Ford's pain quotation and by another, from the late Spanish writer Ramón J Sender: "There's nothing like a foreigner when it comes to seeing what we're like."