Geographical magazines and popular geographies: the case of the Revista Geográfica Española, 1938–1977

Journal of Historical Geography 39 (2013) 85e98

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Geographical magazines and popular geographies: the case of the Revista Geográfica Española, 1938e1977 Jacobo García-Álvarez* and Daniel Marías-Martínez Department of Humanities: History, Geography and Art, Carlos III University of Madrid, 28903 Getafe, Madrid, Spain

Abstract The history of geographical and travel journalism and, more widely, the history of ‘popular geographies’, have traditionally been neglected in the historiography of geography. This paper examines a magazine, the Revista Geográfica Española (1938e1977), closely connected to Franco’s Spain. Originating far from the academic field as an art, history and travel magazine, its target was the cultivated reader; its intention, to become a Spanish version of National Geographic Magazine. In this paper we will discuss the importance of geographical journalism and popular geographies for the history of geography and will analyse the most relevant milestones in the life of Valeriano Salas-Rodríguez, the founder of the Revista Geográfica Española and its director until 1962. The paper considers the origin, goals and features of the magazine, as well as the image of Spain conveyed through its pages. The analysis will focus in two main aspects: on the one hand, the connection of the magazine with geographical imaginations which dominated Franco’s Spain, linked to questions of national identity and landscape; on the other hand, the bonds that Salas and the magazine itself had with a number of policies and initiatives fostered by Franco’s administration in the field of tourism and national heritage. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Popular geographies; Geographical magazines; Travel journalism; Spain; Francoism; Valeriano Salas-Rodríguez; Revista Geográfica Española

Both the personality of Valeriano Salas-Rodríguez (1898e1962) and the story of the Revista Geográfica Española (1938e1977), a nonacademic geographical magazine founded by Salas and edited by him for more than two decades, has gone virtually unnoticed in the historiography of geography. Research on the history of Spanish geography and studies in the history of travel journalism have had nothing to say about Salas-Rodriguez or his work. This oversight is all the more remarkable given the range and significance of Salas’ contributions within fields as diverse as photography, journalism, motoring, collecting and geography; and given the circulation, continuity and distinctiveness of the aforementioned magazine in the Spain of its time.1 To explain this oversight is easier from the point of view of the history of travel journalism in Spain, which is an underdeveloped

field. However, it is much more difficult to justify from the standpoint of the history of geography. It is true that the Revista Geográfica Española was, as we will see later, a magazine which had little or nothing to do with academic geography in Spain. Yet the historiographical oblivion into which this journal has fallen clearly illustrates a deeper and more serious shortfall which has only recently been challenged: namely, the neglect within the discipline e and its historiography e of publications devoted to the dissemination of geography and, more widely, of non-academic, ‘non-professional’ manifestations of geographical knowledge, which have come to be described variously as ‘popular geographies’, géographie grand public or simply paragéographies. Generally speaking, histories of contemporary geography have focused mainly on the academic, scholarly aspects of the discipline.

* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (J. García-Álvarez), [email protected] (D. Marías-Martínez). 1

Salas is not mentioned in either of the two main specialized works on the history of travel journalism in Spain, namely those of M. Belenguer, Periodismo de viajes: análisis de una especialización periodística, Sevilla, 2002; P.E. Rivas, Historia y naturaleza del periodismo de viajes, Madrid, 2006, or in the specialized history catalogues, like that of A. López de Zuazo, Catálogo de periodistas españoles del siglo XX, 2nd Edition, 3 vols., 1987. Neither is there any reference to Salas in any of the few general works on the history of Spanish geography (such as the book by J. Vilá, El conocimiento geográfico de España. Geógrafos y obras geográficas, Madrid, 1989); nor in those about the history of photography (P. López, Historia de la fotografía en España, Barcelona, 2005), motoring (J. Ciuró, Historia del automóvil en España, Barcelona, 1994), exploration (L. Conde-Salazar (Ed.), Atlas de los exploradores españoles, BarcelonaeMadrid, 2009) or art collecting (L. Rodríguez, El coleccionismo de pintura en España, Santander, 1990). And finally, neither does he appear in the main Spanish biographical dictionaries, such as the new, and very extensive Diccionario Biográfico Español published by the Real Academia de la Historia, 50 vols., 2009e2012 (still in the process of publication). 0305-7488/$ e see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.06.001

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Moreover, the history of travel or ‘geographical journalism’ will awaits examination, notwithstanding recent historiographical developments in some contexts, notably the Anglo-American world, reflecting the influence of critical and post-colonial approaches. These have explored, in an explicit and fruitful way, other voices and dimensions crucial to the constitution of the ‘geographical imaginations’ of our time, including the history of travel or ‘geographical’ journalism and its relationship with academic geography and the building of such ‘imaginations’. As has often been noted, this neglect is particularly remarkable if we take into account the fact that the social influence of many magazines and related audiovisual forms usually surpasses that of scholarly works, and that in some cases these media have contributed e and still do e in a significant way to configuring not only the public image of the discipline, but also of society and its territories. In Johnston’s words: The gap between the popular geographies presented by magazines such as National Geographic, the subject taught at schools and, especially, the academic discipline, is large. Given the size of this gap and the likely impact of conceptions of the subject and/or discipline on popular ideas of geography, it is perhaps surprising that academic geographers have paid relatively little attention to National Geographic and other magazines.2 Although the example of National Geographic Magazine, to which we will return in the next section of this work, is paradigmatic in this sense, it is by no means the only case. This paper considers the importance which popular geographical magazines have had or could have in the historiography of geography by analysing Valeriano Salas’ role in the foundation and publication of the Revista Geográfica Española, a magazine which, while a private project, found vital support within certain sectors of Franco’s administration. The Revista sought to emulate the well-known American magazine although its means, and consequently its results, were much more modest. The paper aims, firstly, to contribute research on the history of ‘geographical’ journalism in Spain, and, more widely, the public image of geography beyond the academic world, as reflected in one of the most significant tools of ‘popular geography’; and secondly, to demonstrate how this kind of journalism fitted, firmly and explicitly, into some of the political strategies, and especially into certain propaganda discourses of Franco’s regime. The analysis of the political and ideological role of geography and geographical knowledge during Franco’s Dictatorship poses some problems and has given rise to diverse interpretations among specialists. As mentioned above, studies on the history of geography during this period have mainly focused on the academic side of the discipline (i.e., university geography), where the degree of

commitment towards policies and ideological principles under Franco’s rule varied considerably. Even though the institutional support that Franco’s regime gave to geography in the university context was undoubtedly decisive, the leading professors decided, at least during the first years of the dictatorship, to implement a ‘nonpoliticized’ research programme based on the development of localeregional studies within the Spanish territory.3 However, the connection with the ideological principles of Francoism e one of the key elements of which was nacionalcatolicismo (National Catholicism) e was much more explicit in the case of schools (which were subjected to strong official control, at both primary and secondary levels),4 as well as military geography (involved, owing to its nature, with the subject of geopolitics and state strategies, especially in relation to Spanish colonies in Africa).5 This paper aims to show not only the way in which geography was approached or imagined in Spain outside the academic world, but also the way in which travel journalism and popular geography may have contributed to the building and dissemination of some geographical imaginations that played a key role in Franco’s regime.6 Apart from this introduction and the conclusion, this paper is structured in four parts. In the first section, we consider the concept of popular geographies and its relationship to academic geography as reflected in the historiography of geography. Within this context, we make a case for the study of the history of non-academic geographical magazines in the context of relationships between popular and academic geography, and between geography and society more generally. In the second section we provide a biographical sketch of Valeriano Salas, highlighting the most decisive milestones in his travel experiences. In the third section we provide an account of the origin, objectives and general features of the Revista Geográfica Española, including its approach to geography and its main similarities to and differences from other publications of this kind and time. And in the fourth section we consider the image of Spain conveyed by the magazine, highlighting its connection to some geographical imaginations which dominated the academic aspect of geography and its connection to policies and initiatives fostered by Franco’s administration within the field of tourism and national heritage. Geographical magazines and popular geographies: conceptual and historiographical reflections Over the last twenty years, the concept and history of popular geographies have attracted growing interest within academic geography and other fields of knowledge. Contributions to this literature have focused on various different aspects of the theme. Firstly, various attempts to define and delimit this genre of knowledge have been made, using a number of different terms, the meanings of which do not completely coincide. Amongst these, we

2 R. Johnston, [Book review of T.Y. Rothenberg, Presenting America’s World: Strategies of Innocence in National Geographic Magazine, 1888e1945, Aldershot, 2007], Geografiska Annaler: Series B 90, 1 (2008) 93e94. Ironically, Johnston only devotes one paragraph to the National Geographic Society and its famous magazine in his influential text on the history of contemporary human geography (R. Johnston and J. Sidaway, Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography since 1945, 6th Edition, London, 2004, 45). 3 On the history of university geography in Spain during the first decades of Francoism, see J. Gómez, La formación de la Escuela Española de Geografía (1940e1952). Instituciones, revistas, congresos y programas, Ería 42 (1997) 107e146; H. Capel, La geografía española tras la guerra civil, Geocrítica 1 (1976). 4 J. García-Álvarez and D. Marías-Martínez, Nacionalismo y educación geográfica en la España del siglo XX. Una aproximación a través de los manuales de Bachillerato, Documentos de Traballo IDEGA. Serie Xeografía 11 (2002) 1e38; A. Luis and J. Romero, Escuela para todos. Conocimiento académico y geografía escolar en España, 1830e1953, Santander, 2007. 5 6

J. Bosque, La geografía política y la geopolítica en España: pasado y presente, in: J. Bosque (Ed.), Geografía y Geógrafos en la España contemporánea, Granada, 1992, 47e90.

We take the concept of ‘geographical imagination’ in a broad sense, as Schwartz and Ryan did, as ‘the mechanism by which people come to know the World and situate themselves in space and time. It consists, in essence, of a chain of practices and processes by which geographical information is gathered, geographical facts are ordered and imaginative geographies are constructed’: J. Schwartz and J. Ryan (Eds), Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, London, 2003, 6.

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should recall first the notion of géographie-spectacle, a term coined by the celebrated French geographer, Yves Lacoste.7 In more recent years, the more neutral concept of ‘popular geographies’ has tended to prevail in Anglo-Saxon countries. This term designates all those geographical knowledges ‘produced and used beyond the academy and other “official” knowledge institutions’, according to Philip Crang; or, more extensively, all non-university geography, according to Alastair Bonnett, who identifies the two most significant manifestations of popular geography as ‘the popular geography media and pre-tertiary geographical education’.8 Thus, according to Bonnett and some other authors, non-academic geographical magazines form an essential part of these popular geographies. The same applies to terms proposed by others, including ‘vernacular geographies’ (Ron Johnston), paragéographies (Michel Chevalier), or géographies grand public (Jean-Paul Chevalier).9 Secondly, interest in popular geographies and, more precisely, in popular geographical magazines has also arisen in a broader historiographical field concerned with geography, discovery and colonial exploration. This interest in the history of non-academic geographical magazines is due, to a large extent, to the emergence and development of new historiographical approaches of a critical nature, which have successively incorporated, and on occasion combined, the contextual viewpoint (concerned with the relationships between the discipline and society), the poststructuralist viewpoint (with its focus on the relationship between power and knowledge) and the post-colonial viewpoint (with its interest in the processes of cultural difference building and, more widely, in what Edward Said called ‘imaginative geographies’).10 Although the most influential textbooks the history of geography continue to pay very little or indeed no attention to the history of the popular geographical magazines,11 geographers, historians, anthropologists and cultural studies scholars have over the last few years undertaken an in-depth

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study of some of these magazines, from innovative and critical perspectives. The example of National Geographic Magazine (henceforth NGM), the most important of these geographical magazines, has certainly been the most studied to date,12 although over the last few years historical approaches to other countries or magazines with similar characteristics to the NGM have started to appear.13 Furthermore, the objectives and results of this kind of study cannot be separated from a third kind of concern, much more modern, concerning the problematic relationship between popular geographical magazines and academic geography. As recent work suggests, the official magazine of the National Geographic Society has not only shaped the popular image of geography within the United States (though as Dobson says, with a hint of irony, ‘no geographers remain at the Society in positions of administrative or editorial authority’),14 it has also decisively influenced the way American readers have pictured both themselves and the rest of the world. And more than that: some of these studies have exposed the strong geopolitical dimension of this kind of geographical journalism (or journalistic geography), notwithstanding its apparently apolitical contents, illustrating for example the close ties existing between the NGM and its commitment to the defence and acknowledgement of the United States’ geopolitical and strategic interests during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.15 But if the analysis of this latter question (the ideological and geopolitical dimension of popular geographical magazines) is vital from any critical historiographical perspective, the examination of the first question (the capacity of these magazines to influence the geographical imagination and the public perception of the discipline) poses a fundamental problem for academic geography today. As Johnston maintains (using the cases of the NGM, Geographical and New Zealand Geographic), the fact that academic geography currently ignores popular geographic magazines and that, in turn,

7 According to Lacoste, this term refers to landscape representations distributed through the cinema and photography (illustrated magazines, publicity posters, postcards, etc.), all of them linked to the ‘ideology of tourism’: Y. Lacoste, La géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre, Paris, 1976. 8 P. Crang, Popular geographies, Environment and Planning D 14 (1996) 631e633; A. Bonnett, Geography as the world discipline: connecting popular and academic geographical imaginations, Area 35.1 (2003) 55e63. 9 R.J. Johnston, Four fixations and the quest for unity in geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 11 (1986) 449e453; R.J. Johnston, Popular geographies and geographical imaginations: contemporary English-language geographical magazines, GeoJournal 74 (2009) 347e362; M. Chevalier, Géographie et paragéographies, L’Espace géographique 18 (1989) 5e17; P. Chevalier, Quatre pôles dans le champ de la géographie?, Cybergeo, Section ‘Epistémologie, Histoire de la Géographie, Didactique’, article 23 (1997). 10 A useful critical synthesis of the evolution of the historiography of geography over the last 30 years in the Anglo-American world can be found in P. Puente-Lozano, Sobre los cambios en las ‘imaginaciones geográficas’ contemporáneas. Historiografía, epistemología y teoría en la geografía crítica anglosajona, Ph.D. thesis, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 2011. 11 We have already mentioned, in this regard, the minimal attention paid to the National Geographic Society in Johnston and Sidaway, Geography and Geographers (note 2). The work of G. Martin (All Possible Worlds. A History of Geographical Ideas, 4th Edition, New York, 2005) recognizes ‘the very large contribution’ that the National Geographic Society has made to geography (p. 340), but devotes a mere two pages to it (specifically, pp. 433 and 439) out of over 150 pages dedicated to geography in the USA. The same neglect of these kinds of non-academic geography can be observed in the most popular textbooks on the history of geography in Spain (Vilá, El conocimiento geográfico de España (note 1)) and, to a lesser extent, in France (P. Claval, Histoire de la Géographie française de 1870 à nos tours, Paris, 1998, devotes an interesting chapter to the popular forms of geography in France in the 1870s, pp. 51e68, as well as a brief section to the recent success of paragéographies, pp. 400e402). 12 The story of National Geographic Magazine has given rise to a growing bibliography over the last few years, mainly by authors who are not geographers. Apart from the official accounts promoted by the NGS itself, some stand out for their critical and innovative approaches, such the works by C. Lutz and J. Collins, Reading National Geographic, Chicago, 1993; J.A. Tuason, The ideology of empire in National Geographic Magazine’s coverage of the Philippines, 1898e1908, Geographical Review 89 (1999) 34e53; S. Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880e1950, Chicago, 2001; T.Y. Rothenberg, Presenting America’s World: Strategies of Innocence in National Geographic Magazine, 1888e1945, Aldershot, 2007; S. Hawkins, American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination, Charlottesville, 2010. 13 With regard to France, see the work of G. Labinal, La géographie des medias. Un analyse iconologique et textuelle des magazines, PH.D. thesis, Université Paris 1- Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2009; regarding the UK, see F. Driver, Visual culture and the geographical imagination: Michael Huxley and the Geographical Magazine, 1935e1959, paper presented at the RGS-IBG Conference 2011; regarding Argentina, P. Zusman, Educando la imaginación geográfica en el marco del Panamericanismo. La Revista Geográfica Americana en la década de 1930, paper presented at the Segundas Jornadas de Ciencias Sociales. Espacios, culturas e identidades, Universidad Autónoma de Entre Ríos, Concepción del Uruguay, Argentina, 17 June 2011; regarding Spain, J. García-Álvarez and D. Marías-Martínez, Geografía, viajes y periodismo en la España del franquismo: Valeriano Salas y la Revista Geográfica Española, Scripta Nova, Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales [online], XV (20 October 2011). Another case study on an extremely popular USA magazine is that of J. Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity, Minneapolis, 2000. 14 J. Dobson, Why can’t geographers write their own story?, Geographical Review 96 (2006) 480e483. Referring to the context of the United States of America, and the particular case of National Geographic Magazine, Dobson added the following: ‘Geography may well be the only discipline whose public image is based so thoroughly on a popular magazine, and the lack of geographers at its helm adds to the anomaly’. 15 Tuason, The ideology of empire in National Geographic Magazine’s coverage of the Philippines, 1898e1908 (note 12); Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880e1950 (note 12); Hawkins, American Iconographic (note 12), 103e134.

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these magazines ignore the work of academic geographers (and even the geography taught in primary and secondary education) produces a problematic, if not schizophrenic, state of affairs.16 The result is a situation in which university geography is largely incapable of controlling and influencing the public image e and therefore public recognition e of its own discipline; and in which some magazines, which call themselves ‘geographic’, disseminate an image of geography which is completely, or almost completely cut off from specialized geographers. This lack of communication, and, in a way, mutual incomprehension, for which both parties are partly responsible and which in some cases originated over a century ago,17 seriously contributes, according to Johnston, to the separation between academic geography and society, and even to institutionally weakening the promotion of academic geography within the education system. For this reason the author emphatically defends the need for academic geographers to make a decided effort to be more aware of the popular geographical magazines and the geographical imaginations which these magazines convey; to become acquainted with them, and even to establish alliances with their producers, which would certainly result in better public promotion of university geography. Detailed critical research on the history of popular geographical magazines could make a significant contribution to this task in several ways. First of all, it could shed light on the conditions which gave rise to the emergence of this kind of magazines and, in particular, the relationships these had with other geographical practices and knowledge. In that regard, the question of the relationship between the popular geographical magazines and academic geography is particularly relevant, as has been convincingly shown by, for example, the research into the process which led to the creation of the Association of American Geographers, marked, among other aspects, by the disagreement of some of its original founders (led by William Morris Davis) with regard to the progressive leaning of the National Geographic Society towards a ‘popularized geography’.18 Secondly, critical research on the history of popular geographical magazines should investigate the strategies whereby these magazines delimited their own frame of reference, as well as the way in which they tried e and in some cases managed e to connect with society and obtain a wide and truly popular readership. This involves examining the way they understood and defined geography, which methods and rhetoric (verbal and iconographic) they employed to communicate and promote that conception, and whose interests (personal or collective) they served.

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Thirdly, a critical history of non-academic geographical magazines could look into the geographical imaginations the magazines disseminated, examine how these were received by the public, and, with regard to that, whether they in any way reflected the official policies of the era or not. Fourthly, and finally, this kind of research should also carefully consider how the histories and memories of the discipline are constructed. For example, it must ask why the canonical histories of the discipline have traditionally forgotten or at least overlooked the history of popular geographies (or worse, scorned them, as non-scientific or even an embarrassment). And we must also consider to what extent these magazines may, in turn, have built their own historical vision of the discipline, paying far more attention, for example, to the geographical tradition of travel and exploration than to the genesis and evolution of the modern academic discipline. A study of the figure of Valeriano Salas and the Revista Geográfica Española, hitherto ignored within the historiography of Spanish geography, is a good example of the interesting possibilities and results which research into these ‘neglected’ e and, for some academic scholars, even ‘uncomfortable’ e histories of geography could offer. Valeriano Salas: a biographical sketch Valeriano Salas-Rodríguez was born in 1898 in Béjar (a small town in the province of Salamanca, Spain).19 The son of a well-off family, he was able to live comfortably and could afford to cultivate a number of interests. Salas studied in Spain, mainly in San Sebastian, and in France, although we have no records of the subjects he read or where he was enrolled. As a young man he spent long periods in Italy and England, where he learned Italian and English, became an expert in music and painting, and developed a love of travel, photography, bullfighting, art, and arts and crafts collecting, as well as sports. He soon became an enthusiastic and audacious traveller. Keen on motoring, Salas tried to emulate e and, in some aspects, to surpass e the celebrated transcontinental expeditions launched by Citroën (as well as by some individual explorers) in Africa and Asia during the twenties and the beginning of the thirties.20 In February and March 1930, he traversed a substantial section of the Sahara desert in a motor car; from October 1930 to April 1931 he completed the journey again, this time reaching Equatorial Africa; from April to August 1936 he embarked on a new journey from San Sebastian to India, more than 20,000 km (see Fig. 1). The story of this last trip, cut short when Salas learned of the outbreak of the

Johnston, Popular geographies and geographical imaginations (note 9); R.J. Johnston, On Geographic and geography, New Zealand Geographer 67 (2009) 167e170.

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As G. Martin appositely remarked with regard to the National Geographic Society and its president from 1980 to 1996, Gilbert Melville Grosvenor, ‘the society had long had a difficult relationship with the profession; to many professional geographers the popularization of its magazine under the rubric of geography was inappropriate and misleading. Many geographers felt that there was rather little geography in National Geographic. To the [National Geographic] society and its leadership [Gilbert M. Grosvenor], however, professional geographers seemed snobbish, insulated and often unimaginative’ (Martin, All Possible Worlds, 439 (note 11)). 18 On the origins of the split between the National Geographic Society and the so-called academic, scientific or professional geographers, see P. Pauli, The world and all that is in it: the National Geographic Society, 1888e1918, American Quarterly 31(1979) 517e553, 524e526; Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880e1950 (note 12), 49e50, 73e74; Tuason, The ideology of empire in National Geographic Magazine’s coverage of the Philippines, 1898e1908 (note 12), 35e38. 19 The following account rests mainly on obituaries written by A. Dotor, [Necrológica de Valeriano Salas], Boletín de la Asociación Española de Amigos de los Castillos 37 (1962) 127e128; J.A. Cabezas and V. Salas, Revista Geográfica Española 40 (1963) 9e11, as well as other sources, fragmented and varied, of information that has been transmitted orally, or files and dossiers we managed to consult. Among these we would like to highlight all the documents available at the Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, henceforth AMAE for reference) and at the Béjar Municipal Archive (Archivo Municipal de Béjar). 20 For more information on motor car expeditions organized by Citroën, see E. Deschamps, La cuisine des croisières Citroën: la première traversée du Sahara, la croisière noire, la croisière jaune, Boulogne, 2001; A. Audouin-Dubreil et al., Les croisières Citroën: 1922e1934, Paris, 4 vols., 2009. Amongst the Spanish initiatives contemporary with those of Salas, of note are the travels of architect Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí (1891e1981), described in the book Sahara-Níger. Nou viatge pel desert i la selva africana, published in 1932. On this figure and other similar pre-war Spanish travel experiences in Africa, see the contributions of J. Nogué and A. Luna, in: M.D. García-Ramón, J. Nogue-Font and P. Zusman (Eds), Una mirada catalana a l’Àfrica. Viatgers i viatgeres dels segles xix i xx (1859e1936), Lleida, 2008.

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Fig. 1. V. Salas in front of one of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, 1936. Source: RGE, no. 3 (1938).

Spanish Civil War (1936e1939), was published in the first three issues of the Revista Geográfica Española, founded by Salas himself in San Sebastian during the war.21 During the Civil War, Salas joined Franco’s troops, the so-called ‘National faction’. He fought on the front line and, together with his father, made important donations to the Nationalist Army, a gesture that earned him the Cross of Military Merit. At that time, his conception of travel changed: formerly heavily influenced by the aspect of adventure and an interest in exotic landscapes and cultures, it was now to evolve towards a patriotic, Spain-centred approach, connected to some of the ideological postulates and political strategies of Franco’s regime. In 1940 Salas, who had been living in San Sebastian, moved to Madrid, where he continued publishing the Revista Geográfica Española and planning new journeys to Africa, this time to visit the Spanish colonies of Ifni and Sahara, Spanish Morocco and Spanish Guinea. An enthusiastic proponent of photography, which was one of his main interests and was closely connected with travel, and inspired by the strong patriotic tendency already mentioned, in early 1946 Salas proposed the creation of a Photo Archive for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to be devoted ‘to the collection of the endless samples of Spanish art and history scattered all over the world, and most especially in the Americas’.22 Thanks to the unconditional support of Enrique Valera, who was in charge of the Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales (General Directorate for Cultural Relations), a recently-created department in the above mentioned Ministry, the idea crystallized and, six months later (starting in

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June, 1947), Salas was appointed Head of the Archivo Fotográfico Hispánico (Hispanic Photo Archive). Between 1946 and 1953 he embarked on several journeys through the United States, Cuba, the low countries, Italy and the Near East; all of these were portrayed in a series of the Revista Geográfica Española under the title La huella de España en el mundo (‘Spain’s footprint in the world’).23 In spite of all this, Salas’ ambitious plan of producing around 5000e6000 negatives a year (and organizing exhibitions in several countries) started to lose impetus, especially when Luis García-Llera was appointed General Director of Cultural Relations in June 1952. All the same, in July 1950 Salas was awarded a distinction from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to thank him for his work as the head of the Revista Geográfica Española and the Hispanic Photo Archive. Another interesting initiative by Salas during this period was the creation of the Asociación Española de Amigos de los Castillos (Spanish Society of Friends of the Castles), founded in 1952, of which he was Vice-President from its foundation until 1960. The Society, which still exists today, was established with the aim of preserving and publicizing Spain’s rich heritage of castles, an interest which could be observed in some of the monographic issues of the Revista Geográfica Española. Salas died suddenly in Madrid, in April 1962, from a rare disease he probably caught during a trip to India. His remains lie in the town cemetery of Béjar, where he was born. He also donated an important art collection (known as the Valeriano Salas Legacy) to this town, meant to be displayed in a town museum. His widow Teresa Tellechea-Otamendi, who died in 1968, was left to put this into practice. Revista Geográfica Española: between travel journalism and propaganda As little or no attention has been paid to the Revista Geográfica Española and its articles devoted to the history of geography and travel journalism in Spain, it is necessary to give some data pertaining to its origin, objectives and main features as a magazine. As stated above, the Revista Geográfica Española (henceforth RGE) was set up in San Sebastian in May 1938.24 The personality of its founder would determine the magazine’s orientation during its two first decades, and continued to guide its aims for the two following decades, until publication ceased. Salas directed the magazine until issue 39, published in 1962, the year of his death. On that date, his regular assistant Aurelia Alonso would take over and manage the magazine until the last issue, number 63, was published in 1977. Over the period as a whole, the magazine appeared irregularly: until 1960 it was published six-monthly although sometimes it was four-monthly; from 1961 onwards just one issue per year was published, with some exceptions. Also, its headquarters changed periodically: for the publication of the first eight issues, it was based in San Sebastian, and then it moved to Madrid from issue 9 (published in 1941) onwards, where it would occupy several different premises until its closure. As for the journal’s circulation figures, we have little data, but what we do have is significant: in 1939 the magazine was presented in a promotional advertisement inside issue 5, probably rather

21 V. Salas, Revista Geográfica Española 1 (1938) 5e24; 2 (1938) 49e70; 3 (1938) 55e73. The complete story of the journey, with some changes and additions, was published some years later as a book, entitled De España a la India en automóvil, Madrid (no publishing date given). Although Salas does not explicitly mention any precise precedent, he probably took Major Forbes-Leith’s automobile trip from London to India (1924), besides the Citroën’s Croisière Jaune (1931e1932), as a main inspiration for his journey. The accounts of both travels were published in National Geographic Magazine: F.A.C. Forbes-Leith, From England to India by automobile, NGM 48, 2 (August 1925) 191e223; G.M. Haardt, The Trans-Asiatic Expedition starts, NGM 59, 6 (June 1931) 776e782; M.O. Williams, The Citroën Trans-Asiatic Expedition reaches Kashmir, NGM 60, 4 (October 1931) 387e443; M.O. Williams, First over the roof of the World by motor, NGM 61, 3 (March 1932) 320e363. 22

AMAE, file R4410, dossier no. 11.

23

Revista Geográfica Española 20e21 (1946), about the US; 26e29 (1950e1951), about Italy; 30 (1951), on the Benelux; 32 and 34 (1952e1953), about the ‘Holy Land’; 35e36 (1954), about Cuba. 24

Date indicated on the front cover of issue 1, although the date given in the issue’s table of contents is April 1938.

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extravagantly, as ‘the most widespread Art, Geography and History magazine in the Spanish-speaking World’. In 1961, when the magazine was registered at the Depósito Legal (Spanish register of publications), the run was around 2000 copies per issue, but we know through other documents found in the files of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs that this figure could vary according to several circumstances and that some issues, called ‘extraordinary’ (i.e., special or thematic issues, as opposed to the issues referred to as ‘regular’ or ‘miscellaneous’), had a bigger run.25 The magazine, which received many direct subsidies from various public institutions (described below) while Salas was its editor, was sold mainly by subscription but also had points of sale in Spain as well as abroad.26 To these sources of income we should add others, including those derived from Salas’ own resources (as we know from his correspondence, Salas invested a good part of his personal assets in the project),27 and other sources such as advertising (both institutional and private), which was especially significant during its first ten years.28 Nonetheless, in the post-war environment (characterized by all kinds of shortages and scarcity) the economic and material obstacles that had to be overcome just to keep the magazine going e and to maintain its list of prestigious contributors and its graphic quality, especially in the first issues e were tremendous, as the editor himself observed on several occasions.29 What topics and themes characterized the contents of the RGE? What was its conception of geography? Which were the cultural references and who were the main contributors? To begin with, the majority of its central themes and objectives were briefly stated in the editorial of the first issue, sponsored by the Servicio Nacional de Propaganda (National Service of Propaganda) (see Fig. 2).30 This article, entitled ‘Nuestro propósito’ (‘Our purpose’), was illustrated with a picture of Franco in military dress, pointing with his finger on a map (see Fig. 3), and was full of the rhetoric of the Spanish Falange (a political party of fascist orientation, created in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera). It shows the magazine’s connection with the ideological principles of Franco’s side and explains several of the key ideas underlying that connection: the link between landscape and national identity, the praise of landscape as a conveyor of nationalism, the aim of paying attention to the footprints of Spain and their projection all over the world and the use of images and graphic representations for the efficient and prompt communication of such ideas. The National Service of Propaganda sponsors the publication of the ‘REVISTA GEOGRÁFICA ESPAÑOLA’, first issue, with the

objective of placing the Spanish people in frequent and fervent communication with the essentials of its landscape. Mountains, plains, deserts and rivers, all the beauty and austerity of our land, should have a place in our pages and heartfelt knowledge in our words. (.) The presence of the Castilian plain is History itself. We will try to appreciate Spain in its very land as well as in the exemplary succession of its creation and loveliness (.) Behind every geographical feature of our country, in the poverty of the steppe, in the fervour of the plain, rests, eternal and implacable, Spanish metaphysics. We will also introduce other countries, distant lands, preferably those that, beyond the sea, were born with the same destiny, united by Religion and Culture. Being a graphic magazine, it will add live documents to empty description.31 In fact, those objectives would be clearly and immediately expressed in several parts of the magazine, and most particularly in the ‘extra’ issues. Among them, the most important were those related to ‘The Spanish footprint all over the world’ (made up of 20 issues), those devoted to tourism and focussing on certain countries and territories (12 issues) and last, but not least, the ‘Spanish Castles’ series (also 12 issues). The propaganda side of the magazine was clear from the beginning through the support received from Franco’s administration, for example from the Servicio Nacional de Propaganda (National Service for Propaganda), the Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales (General Directorate of Cultural Relations), the Dirección General de Marruecos y Colonias (General Directorate of Morocco and the Colonies), the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas (General Directorate of Devastated Regions) and the Dirección General de Turismo (General Directorate of Tourism). But apart from the propaganda objective, the RGE started out with the purpose of becoming a benchmark among the popular geography magazines in the Spanish-speaking world. In that regard, it was inspired by National Geographic Magazine, founded in 1888, which would indisputably become the leading popular geography magazine worldwide from the early years of the twentieth century onwards, especially in terms of its circulation.32 With a smaller run and more modest and meagre resources, the RGE attempted to become a sort of Spanish version of the famous American magazine to which, according to some sources, Valeriano Salas could have been a contributor even before founding the RGE.33 This wish to emulate, implicitly evident in the first RGE issues, both in the contents and in the importance given to

25 In this respect see the letters, especially those dated December 1st 1948, and December 18th 1953 (see note 22), sent to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Alberto Martín-Artajo, in which Salas explains what the run is, and gives details of the subsidies the magazine receives and all the costs of the publication for some of the issues in the series ‘La huella de España en el mundo’. 26 On several occasions (for example in issues 17 [1945] and 18 [1945]), the editors of the RGE inserted a ‘Notice for readers in Great Britain & the British Empire’ in which the possibility of acquiring the magazine at the London Anglo-Spanish Press Bureau was announced. Some issues of the RGE, like issue 20 (1946), offer three different subscription rates, corresponding to Spain, the USA and the UK. 27

See AMAE (note 22).

28

Towards 1950, advertisements did occupy a good part (over 10%) of the RGE’s pages. Apart from institutional publicity, private clients were quite diverse, but the presence of hotel facilities stands out. 29 An example: in a leading article published in issue 22 of the RGE, written to celebrate the magazine’s tenth anniversary, Salas said that, among the many obstacles he had to overcome to publish it, ‘the main one was, and still is, the lack of paper’ (V. Salas, A los diez años de vida, RGE 22 [1948]). On this subject we can also see the letters mentioned in note 14. However, over its almost 40-year lifetime, the RGE preserved its original format, couché paper and a size of 24 cm  18 cm. 30 On the complex institutional structure of the propaganda of Franco’s side at this time, see the Doctoral Thesis by S. Núñez de Prado y Clavell, Servicios de información y propaganda en la guerra civil española, 1936e1939, Madrid, 1992. The National Service of Propaganda, which sponsored the first RGE issue, was attached to the Ministerio del Interior, headed by Ramón Serrano-Suñer, within the framework of Franco’s first government, set up in Burgos, in February 1938. 31

Salas, RGE 1 (1938) (note 21) page without number.

32

According to C.D.B. Bryan (The National Geographic Society: 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery, New York, 1987) the NGM had a run of 1,130,000 copies in 1940, a number that was to grow considerably during the following decades until reaching its maximum run, of nearly 11 million, in 1981. According to the data provided by G. H. Grosvenor, in May 1935 there were 1560 NGM subscribers in Spain, and more than 10,000 in all the Spanish-speaking countries (G. H. Grosvenor, The National Geographic Society and its Magazine, NGM 64, 1 (January 1936) 123e164, pp. 163e164. 33 We were unable to verify this data when reviewing the indexes of the complete NGM collection, although there are some signs of the presence of Salas’ pictures in the files of the National Geographic Society.

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Fig. 2. Front cover of RGE first issue, May 1938, with a picture of the ruins of Ctesifonte, by V. Salas.

photography, would be explicitly expressed in an article that Federico de Madrid (the nickname of Federico Sardá), a frequent contributor to the RGE during the magazine’s first ten years, wrote on the NGM in 1946. In this article, Madrid e who defined his contribution as ‘a chapter in Journalistic Geography’ e analysed and celebrated the dramatic success of the NGM as a publication which should set an example for the RGE. For Madrid, the key of such success was the American magazine’s capacity to satisfy and stimulate people’s curiosity about geography and travel, as well as the need for escape experienced by readers of a very different kind, in an easy style and an attractive format:

34

We all need to flee with our mind from our natural environment and go to a distant, different place, the farther the better. It is then an act of charity, an intelligent and efficient act of charity on the part of that American society [the National Geographic Society] to satisfy all of our cravings for a change, a craving that gives us a pleasant rest and an easy to digest bite of culture.34 On those grounds, the author encouraged the readers and management of the RGE to study: an example we show here: ministers, professors, teachers, common people, librarians, men of science and readers

F. de Madrid, Para emulación y ejemplo. El National Geographic Magazine, RGE 19 (1946) article without page numbers.

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Fig. 3. Portrait of Franco taken during the Spanish Civil War, by Campúa. Source, RGE, no. 1 (May 1938).

should understand, from their own position, what our RGE can be and should become, if we all lend a hand (.) The empire of the Spanish language has more than eight million speakers scattered all over the world, in its five continents; if we include those who speak similar languages, this number will double. In ten, fifteen or twenty years at the most, at least one Spanish speaking individual in a hundred should be a reader of the Revista.35 Apart from being a vehicle for ideology and propaganda, the RGE was meant to be a travel magazine (or, more exactly, as for many years could be read in its title, an ‘Art, History and Travel magazine’) aimed at a cultivated reader, though not an academic as such. Regarding its contributors as well as its style, theme and contents,

35

Madrid, Para emulación y ejemplo (note 34).

36

Gómez, La formación de a Escuela Española de Geografía (1940e1952) (note 3).

the magazine worked almost completely independently of Spanish academic geography, which emerged and developed during the decade after the Spanish Civil War in some universities and in the Instituto de Geografía Juan Sebastián Elcano (also known as Instituto Elcano), created in 1940 and attached to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spanish National Research Council).36 With the exception of some special contributions, the term ‘geography’ was considered inherent to the magazine’s concerns with the practice of travel, and its accounts of countries, regions and places. In fact, from issue 47 (1969) onwards, the original subtitle was modified to ‘Geography e History e Art’, i.e., the term ‘Travel’ was replaced by ‘Geography’. The few references to the history of geography published in the magazine confirm this same conception; furthermore, they are strongly imbued with nostalgia for the Spanish Empire and the Nationalist rhetoric of Franco’s regime. The historical contributions to geographical knowledge which interested the successive editors of the magazine and some of its main contributors are almost all linked to the processes of discovery, exploration and conquest of the old Spanish Empire; with a few exceptions, these references are clearly focused on the experiences and legacy of the travellers, explorers and conquerors of Hispanic America, or more generally, as Salas himself observed, of those ‘countries and places where our civilization managed to prevail, creating magnificent monuments, model institutions and an infinity of works of transcendental importance’.37 The magazine’s contributors included various professionals and scholars, among them journalists, writers, professors and teachers, members of the Royal Academies (primarily History and of Fine Arts), military men, architects, feature writers, museum managers, politicians or people with a position in the government, diplomats, and so on. The contribution of university geographers and, in general, geography teachers e either Spanish or foreign e to the RGE was minimal throughout its lifetime.38 Similarly, relatively few articles consider the landscape or peopleeenvironment relations in the scientific and academic terms of modern geography. In the context of post-war Spain, where there were only three geography periodicals in existence, the RGE had a place of its own. And this was a very different place from that of Estudios Geográficos (published by the Instituto Elcano), founded in 1940 and the main mouthpiece for the emerging Spanish ‘school of (academic) geography’. Very different too from that of the oldest Spanish geographical periodical, the Boletín de la Real Sociedad Geográfica, founded in 1876, with its much more erudite tone. Together with other foreign publications instrumental in the dissemination of popular geography in other parts of the world, including the Revista Geográfica Americana (published in Argentina from 1933 to 1956)39 and the Geographical Magazine (founded in 1935 and linked to the Royal Geographical Society),40 the Spanish precedents of the RGE are to be found mainly among travel magazines published before the Spanish Civil War, such as the Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones (published from 1893 to 1954, except for the Civil War years) and the illustrated

37

V. Salas, Un viaje a través de Sicilia, RGE 28 (1950) 135e156. In this regard, also of interest are Salas’ writings on his tour of the United States (V. Salas, Impresiones de viaje, RGE 20 [1946]) and, above all, the five RGE special issues on the cartography and history of Spanish geographical discoveries, the work of Carlos Sanz (RGE 50 [1970], 52[1972], 54 [1973] and 62e63 [1977]). 38 The only university teachers of geography who contributed e and that only occasionally e to the RGE were naturalists Eduardo Hernández-Pacheco (with an article on the geographical features and geology of the northern Spanish Sahara, published in issue no. 10 of the magazine), and his son Francisco Hernández-Pacheco (who wrote an article on the Sebjas of Jarfaia territory in the same issue and another one, devoted to prehistoric caves and sites in Spain, in issue no.18). Also, Isidoro Escagüés-Javierre, a member of the Royal Academy of History and Moral and Political Science and a secondary school teacher of geography and history, wrote three interesting articles on Naples (RGE, issue 26), Sicily (RGE, issue 28) and the Duchy of Milan (RGE, issue 29). 39 Zusman, Educando la imaginación geográfica en el marco del Panamericanismo (note 13). We would like to thank the author for providing us with this manuscript, currently being printed. 40

Driver, Visual culture and the geographical imagination (note 13). We thank the author for providing us with this manuscript.

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Fig. 4. Front cover of RGE, no. 6 (1939). Photo by V. Salas: ‘Crane on the Niger River’.

magazine Alrededor del Mundo (published from 1899 to 1930). However, the RGE is very different from these last magazines, among other aspects, in the central role assigned to photography, one of the main passions of its founder and editor in chief. An inveterate traveller and excellent photographer, Salas provided a significant number of the thousands of pictures published in the magazine, taken during his travels. He promoted a number of photographic expeditions and excursions far from the Iberian Peninsula, and organized many exhibitions and the production of documentary films with geographical content for disseminatory purposes. The making of these was entrusted to two

regular contributors to the magazine: Manuel Hernández-Sanjuán (editor in chief of the RGE during a good part of Salas’ mandate as manager) and Segismundo Pérez de Pedro, both founders of the Spanish film company Hermic Films, established in 1940. If the work of those two professionals can be considered to be pioneering in the history of Spanish documentary films,41 the large quantity and good quality of the pictures published by the RGE, a sample of which could be seen on many of the magazine front covers (see Figs. 4 and 5), gave the publication an added value and was no less pioneering in the infancy of travel photojournalism in Spain. This value has even greater merit if we take into account the enormous

41 A. Elena, La llamada de África. Estudios sobre el cine colonial español, Barcelona, 2010, 88e91; P. Ortín and V. Pereiró, Mbini: cazadores de imágenes en la Guinea colonial, Barcelona, 2006.

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Fig. 5. Front cover of RGE, no. 24 (1949). Photo by S. Pérez de Pedro: ‘In the beaches of Eureka, Spanish Guinea’.

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difficulties that the magazine had to overcome in its early days, from the material and economic point of view.42 Indeed, in Spain’s critical post-war situation and during the first years of Franco’s regime, publishing such a lavish and beautifully illustrated magazine as the RGE must have been extremely difficult. It should be borne in mind that the Spanish GDP per capita fell dramatically in the five years following the end of the Civil War and did not regain pre-war levels until 1954.43 Similarly, the price of paper and many other industrial products soared in this situation of generalized scarcity, which was not really resolved until well into the 1950s. This problematic economic context, and in particular the high costs of the plentiful and costly photographic material characteristic of the magazine, which Salas occasionally referred to in his editorial notes,44 probably explains the RGE’s high price over the first twelve years, far higher than that of the other Spanish geographical magazines then in existence. It was also very expensive in relation to average purchasing power in Spain at the time.45 The aspiration, mentioned above, of turning the RGE into a kind of Hispanic NGM, capable of reaching ‘at least one Spanish speaking individual in a hundred’46 would always remain a dream, impossible to accomplish in a country like Spain in the early years under Franco. Terribly impoverished and damaged by the war, with an eminently autarchic, government-controlled, and rural economy (in 1950, 50% of the active population still worked in the primary sector), Spain was also politically isolated and closed off from the rest of the world. The image of Spain in the Revista Geográfica Española: landscapes, monuments and national identity A systematic and detailed analysis of RGE contents would take up far more pages than are available here. For this reason, and in line with our objectives in this paper, we have focused our study of its contents on two of the core themes reflected in the magazine: the special issues devoted to certain countries and territories, and those devoted to Spain and Spanish Castles. These two subjects, which were the topic of 24 out of the 63 RGE issues, represent some of the key aspects of the image of Spain conveyed by the magazine, and

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also indicate some close connections between Salas, some of his contributors, and some policies of Franco’s regime. The first of the connections we shall discuss here is suggested by the issues devoted to tourism. In his obituary written by Juan Antonio Cabezas and published in the RGE, Salas was described as ‘one of the pioneers and forerunners of national and international tourism’.47 This statement may be excessive, but it illustrates some of his main interests and passions. Even in one of the early issues, journalist Luis Bolín-Bidwell, General Manager for the Tourism Department (later known as the General Directorate of Tourism, 1939e1951) in Franco’s administration, warmly congratulated the RGE on ‘the excellent work that (.) is doing for the greater knowledge of all the wonders of our country’.48 Until the end of 1940, the institution directed by Bolín, a department of the Ministry of Governance and attached e significantly e to the Undersecretariat for Press and Propaganda, would lend financial support to the publication of some of the magazine’s issues and would insert advertisements for some of its main products, facilities and publications as well on a regular basis.49 On 18 July 1965, the RGE was awarded the Bronze Medal for Merit in the field of Tourism from the Ministry of Information and Tourism, headed by Manuel Fraga-Iribarne. Being a travel magazine, the relationship between the RGE and tourism was relevant during the first decades of the publication’s life. Apart from the many travel reports, or the articles on places that usually made up the so-called regular issues or miscellanea, until 1963 (during Salas’ management) the RGE published twelve thematic issues devoted primarily to showing the main routes, resources and geographical or tourist landmarks of several territories, both Spanish and foreign (provinces, regions, countries, even cultural fields of a supranational nature).50 And many of those issues, coordinated by Salas and entrusted to different writers, can be read as a kind of compendium or cultural guide. They had the sponsorship of the local and national tourism institutions which were interested in them as their objective was, to a great extent, promotion and propaganda. A good example of this is issue 17, a thematic volume on tourism in Spain, published in 1945 with the sponsorship of the General Directorate of Tourism, the General

42 For example, the first twelve issues of RGE have more than 800 pictures (mainly photographs), which gives an average of more than 65 pictures per issue (a third of them are full page). These issues had an average length of 80 pages (without advertisements), which gives us an idea of the importance given to illustrations. 43 For an overview of the Spanish economy at this time, see L. Caruana, El primer franquismo (1939e1949): la postguerra interminable, in: A. González and J. M. Matés (Eds), Historia económica de España, Barcelona, 2006, 687e706. 44

For example, in RGE 8 (1940) and 22 (1948).

45

Although information about the prices of the RGE is confusing for various reasons, it seems that the magazine was decidedly expensive, especially before the early 1950s, given the average income per person at the time. Between 1938 and 1950, for example, the RGE’s retail price (for direct sale to the general public) fluctuated between 40 pesetas for most regular issues, although these were much cheaper by subscription (8 pesetas per issue with a subscription within Spain in 1949) and 80 pesetas for most extraordinary issues (the price fell to 20 or 25 pesetas per issue with a subscription in 1949). If we take as a reference the macroeconomic figures recently provided by J. Maluquer (Del caos al cosmos: una nueva serie enlazada del Producto Interior Bruto de España entre 1850 y 2000, in: Primer Encuentro Anual de la AEHE, Barcelona, 2009), the retail prices of the RGE could represent between a minimum of 10% (with regard to the regular issues) and a maximum of 30% (in the case of some extraordinary issues) of the GDP per person per month in Spain throughout the period concerned (or between 2.5% and 8.5% of this GDP if we consider the subscription prices). There is no doubt that the RGE was, in particular with regard to its retail prices, significantly more expensive than the quarterly magazine Estudios Geográficos (12 pesetas per copy in 1940, 14 pesetas per copy in 1950) or the monthly Boletín de la Real Sociedad Geográfica: single copies of this sold at 4 pesetas each, while an annual subscription cost 40 pesetas in Spain. However, at the same time, it should be pointed out that the quality of the paper and the quantity of photographs in these two publications were significantly inferior to those of the RGE. 46

Madrid, Para emulación y ejemplo (note 34). Article without page numbers.

47

Cabezas and Salas, RGE (note 19).

48

RGE 8 (1940), page without number.

49

For example, the so-called ‘Rutas de Guerra’ (War Routes), which were organized by the Tourist Department of Franco’s government between 1938 and 1939; the ‘Paradores and Albergues’ network (a network of hotels and inns created by the Spanish State in 1928); and the work Apología turística de España, the first edition of which was published in 1943. On Spanish tourism policy for the first few years under Franco and its propaganda dimension, see S.D. Pack, Tourism and Dictatorship: Europe’s Peaceful Invasion of Franco’s Spain, Basingstoke and New York, 2006; B. Correyero and R. Cal, Turismo, la mayor propaganda del Estado. España: desde sus inicios hasta 1951, Madrid, 2008. 50 Thematic issues which should be mentioned here would be, for Spanish territories, those devoted to the provinces of Gran Canaria (issue 8), Cádiz (issue 13), Málaga (issue 14), tourism in Spain (issue 18), and Madrid and the surrounding area (no. 23). To these should be added others, such as issues devoted to some of the Spanish territories in Africa, although the purpose of those issues is not only, indeed not even mainly, the focus on tourism. Among the special issues on foreign countries and cities oriented towards tourism, we should mention those devoted to England and the Commonwealth countries (issue 17), India (issue 39), Egypt (issue 40) and Imperial Peking (issue 53).

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Directorate of Cultural Relations and the General Directorate of Devastated Regions, to which, besides the Spanish journalists, some British writers familiar with our country contributed. More than an analysis or in-depth study of tourism and related activities, the 14 articles included in this issue were conceived as a summary of the resources and potential of Spain in relation to tourism, aimed at Spanish and foreign readers alike.51 In this issue the importance, from the point of view of propaganda, attached by the regime to tourism is apparent as a means of building an ideal image of Spain (and of the regime itself), an image that would be publicized abroad in an attempt to dismantle some negative prejudices and ‘black legends’ present in the foreign vision of the country from previous times.52 While the image of tourism and, more widely, of Spain itself promoted by the RGE needs a much more detailed analysis than is possible here, some key points can be identified. The articles published by the RGE reflect Salas’ conception of travel and tourism, with a marked preference for individual journeys, along routes travelled by car, with a broadly cultural approach. Within this framework, the articles devoted to travel around Spain are generally focussed on cultural resources of a historical and artistic nature, though folklore and ethnographic aspects are also considered, as are natural landscapes readily associated with romantic aesthetics, such as mountain chains or volcanoes. Some of the special issues devoted to the Spanish provinces, such as Gran Canaria, Málaga and Cádiz, incorporate landscape elements not only as a resource or a means to attract tourists’ attention, but also as samples of heritage. These have, generally speaking, an important place in the iconography of the magazine. Other contributions, such as some of the articles included in the special issue on tourism in Spain, even establish colourful relationships e some of them, of a deterministic nature e between climate, landscape and the temperament of the Spanish regions and their inhabitants.53 Another matter that should be stressed in connection with the RGE’s devotion to tourism lies in the fondness its various editors and main contributors showed for certain elements of Spanish historical, artistic or architectural heritage connected with the image of national identity attached to Franco’s regime, strongly influenced by National Catholicism. Castles, monasteries, churches and cathedrals, pilgrimage routes and even, in the early days, some routes linked to military actions and victories of the ‘National Faction’ during the Spanish Civil War received great attention in the magazine’s regular issues, and some of these places were also the subject of special issues: those focused on cathedrals (issues 42, 43 and 55), monasteries (issue 44), the pilgrimage route of Santiago de Compostela (issue 51) and, above all, the series entitled Castillos de España (Castles of Spain). As already mentioned, thirteen

extraordinary issues were devoted to this topic from 1949 to 1975, structured by province and historical region.54 The first six numbers of the series were, quite significantly, written by Ángel Dotor, a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and illustrated with Salas’ pictures. Both authors would be important figures in the creation and development of the Asociación Española de Amigos de los Castillos, founded in Madrid in 1952.55 The publishing of the castle series by the RGE was probably in response to a decree, enacted on 22 April 1949, by the Ministry of National Education, that put ‘all the castles in Spain, regardless of their state of deterioration’ under the protection of the State and commanded the Dirección General de Bellas Artes (General Directorate of Fine Arts), represented by the Marquis of Lozoya, to proceed ‘by means of its technical bodies [.] to the writing of a detailed and exhaustive inventory of all the castles in Spain, made up of both documents and pictures’.56 At the same time, this interest in the preservation of Spanish ideological heritage perfectly fitted the image of Spain promoted by National Catholicism, full of religious and military principles and historiographical interpretations focused on the Castilian region. ‘[Castles] are true palimpsests made of stone, a living chronicle of the past and the inexhaustible reserve of poets’, wrote José Sanz y Díaz in the aforementioned monographic issue on tourism in Spain. ‘They are the summary of our History, of our racial strength, of our ecumenical spirit, even of our literature’.57 Those monuments are so full of meaning, they are so representative of our History and Art, and reflect, in such a distinct manner, some of the main principles of the soul of our race in its secular development, that no-one could remain oblivious to the emotional power and the evocative force that its very name whispers. Those monuments represent, like cathedrals, monasteries and palaces, the highest point of life in the centuries tenth to sixteenth, as well as its origins, mishaps, splendour and decadence (.) and define the psychological aspects of a nation whose main region, creator of their nationality, took its name from them.58 The publication of the castle series in the RGE was justified, in Dotor’s opinion, by ‘the leading role that [those castles] play in our history’ and ‘their meaning, today, as an aesthetical element framed in the Spanish landscape and manners’59 (see Fig. 6). To draw up an inventory cataloguing their condition was also a key task when it came to preservation; as Dotor put it, ‘as many of them as still today show their graceful shape after a long period of negligence, which proved fatal to a good number of them’.60 The preamble to the above mentioned Decree of 22 April 1949 made similar points:

51 The issue is made up of articles on Spain’s climate and landscape, the main prehistoric caves and sites, Roman monuments, Arabian culture, castles, imagery, gardens, Paradores and Albergues, fishing in rivers, bullfighting and the Fiesta, cathedrals, big game, the Balearic and Canary Islands, and villages rebuilt after the Civil War by Franco’s government in Aragón. The issue bears a preface written by the famous Irish Hispanist Walter Starkie (founder and first director of the British Institute in Madrid) and the contributors also included two other British authors. 52 See the article by M.P. del Río-Cossa, Los Paradores y los Albergues de la Dirección General del Turismo, RGE 18 (1945). The political and ideological aspects of the tourism policies of the early years of Franco’s dictatorship have been studied in Pack, Tourism and Dictatorship (note 49); Correyero and Cal, Turismo, la mayor propaganda del Estado (note 49). 53

Especially R. Rosillo, Clima y paisaje de España, RGE 18 (1945).

54

Issues 25 (Provinces of Segovia and Valladolid), 27 (Cuenca and Guadalajara), 31 (Madrid and its Province), 33 (Toledo), 37 and 38 (Cáceres), 41 (Levante, or Reino de Valencia), 49 (Salamanca and Zamora), 56, 58, 59 and 60 (Andalucía) and 61 (Spanish fortresses in América: Cartagena de Indias). 55 The first President of the Association was a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Juan de Contreras y López de Ayala, Marquis of Lozoya, General Director of Fine Arts during Franco’s government from 1939 to 1951 and a regular contributor to the RGE. 56

Boletín Oficial del Estado (5th May 1949).

57

J. Sanz, Castillos de España, RGE 18 (1945) article without page numbers.

58

A. Dotor, Castillos de España: provincias de Segovia y Valladolid, RGE 25 (1949) issue without page numbers.

59

Dotor, Castillos de España (note 58).

60

Dotor, Castillos de España (note 58).

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Fig. 6. The castle of Jadraque, Guadalajara. Photo by V. Salas, published in RGE, no. 27 (1950).

One of the features which most embellish the Spanish landscape are the remains of castles scattered all over many of its geographical landmarks. These remains, apart from their extraordinary importance from the picturesque point of view, evoke the history of our land and its most glorious times. Their prestige is enlarged with the legends woven around them by popular imagination. Any of these castles, whatever its condition, should be the recipient of the care and concern of our State, so conscientious in preserving the spiritual principles of our race. Unfortunately those venerable traces of the old times are undergoing a process of destruction. Dismantled and unused, nearly all of them have become quarries where pillage speeds their collapse, some of the most beautiful are already gone. It is now impossible to rebuild them, except in some exceptional instances; it is even impossible to do any work just to keep them standing; but we should, at least, avoid all abusive behaviour that speeds their destruction.61 An advertisement published in the RGE three years later suggested that the foundation of the Asociación Española de Amigos de los Castillos, apparently the result of a meeting held at the magazine premises under the auspices of Salas, was a response to need for ‘surveillance and study of the existence, condition and, if possible, restoration of those noble buildings’.62 Since the place those monuments occupy is so prominent in the index of tourist attractions of our country, it proves to be urgent and inevitable to try and preserve such a valuable heritage and to avoid its extinction, which will happen if we do not apply a prompt cure.63 Inevitably mixed up with other considerations of a more scientific and ideological nature, the series on Spanish castles published by the RGE reflected and projected, more or less

61

See Boletín Oficial del Estado (note 56).

62

RGE 31 (1952) page without number.

63

See RGE 31 (note 62).

explicitly, a sincere concern about the pitiful condition of many of those buildings and support for a program to recover and preserve them. On this basis the magazine surely deserves a place of its own in the history of castles and, more widely, in the history of national heritage preservation in Spain.

Conclusion The life of Valeriano Salas-Rodríguez, as well as the story of his main achievement, the Revista Geográfica Española, scarcely known to date, has many different aspects. His personality was, at least, striking and singular. His experiences as a traveller, in the context of the Spain of the time, were intense and, in some cases, original and pioneering. He travelled tirelessly from his youth, through Spain but also throughout Europe, Africa, America and Asia; he planned and carried out many motor car journeys in Africa and Asia and, from the late thirties, enthusiastically tackled the popularizing of geography by means of the RGE, the magazine he founded and directed for nearly a quarter of a century. His passion for travel allowed him to unite his taste for adventure with his craving for knowledge and, from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he incorporated a heavily ideological and nationalist component into his work, which was linked to the propaganda of the winning faction and to his particular idea of Spain and Spanish identity, so influenced by National Catholicism. Above all, from a contextual and historiographical point of view, Salas’ life and his projects e travels, publishing and archives e shed light not only on the structure of travel journalism or the dissemination of popular geography in the early days of Franco’s Spain, but also on the history of the social image that geography, as a subject, had in that period. The history of Salas and the RGE helps us to understand another history: that of the perception of geography as a discipline not necessarily linked to the academic environment, to

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education and the professional sphere; a perception usually neglected and in many cases ignored by contemporary historiography. Even though they originated in a private initiative, Salas’ main projects after the Civil War had, to a greater or lesser extent, long-standing and varied institutional support from Franco’s administration and tried to led support, directly or indirectly, to some of the Dictatorship’s policies, including those aimed at promoting tourism around Spain (the main topic of some issues of the RGE); the support and popularization of Spanish Castle heritage (which he backed not only through the magazine, but by founding the Asociación Española de Amigos de los Castillos); or diplomacy and cultural activity abroad (which can be seen in the creation of the Hispanic Photo Archive and in the RGE series on ‘The footprint of Spain all over the world’, which deserves specific study itself). Last, but not least, we have to remember how significant the RGE was to the history of geography as a discipline. Notwithstanding the precarious economic and social conditions of Franco’s Spain, particularly during the twenty years following the Civil War, which frustrated any hopes of turning the RGE into a magazine with a wide, cultured and well-educated readership, the magazine was an explicit attempt to build a ‘journalistic geography’ on the model of some foreign examples, much better known and more successful. This was a journalistic geography aimed at the Spanish-speaking reader and offering photography as its main asset, relying on pictures and graphics, a taste for travelling and curiosity about landscapes, places and other societies; a magazine composed by diverse individuals and groups from the scholarly or the

professional sphere, outside the university arena of geography. Even in the Spanish context, such an attempt had, as we have already mentioned, some precedents, and it was also followed up by a remarkable sequel the year the RGE disappeared.64 Equally, the fact that a magazine which included in its title the adjectives ‘geographical’ and ‘Spanish’ developed nearly completely separately from geography and the Spanish geographers belonging to the academic field, could seem, at first, to be a great contradiction, if not a paradox. Yet this apparent contradiction has been and still is commonplace in some other fields where the distinction between the popular side of geography e such travel photojournalism e and geography as a discipline, to be taught at university or studied in research centres, is more than evident and, for some authors, a real problem. Insofar as this géographie grand public e or in Lacoste’s terms, this géographie-spectacle e has decisively influenced the image of both landscapes and the discipline of geography itself, it deserves more attention from historians of our subject.

Acknowledgements This work makes part of the Research Project CCG10-UC3M/HUM5564, funded by the Carlos III University of Madrid. Thanks are due to the three anonymous reviewers of the original manuscript, as well as to Prof. Felix Driver, for their helpful comments and suggestions.

64 We are referring to Revista de Geografía Universal, published monthly by 3A Editores from 1977 to 1983. Present in several Latin American countries, the magazine had a Spanish Local Edition (with an office in Madrid).