Image and perception of Nature in the Enlighted traveller

Abstract

The enlightened travellers don't perceive the landscape as the romantics will do, for them the landscape is a book where they would be able to read the history of the country. The English travellers considered that the barren and uninhabited Spanish countryside was the consequence of bad government, the Catholic Church rapacity and absentee landlords. Only if there was a deep change the Spanish cities would not be seen as islands in a desert.