While they lay there holding hands, Ambio told Serena what happened. "When the fog finally lifted after the sun came out, I thought I was going to burn up. I was so thirsty that I was tempted to drink the seawater, but I knew it would kill me. And then I prayed, saying, "We were born together, please let us die together." Ambio then went on to say, "I drifted all that day without a cloud in sight. All I could think of was that you were getting burned up like myself." "I wish," said Serena, "that I'd had the misfortune not to have been picked up by those fishermen. It would have saved me from a living hell. I did not get burned up like you, but if hell is anything like I went through, I sure do not want to go there."

Walking in the Pyrenees, Matthew Parris stumbled upon a magnificent medieval house. Inspirational and instructional, this is the story of one man's dream to turn a forgotten ruin into his very own castle in Spain.

British culture of the Romantic period is distinguished by a protracted and varied interest in things Spanish. The climax in the publication of fictional, and especially poetical, narratives on Spain corresponds with the intense phase of Anglo-Iberian exchanges delimited by the Peninsular War (1808-14), on the one hand, and the Spanish experiment of a constitutional monarchy that lasted from 1820 until 1823, on the other. Although current scholarship has uncovered and reconstructed several foreign maps of British Romanticism - from the Orient to the South Seas - exotic European geographies have not received much attention. Spain, in particular, is one of the most neglected of these 'imaginary' Romantic geographies, even if between the 1800s and the 1820s, and beyond, it was a site of wars and invasions, the object of foreign economic interests relating to its American colonies, and a geopolitical area crucial to the European balance designed by the post-Waterloo Vienna settlement. This study considers the various ways in which Spain figured in Romantic narrative verse, recovering the discursive materials employed in fictional representation, and assessing the relevance of this activity in the context of the dominant themes and preoccupations in contemporary British culture. The texts examined here include medievalizing and chivalric fictions, Orientalist adventures set in Islamic Granada, and modern-day tales of the anti-Napoleonic campaign in the Peninsula. Recovering some of the outstanding works and issues elaborated by British Romanticism through the cultural geography of Spain, this study shows that the Iberian country was an inexhaustible source of imaginative materials for British culture at a time when its imperial boundaries were expanding and its geopolitical influence was increasing in Europe and overseas.