When Spain didn’t know how to market its cuisine or its stars

Felipe Vidales, a Doctor of History from Toledo, analysed in his lecture how travellers on the Grand Tour between the 16th and 18th centuries viewed Spanish cuisine and the Spanish sky. Far from the country’s current culinary reputation, those early tourists left behind accounts full of disappointment at a culinary offering they considered poor, disorganised or even unpleasant. Drawing on diaries such as those of the Italian monk Norberto Caimo and the Earl of Sandwich, Vidales shows how Spain was sidelined from the origins of modern tourism and how prejudices took root that still persist today.

The historian emphasises that these travellers—who were both politicians and scientists—also acted as agricultural and gastronomic ‘spies’: they noted down farming techniques, water usage, the organisation of meals and cooking methods, particularly in rural areas. Their accounts allow us to reconstruct a working-class diet consisting of bread, eggs, porridge, migas, gazpacho and stews – very different from the elite cuisine found in traditional cookery books. They were as surprised by the refined table etiquette inherited from Al-Andalus — the distant precursor to today’s ‘set menu’ — as they were by the ubiquity of pork and chickpeas, a legume almost unknown to them.

Vidales links this material to very contemporary debates: he criticises mass tourism, which has severed its ties with the countryside and sacrificed culinary authenticity in order to serve visitors what they ‘think they want’, from cloned cheesecakes to global trends. In contrast, he champions the potential of cultural and astronomical tourism in regions such as Castilla-La Mancha, where the very same skies that once guided those travellers with quadrants and astrolabes could today serve as a high-quality tourist attraction. His conclusion is clear: neither gastronomic identity nor recipes are set in stone; they have always changed, and understanding that history is key to deciding which traditions we wish to uphold and how to share them with the world.