Last updated on September 26, 2026 by Shannon
I’ve called Spain home since 2018, with six years in Barcelona and now from my home on Spain’s Costa del Sol. I’ve also traveled extensively, training north to south, and even overland on 500 km of the Camino de Santiago, crossing the Pyrenees from France into Spain on foot. I love this country, and it’s been good to me.
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I have always felt it my duty to understand the complicated history of my adopted home, particularly when I moved to a place as complicated as Barcelona. Plenty of people alive today remember Franco, and almost nobody talks about him. The Basque Country and Catalonia each carry their own tensions.
If you only read one before your trip, make it The Shadow of the Wind.
3 Books About Spanish History You Need to Understand Modern Spain
These three books fill in the history that most Spaniards won’t bring up over dinner. All three are on my list.
1. In Diamond Square by Mercè Rodoreda
The Spanish Civil War, lived by one young woman in Barcelona’s Gràcia neighborhood, from dances in the square to the war and the hungry years after. I lived in Gràcia, and the square in the title is Plaça del Diamant, right in the neighborhood, so this one is at the top of my list. It’s short, and Catalans still treat it as a national treasure. (It’s also published in English as The Time of the Doves.)
2. Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett
This is the book that explains the silence. Tremlett, a British journalist based in Madrid, travels the country trying to understand why Spaniards agreed to quietly move past Franco rather than reckon with him. It reads like a travelogue, not a history class.
3. Homeland by Fernando Aramburu
Two families in a small Basque village, best friends until ETA violence splits them apart. Aramburu is from San Sebastián, and the novel was a massive bestseller in Spain and later an HBO series. It’s long, but it’s famous for being hard to put down.
Spain Travel Books That Take You Around the Country
4. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Barcelona, 1945. A bookseller’s son finds a mysterious novel in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, and someone has been burning every other copy. This is the one book my cousin insisted I read immediately when we spotted it on a book swap shelf in India. It started slow, and I might not have made it to the meat of the story that hooks you if my cousin hadn’t been so insistent it was worth continuing.
5. Driving Over Lemons by Chris Stewart
Stewart (yes, Genesis’s very first drummer, back when he was a teenager) buys a rundown farm in the Alpujarras mountains south of Granada, with no road, no electricity, and no bridge across the river to reach it. I’ve spent countless hours looking at land around Spain, pondering a life in a more rural area, and Stewart’s account is a reality check on not only the process of house hunting in a foreign country, but the quirks unique to Spain.
6. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
A group of American and British expats leaves Paris for the running of the bulls in Pamplona. It’s the book that put San Fermín on the map for foreigners. It’s a classic, but it was an easier read than I expected.
7. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee
The quick read, and the right one for the plane. At about 200 pages, it sets the stage for your trip before you land. In 1935, a young Englishman arrives in Vigo with a violin and walks the length of Spain, busking for food and a bed. It’s lyrical and funny, and it shows the country just before the Civil War tore it apart, ending on the coast not far from where I live now as the fighting breaks out around him. It’s a classic, and it’s on my list.
8. Spanish Steps by Tim Moore
The Camino, walked with a stubborn donkey. I walked 500 km of the Camino and somehow never read a Camino book, so this one is next up on my list.
And the one to skip: Don Quixote. It’s the Spanish novel everyone knows, and a slog for most travelers. Go see the windmills in La Mancha instead.
Movies and TV Shows About Spain to Watch Before You Go
Pan’s Labyrinth
Set in 1944, when Franco’s army was hunting the last resistance fighters in the mountains. It’s a haunting movie, with fantastical visuals and a fantasy world that only heightens the harsh reality of fascism.
Las Chicas del Cable (Cable Girls)
Four women working at Madrid’s telephone company in the late 1920s, with the final season running into the Civil War. I binged it around the pandemic as Spanish practice. It’s everything that hooks you about a telenovela, but with great acting, a fun plot, fabulous costumes, and enough history to justify it as “research.”
La Valla (The Barrier)
Technically dystopian, set in a walled-off Madrid in the near future, but the rationing, informants, and fear feel a lot like postwar Franco-era Spain. It had me hooked.
The Way
Martin Sheen walks the Camino after his son dies on the first day of the trail. I watched it before walking my own Camino.
Skip: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
If you want a sun-soaked, romantic postcard of Barcelona, with Gaudí, long dinners, and a side trip to Oviedo, it sets the mood, and Penélope Cruz won an Oscar for her role. I just didn’t get the hype.
Next up, read my favorite travel books of all time.