Spain has functioned as a tourist location for outsiders for at least the past two centuries. In the nineteenth century Frenchmen found Spain convivial as the primitive other next door, conveniently just the other side of the Pyrenees but allowing an escape, for a time, from the constraints of polite French society. This included a form of sex tourism, or at the very least an appreciation of maidens duskier than those to be found in France. Joseba Gabilondo observes that in the nineteenth century ‘Southern Europe, in continuation with the lower classes of most Northern European countries and cities, becomes the field in which heterosexuality is “tried out” and learned by young bourgeois men, so as to implement it later back home with women of their same class’ (Gabilondo 2008: 21). Spanish women thus come to represent a sexualised exotic other that nonetheless includes a show of freedom or agency, as Gabilondo goes on to note, ‘The orientalized “independence” of the Spanish woman becomes the sign of her “other sexuality” that is “before” and “outside” French bourgeois heterosexuality’ (ibid.: 27).

One of the most famous outputs of this vein is of course Prosper Mérimée's novella ‘Carmen’ of 1845, which in turn formed the basis of Bizet's opera of 1875: from there the portrait of a free-spirited, fickle and sexually desirable young Gypsy woman became known worldwide (spawning in her turn myriad interpretations of her story: see Powrie at al. 2007). Mérimée's original story included a framing device of the French narrator travelling and researching in Spain, who meets Carmen's lover and nemesis don José. The latter relates Carmen's story which then forms part of the narrator's musings on Gypsy society. Don José is himself a Northerner, from Navarre or the Basque Country, experiencing southern Spain for the first time when he is posted there as a soldier. Thus Carmen is seen as the object of a tourist's gaze on more than one level; or, indeed, we replace the tourist with our own gaze, adopting that of Mérimée's original traveller. What is perhaps less well known is that Spain has taken some pains to resist this figuration.