Through Portugal: From a British Traveller’s Deconstruction of the Spanish Image of Portugal to the Promotion of the Country as a Tourist Destination

Through Portugal (1907), a travel account written by the Hispanist, Martin Andrew Sharp Hume (1843-1910), invites examination from two complimentary angles. Due to Spanish ancestry on his mother’s side, Hume lived for a time in Spain, an experience which would mark his view of other countries and cultures. Hence, the first part of the present article will attempt to assess how far his experience of life in Spain gave him a stereotyped view of the neighbouring country – Portugal – which the author systematically deconstructs along his account. As I will attempt to show, it is the (re)discovery of the “Other” filtered not through what had been previously written by other British “Selfs” but rather by what “other Others”, the Spanish, had passed on to him. In the second part the impact of the book on the English-speaking world will be examined, linking it to the promotion of tourism to Portugal carried out by the Sociedade Propaganda de Portugal.