Cultural perceptions of Denmark in Spain

Tourism marketing certainly plays a role in the construction of Danish images in the Spanish imagination, but tourism goes both ways: It goes without saying that Spanish tourists may be interested in the Viking exhibitions and museums in the Nordic countries, but their viewpoint is also influenced by the Council of Europe’s Viking Destinations elsewhere. There is one in Spain called Torres del Oeste in Catoira, an Atlantic Spanish tower internationally known in the Viking pilgrimage and celebrated with an annual meeting to recreate the legendary battle between Norman and Galicia inhabitants in the ninth century.

Architecture and art can also go both ways, exemplified by the Spanish-Danish architects Frank Maali & Gemma Lalanda who have been nominated and have won various architectural prizes, including the Nykredits Funds Architecture Prize in 2019. Although there is in general little Nordic art in Spanish museums, in 2007 Barcelona and Copenhagen had a co-production project with the aim of bringing Danish artists to the city on the Mediterranean coast. The artists on that occasion were the acclaimed twentieth-century film maker C.T. Dreyer and the nineteenth-century painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. Despite Hammershøi’s works having travelled throughout Europe and North America, this was the first time they had been exhibited in Spain. Peder Kroyer, a contemporary of Hammershøi, travelled throughout Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, including Spain, exchanging ideas with local artists. Kroyer is supposed to have met the Spanish Mediterranean painter Joaquin Sorolla at the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris.

Literature and memoirs by Spanish travelers to the Nordics also create particular perceptions of these countries. Josep Plá was a Spanish journalist who wrote a travel memoir called Cartas de Lejos (Letters from Afar) in 1980, which was the result of the journeys that he made in France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and the Nordic countries. Although ostensibly a journalist, Plá was actually not that interested in news, but rather in writing a type of literary and descriptive chronicle. In the book, Plá's gaze is subjective and, through thoughtful observations, he helps the Spanish reader to better understand the idiosyncrasies of the Nordic countries he visits. He refers to the Nordic urban organization of towns and villages and their sense of equality and community. As a visitor from a southern European country, the cold and darkness of the Nordic seas is not only a minor detail but written with memorable feeling, especially when arriving on a ferry from northern Germany. Cultural journalism’s – like Plá’s – has the ability to connect readerships from diverse European communities, emphasizing the differences and richness of European cultures.

And of course there are also Nordic travel books about Spain. The image of romantic Southern exoticism abounds in Hans Christian Andersen’s diaries, for instance. Interestingly, when I conducted surveys in a Castilian public library and interviewed numerous Spanish readers of Hans Christian Andersen, most of them were aware that he had written diaries on his European travels. On the other hand, when talking to Danish readers during a short stay in Odense in June 2014, few were aware of his travel diaries concerning Spain.