THE ENGLISH ETERNAL SUMMER

“The English Eternal Summer” is, in a way, a return visit to the one paid to us, in their day, by romantic European travellers British in particular. Readers will find in this book as much originality and exoticism as those travellers did in the Spain of the 18th, 19th and even the 20th centuries. It tells, not so much the history of the English Cemetery of Malaga, the first Protestant graveyard in our country, but the story of the lives, lived to the full, of those who rest there, unique and unrepeatable fragments of the fascinating mosaic that was formed by foreign communities in the South of Spain, together with passers-by, writers, fugitives, seamen, missionaries, spies, tourists, actresses, tradesmen, the shipwrecked and the stateless, all of whom came to rest in an eternal sleep in that beautiful cemetery, a botanical garden in fact, that still survives on the hillside of the Gibralfaro. Rafael Torres concentrates into this book all his research, and his ability to interpret the past against a cosmopolitan backdrop, full of history, full of life: the Protestant Cemetery of Malaga. In it there are no large funerary monuments, or many celebrities, but there are real events, many forgotten or thus far unknown, of two centuries of revolutions, wars, progress, epidemics, of trade, voyages and adventures in that corner of Europe where so many chose to live and die.

Rafael Torres (Madrid 1955), is the author of the heptalogy on the War of Spain that has served as an incentive and benchmark for the restoration of the Historical Memory, suppressed by the Franco regime during its appalling decades and by a period of Transition that nurtured oblivion. He has also written some thirty books of various genres, and produced a vast and remarkable body of journalistic work, in which he has poured the best of his literary efforts during more than forty years, to try to understand, and explain, what happens, what does not happen and what should happen. A republican, independent, committed to his work and to finding and voicing the truth, he has become a credit to his readers with over 15,000 columns and articles published in the most important newspapers and magazines, as well as many years countercurrent work in radio and television. Rafael Torres has also published a column in OTR-Europa Press for over 30 years, and his novel “Los naufragos de Stanbrook” was awarded the Ateneo de Sevilla prize. His books are recommended reading in many secondary schools and universities in France.