‘Her lust for adventure was honey for me’: readers’ favourite travel books

From dodging the Nazis in Italy to running around New Zealand, our tipsters found inspiration and insight to help them forget the pandemic

Fabled Shore is Rose Macaulay’s account of her journey in 1949, alone and by car, round the coast of Iberia from Catalonia to the Algarve. She found dire poverty and the Spain she describes, still reeling from civil war, is unrecognisable to us now. Today’s tourist hotspots were then empty, pristine beaches with ramshackle houses, sometimes only with a barn to sleep in, and curious children who clustered round this strange creature – a foreign woman travelling alone by car. The prose is full of beautiful descriptions, with a very funny account of what she found in Gibraltar. Strange to think that there are people still alive who remember that time. Read this, and weep.
Barbara Forbes