Attending the event, along with the work’s author, will be Juan Manuel Riesgo, a professor at the Humanities Institute of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and Vice-President of the Spanish Association of Africanists, José Javier Fuente del Pilar, Director of Miraguano Ediciones, and Nuria Medina, Casa Árabe’s Coordinator of Culture and New Media.

The presentation will begin at 7:00 p.m. in the Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62) with free entry until the room’s capacity is full.

Joaquín Gatell y Folch (Tarragona, 1826-Cádiz 1879), known in his travels as Caid Ismail, forms along with Domingo Badía (Ali Bey el Abbasi) and José María de Murga (Hach Mohammed el Bagdadi or the Moor of Biscay) the classical triad of Spanish travelers on journeys through Morocco in the nineteenth century. However, the Catalan explorer and Arabist continues to be the most unknown and least appreciated of the three.

This book is an attempt to rediscover him as a figure, with an edition of his Travels Through Morocco that is annotated and commented. This generic book title is used to label the most thorough compilation to date of all his writing. In addition to the geographic studies on the Sousse, Nun and Tekna, originally published in French in the bulletin of the Société de Géographie de Paris in 1869 and 1870, also included are the diaries from his expeditions with the Sultan of Morocco, published by Madrid’s Geographic Society shortly before his death, as well as his Manual for the Exploring Traveler Through Africa, rescued by José Gavira in 1949, as well as including poems, Orientalist texts, maps, letters and archival documents, most of which have never before been published.

Thanks to these materials, the introductory study offers a critical, surprising view of Gatell, clarifying many of the dark spots in his life and revealing the complex political and diplomatic intricacies of his trips through Morocco. This edition was created by Francisco Javier Martínez Antonio, an expert historian on nineteenth-century Morocco. In the same collection, he has already published his book Intimidades de Marruecos. Miradas y reflexiones de médicos españoles sobre la realidad marroquí a finales del siglo XIX (Intimacies of Morocco: Viewpoints and reflections of Spanish doctors about the Moroccan reality of the late nineteenth century).

Francisco Javier Martínez Antonio (Zaragoza, 1973)
A researcher at the Center of Human and Social Sciences of Spain’s Superior Council of Scientific Research (CSIC). His research focuses on Spanish-Moroccan relations, especially in the field of medicine and public health from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. In 2005, he received the Hernández Morejón Award for the best historical thesis on Medicine, and in 2009, the Uriach Foundation History of Medicine Award. He has published Intimidades de Marruecos (Intimacies of Morocco, 2009), La otra Guerra de África (The Other War of Africa, 2011), Regenerar España y Marruecos: ciencia y educación en las relaciones hispano-marroquíes a finales del siglo XIX (Regenerating Spain and Morocco: Science and education in Spanish-Moroccan relations in the late nineteenth century, 2011) and Viajes por Marruecos (Travels Through Morocco).