The novel most responsible for the everlasting romanticization of Jazz Age expat culture in Paris, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, takes place half in Spain. When the pressures of drinking wine and eating oysters in the cafés of Montparnasse became too much to take, Hemingway, his friends, and the characters he modelled after them, escaped to San Sebastián, a beach town on the Bay of Biscay ten miles across the border from France, or to Pamplona, a little further south, where they watched the bullfights.

Alice B. Toklas loved Spain as much as Hemingway. She would have lived there, if Gertrude Stein had agreed, in the town of Avila west of Madrid. “I immediately lost my heart to Avila,” Stein has Toklas recall in the Autobiography, “I must stay in Avila forever I insisted. Gertrude Stein was very  upset, Avila was alright but she insisted, she needed Paris.” Stein…