The main goal of this essay is to stu dy a book-El Marroc sensual i fanàticof travel writings written by a Catalan woman traveller, and to put it within the context of the recent scholarship that relates, on the one hand, travel narrative with Orientalism and gender and, on the other, geography and colonialism. The con tradictory nature of the contents of the book leads us to challenge the notion of simple 'Othering' as presented in Said's works where the heterogeneity of colonial power is neglected in a totalising dichotomy between the colon ising Self and the colonising Other. T he contemporary Spanish of cial discourse was indeed pro-colonial and paternalistic and often drew on notions of shared history and geographical proximity in order to legitimise an 'altruistic' colonial presence. The author's position is very different from this of cial discourse, but is deeply ambivalent. Her ambivalence arises from her gender which allows her to live the last Spanish colonial adventure as an outsider, and also from her position ing in Spanish politics. The confrontation between different cultures and traditions is sharply delineated in her accounts on M oroccan women, the primary aim of her travel. The (cultural) impermeability of the Others, with whom she would like to identify deeply, yet with whom she cannot really communicate, forces her to construct her own vision of the identity of these O thers, projecting her own view of (W estern) feminism. The essay demonstrates the importance of focusing on narratives that come from the margins (and particularly from female authors). These provide new perspectives which can destabilise established conceptions of the colonial relationship and, at the same time they can broaden the conceptual and factual history of our disciplines.The aim of this article [l] is to analyse a book of travel writings produced by a woman, Aurora Bertrana, and to set it within the context of recent scholarship relating, on the one hand, travel narrative with Orientalism and gender and, on the other, geography and colonialism . The book, El M arroc sensual i fanàtic, was written in Catalan and published in Barcelona in 1936, only a few weeks before the onset women travellers has been carried out by Englishspeaking authors and on English-speaking women travellers. Our essay, then, tries to contribute to this eld by providing material from the margins, a book written in Catalan, a minority language, and mainly dealing with a minor (in this century) colonial power, and a small, and again marginal, colony, the Spanish Zone in Northern Morocco.

Le début de l'expérience coloniale espagnole en Afrique du Nord a été l'occasion pour la géographie de faire entendre sa voix au moyen de la création d'institutions et la réalisation de travaux scientifiques qui visaient à faire connaître l'importance de la présence au Maroc à une population traumatisée par la perte récente de ce qui restait d'un empire colonial jadis étendu. Les avatars de l'implantation du Protectorat espagnol ont retardé la mise en place d'une véritable politique colonisatrice qui n'a été possible qu'après la Guerre civile. L'africanisme des militaires, dont le général Franco, explique que, dans les années 1940, apparaissent des projets d'aménagement du territoire qui auront un caractère pionnier dans l'Espagne de l'après-guerre mais resteront tout d'abord une « vitrine » de la propagande du nouveau régime. Mais, à ce moment-là, la géographie espagnole s'est montrée incapable de participer à cette expérience à cause de son retard institutionnel et académique et le domaine de l'aménagement du territoire restera pour quelques années dans les mains d'autres professionnels qui, eux, avaient les connaissances qui manquaient aux géographes.Spain's colonial experience in Northern Africa gave at first an opportunity for geographers to assert their public presence through ad hoc institutions and research. The ultimate objective was to gain support for the colonization of Morocco from a population that still was under the impact of the recent loss of the remnants of a once huge colonial empire. The vicissitudes of the establishment of the Spanish Protectorate delayed the implementation of a real colonization policy until the end of the Spanish civil war. The "africanism" of the military officers, General Franco among them, explains that several projects of regional planning appeared during the 1940s. Such projects show the contradictions of the regional planning policy of the government but nevertheless they were pioneering undertakings in post-war Spain as they were intended to be a propaganda show-case for the military regime. Then, however, Spanish geography missed this opportunity due to the late institutionalization of the discipline and, therefore, regional planning remained for several decades the domain of other professionals with the required technical training