Guidebooks, postcards, and panoramas: The building of Montserrat through modern mass media

Abstract

This article demonstrates how guidebooks, postcards, and panoramas have mediated spiritual, cultural, and nationalistic narratives of Montserrat, a mountain and monastery-shrine near Barcelona, Spain. Montserrat—as a place and as an idea—was shaped as a national symbol in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a struggle among shifting religious, cultural, and political forces. These struggles have influenced individual and collective memories while they have informed the architectural grammar used in the reconstruction of the modern monastery-shrine, influencing the work of the Catalan architects Antoni Gaudí and Josep Puig i Cadafalch and informing the alterations of the sites that these mass media represent and idealize.