?The English Eternal Summer? is, in a way, a return visit to the one paid to us, in their day, by romantic European travellers British in particular. Readers will find in this book as much originality and exoticism as those travellers did in the Spain of the 18th, 19th and even the 20th centuries. It tells, not so much the history of the English Cemetery of Malaga, the first Protestant graveyard in our country, but the story of the lives, lived to the full, of those who rest there, unique and unrepeatable fragments of the fascinating mosaic that was formed by foreign communities in the South of Spain, together with passers-by, writers, fugitives, seamen, missionaries, spies, tourists, actresses, tradesmen, the shipwrecked and the stateless, all of whom came to rest in an eternal sleep in that beautiful cemetery, a botanical garden in fact, that still survives on the hillside of the Gibralfaro.
Rafael Torres concentrates into this book all his research, and his ability to interpret the past against a cosmopolitan backdrop, full of history, full of life: the Protestant Cemetery of Malaga. In it there are no large funerary monuments, or many celebrities, but there are real events, many forgotten or thus far unknown, of two centuries of revolutions, wars, progress, epidemics, of trade, voyages and adventures in that corner of Europe where so many chose to live and die.
