This paper examines the vision presented of the island of Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain) in four novels, taken from a wider corpus of popular romance novels published by well-known Mills & Boon between 1958 and 1994. Our aim is to analyse whether the cultural information mentioned in the novels is real or a figment of the authors’ imagination, and discuss what aspects of the Canarian culture attracted the authors’ attention the most. After a brief review of the genre of popular romance fiction, we describe the symbolic and cultural landscape of Tenerife in these popular romance novels. For the analysis of the cross-cultural encounters between the British protagonist and the Canarian characters, we use Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory, a framework for cross-cultural communication which describes the effects of a society’s culture on the values of its members, and how these values are related to their actions.
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the following novels have been chosen: Catherine Airlie. Red Lotus (1958), Pippa Lane. Nurse in Tenerife (1978), Jean McLeod. Meeting in Madrid (1979), Margaret Mayo. Bitter Memories (1994).
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