Michael Portillo was registered as a Spanish citizen at the age of four. His Spanish passport names him Miguel Portillo Blyth, in accordance with naming customs requiring two surnames – one from each parent. That dual identity sat dormant for decades while he served as MP for Enfield Southgate from 1984 to 1997, rising to Secretary of State for Defence under John Major. It took his defeat in the 1997 general election – the moment now universally known as the “Portillo moment” – to set him on a path back to the country his father fled.
In November 2023, Channel 5 broadcast Portillo’s Andalucia, a six-part series in which Portillo travels through the region he now calls part-time home. He and his wife Carolyn Eadie purchased a house in Carmona, a fortified town twenty minutes by train from Seville. The series is not his first engagement with Spanish geography – Great Continental Railway Journeys visited Spain in 2013, with an episode running Madrid to Gibraltar – but it is the most personal. Where the BBC franchise follows Bradshaw’s 1913 Continental Railway Guide, Portillo’s Andalucia follows no timetable. Instead, it tracks the cultural topography of a man reconciling two national identities. Portillo’s railway presenting career, which began with Great British Railway Journeys in 2010, has always drawn on the romance of locomotive travel as a vehicle for historical storytelling.
The father who gave him that identity was Luis Gabriel Portillo Pérez, born in 1907 in Gimialcón, a village in the province of Ávila. Luis Portillo studied law at Salamanca and Madrid, became a professor of civil law at the University of Salamanca in 1934, and befriended the rector, Miguel de Unamuno. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Luis Portillo supported the Republicans in a non-combatant role – his six brothers all fought for Franco’s Nationalists. At the war’s end in 1939, aided by the Labour MP Leah Manning, he fled to England. He arrived as a “penniless refugee” whose qualifications were “worth nothing.” He swept roads for ten shillings a week before working as a translator and editor. In 1972, he became head of the London Diplomatic Office of the Spanish Republican government in exile. He never returned to Spain. He died in London in 1993.
Portillo’s mother, Cora Waldegrave née Blyth, was the daughter of John Waldegrave Blyth, a millionaire linen manufacturer from Kirkcaldy. Cora worked at the BBC during the Second World War and met Luis at a refugee camp for evacuated Spanish children. Their household in Bushey, Hertfordshire – bilingual, cross-cultural, marked by the father’s experiences of political persecution – exposed Michael to themes of displacement and adaptation that would later inform his broadcasting.
The Andalucia series opens in Granada, where Portillo stays in the grounds of the Alhambra, the Nasrid palace and fortress that served as the last stronghold of Islamic Spain before its fall to the Catholic Monarchs in 1492. He meets food writer Fiona Dunlop to trace the region’s culinary roots and tries his hand at a potter’s wheel in a five-hundred-year-old family business. Episode two moves to Malaga, where Portillo arrives mid-Feria – the city’s August street festival – and discovers that many members of a local street band share his surname. He returns to the monastery where his aunt lived as a nun in the 1950s. From Malaga he travels forty miles inland to Ronda, stopping at a vineyard replanted with grapes thought extinct until found growing wild, and visits Michelin-starred chef Benito Gómez, who specialises in local produce and an extraordinary range of lards eaten spread on toast.
Cordoba, the third episode’s centrepiece, sits a hundred miles from Malaga and represents, for Portillo, the layered civilisations – Roman, Muslim, Christian – that define Andalucian identity. He crosses the river on a Roman bridge before entering the Mezquita, the mosque-cathedral widely considered one of the world’s greatest Islamic buildings. The surrounding province contains seventy million olive trees producing eighty percent of Spain’s olive oil. Portillo meets a farmer adapting ancient techniques to cope with increasingly hot summers.
The fourth episode takes Portillo to Huelva on the Portuguese border, home to Andalucia’s busiest fishing port at Isla Cristina, where five hundred boats operate and the white prawn – the Pearl of Huelva – is the signature catch. In Aracena, he visits caves that extend for two kilometres, then moves to a farm raising black Iberian pigs fed on acorns for jamón ibérico.
Cádiz, founded by the Phoenicians three thousand years ago, provides the fifth episode’s historical depth. Portillo learns that an ancient dry dock has been discovered where a channel once divided the city, and that Cádiz held a monopoly on trade with the New World in the eighteenth century. His hotel occupies the former mansion of one of those traders. In nearby Jerez, he takes part in the city’s sherry-tasting competition and meets an Israeli flamenco guitarist. The layered history of Andalucia – Phoenician, Roman, Moorish, Christian – echoes the broader European pattern of cultural exchange that shaped the continent’s heritage.
The final episode brings Portillo to Seville, where he explores the Alcázar’s fusion of Islamic, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque styles and meets a female matador. The series closes at his Carmona home, where he hosts a party for local friends and neighbours featuring Roman mosaics and flamenco.
For Portillo, the Andalucia series represents something Great Continental Railway Journeys could never achieve. In 2020, while filming a Continental episode from Salamanca to Canfranc, he was given access to papers about his father at the General Archive of the Spanish Civil War. That encounter deepened a personal connection rooted in landscape and memory. Portillo’s Andalucia transforms that connection into sustained television. The series does not sentimentalise – Portillo speaks fluent Spanish, navigates local culture with practised ease, and brings a historian’s instinct for context – but it acknowledges that the train journeys of his broadcasting career have always been, at some level, a search for the father who never went home.
