This article 1 deals with overlooked interactions between art history and colonial discourses within the context of tourism in Spain. It aims to demonstrate the central role played by temporalized narratives of otherness in tourist imaginaries about Spain during the 1950s and 1960s. It focusses on the use of art history as a visual filter through which certain aspects of the country were read and experienced as being stranded in the past, often leading to images of poverty becoming aestheticized. This analysis will throw light on how colonial discourses of temporality and authenticity, rather than ideas of modernization, influenced the international rehabilitation of the Franco dictatorship after the Second World War.