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Cristina Morató is a journalist, reporter, writer and TV programmes director at Televisión Española. She was born in 1961 in Barcelona, where she studied journalism in the Faculty of Communication Studies in the Autonomous University of Barcelona, located in Bellaterra.

Trips

She has spent two decades travelling the world with her camera. She has visited mainly Latin America, Africa, and Asia. She travelled around more than 40 countries where she made extensive cultural and anthropological reportages. She is a founding member and vice president of the Sociedad Geográfica Española (Spanish Geographical Society). She is also a member of the prestigious Royal Geographical Society of London. In 2000, she decided to leave her job for good as a TV programmes director in order to keep travelling and start writing books about remarkable female explorers who were forgotten by history.

So far, Cristina Morató has published the following books about female travellers of the past: Viajeras intrépidas y aventureras (Intrepid Female Travellers and Adventurers) (2001), Las Reinas de África (Queens from Africa) (2003), Las Damas de Oriente, grandes viajeras por los países árabes (Ladies from the East, Great Travellers through the Arab world) (2006), and Cautiva en Arabia (Captive in Arabia) (2009), an exciting biography about a French-Basque adventurer and spy who lived in Syria during the 30s and tried to reach Mecca. Critics and readers have praised all her work. Her latest published book is Divas Rebeldes (Rebel Divas) (2010) which gathers biographies of seven distinguished divas from the 20th century, among them, Coco Chanel and Maria Callas. In this book the writer reveals their more human and less well known sides.

In 1982, at only 20 years of age and still studying at the university, Cristina Morató decided to travel to Central America to work as a war correspondent. There, she travelled through Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador making several photographic reportages in black and white. She portrayed the lives of the Miskito Indians living in Nicaragua and the situation of the Salvadoran refugees in Honduras. After this devastating experience, she decided to keep travelling around the world as a photojournalist. Her new colour photography focused on the condition of women in developing countries by shooting the identifying traits of the indigenous villages (Mayan, Amazonian Indians, and Northern Thailand tribes). Cristina Morató has specialised in these topics in the last 10 years.

The following year, in 1983, she travelled for the first time to Africa, to Equatorial Guinea, where she stayed for three months in Evinayong, a city located in the south-east of Rio Muni, due to an extensive reportage she was doing about the lives of Spanish voluntary workers in the Spanish colony and women in the hamlets located in the countryside.

In 1985, she returned to Africa, this time to the former Zaire, nowadays known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she stayed nine months in the hospital of Buta, working as an Intendant of the Spanish Health Cooperation. During that trip, fascinated by the primatologist Dian Fossey, she visited the last mountain gorillas in the Virunga Mountains. There, she wrote an extensive reportage about the region, as well as about the most important natural parks in the country.

This trip was followed by many others through the African continent, looking for the scenes of the great European explorations during the 19th century. In 1887, she travelled to Senegal and stayed there for several months. She lived in the Gorée Island for a period of time, off the Dakar coast, focused on taking photographs of the island and of the African slaves’ descendants who used to depart from there to America. Likewise she conducted an anthropological research about the women called ‘signares’, who lived in Gorée and in Saint Louis city. She also travelled through the area known as Casamance, where she stayed in the 'cases à impluvium'. There she took photographs of its original architecture about to disappear. In 1993 she went across Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, looking for the white myths in the black continent. The writer and journalist Javier Reverte travelled with her. During this trip and for the following four months, invited by the government of Uganda, she explored the legendary fountains in the White Nile, the Murchison Falls, and the scenarios that were travelled by the famous British explorers, such as Richard Francis Burton, Speke, and Henry Morton Stanley. After this trip, she published a great number of articles about these nineteenth-century explorers, and especially about their wives, forgotten by history, despite their contribution to it. Isabel Burton, Florence Baker, and Mary Livingstone are especially remarkable.

In the American continent she wrote a great number of reportages in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Panama. In 1986 she travelled to Argentina, and she spent a year going from Patagonia (in the South) to Salta (in the North). During her stay in this country, she visited Tierra del Fuego. In the city of Ushuaia she fulfilled one of her dreams: travelling by sailing boat to Cabo de Hornos. After a very tough journey and aboard the boat owned by the captain of Calypso (the boat of the famous Jacques Cousteau), named Jean Paul-Bassaget, she sailed around Cabo de Hornos and wrote an extensive reportage about this desolate region, fertile in shipwreck and legends.

Soon after, she went to Colombia, where she spent four months travelling around the country, especially around Guajira, on the border with Venezuela. There she took pictures of the places which had inspired the writer Gabriel García Márquez. Cartagena de Indias, Isla de Providencia, and San Andrés would be the subject of another of her articles about the Caribbean and its inhabitants – descendants from black slaves. In 1997, she got married in Zinacantán, a Mayan village in the state of Chiapa, Mexico. Nowadays, she has a 13-year-old son who has travelled with her several times to Mexico, Morocco and Thailand, her favourite countries. Charmed by the Asian continent, since 1990 she started to travel, among other countries, around Sri Lanka (the former Ceylon) and especially Northern Thailand, where she spent long periods living amongst hill tribes and taking pictures of their rituals and way of dressing.

Literature

She has collaborated on different editorial projects such as the book Los peores viajes de nuestra vida (The Worst Trips of our Lives) (Plaza & Janés). These last six years she has devoted her life to save history’s great female travellers and explorers from oblivion. By publishing three successful books in Spain, she has brought to light the feats of the great British female travellers and explorers of the 19th century.

Viajeras intrépidas y aventureras (Intrepid Female Travellers and Adventurers) – foreword by Manu Leguineche – is an essay that gathers the extraordinary adventures of the most famous female travellers of the African continent’s history, from the female pilgrims to the female explorers. The book was widely distributed and women’s travel literature became popular in Spain.

Las reinas de África (Queens from Africa) is a tribute to the women who crossed the African continent from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. The book became a bestseller and it has been translated into several languages.

Las damas de Oriente, grandes viajeras por los países árabes, (Ladies from the East, Great Travellers through Arab World) includes the biographies of seven great explorer and adventure women from the 19th and the 20th centuries, most of them British, who travelled around the Middle East because they were attracted by the Arab world.

Cautiva en Arabia (Captive in Arabia) is her first biography, dedicated to the countess Marga d’Andurain, a spy and an adventurer in Middle East. This book was translated to Portuguese in 2010.

In Divas Rebeldes (Rebel Divas) she describes the lives of seven icons of feminine rebellion from the last century: Maria Callas, Coco Chanel, Wallis_Simpson, Eva Perón, Barbara Hutton, Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy.

In Reinas Malditas (Cursed Queens), Cristina Morató described the lives of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Sisi the Empress), Alejandra Romanov, Christina, Queen of Sweden, Eugénie de Montijo, Queen Victoria, and Marie Antoinette – six legendary queens both extraordinary and unknown. Although many novels and films have shown us their most glamorous side, Cristina Morató shows their most humane side, and what the official history did not tell us about them is revealed in this book. These ladies were eccentric, fanciful, committed, blessed, rebellious, ambitious, and brave ladies. Some of them had tragic endings that made them become legends, while others were exceptional witnesses of the downfall of their empire, but all of them left behind the luxury and splendour of the court; flesh and blood women that were not able to choose their fate. These are the fascinating histories of six unforgettable queens.

Other works: press, radio and television

At just 24 years of age, she made her début in front of the cameras of Televisión Española (Spanish Television) presenting the programme Plató vacío (Empty Set) (1986), a chat show with music.

Later, she would collaborate with Jesús Hermida and María Teresa Campos in A mi manera (My Way) (1989-1990), and Esta es su casa (This is Your Home) (1990-1991), respectively.

In 1993, she was hired by Telemadrid, where she led a weekly programme called Sucedió en Madrid (It Happened in Madrid) in which events occurred in the Madrid Autonomous Community were reported; it was broadcast until 1994. In 1997, at the same television channel she led a show hosted by Gemma Nierga called Hablando con Gemma (Talking with Gemma); in 1998, a debate programme Todo depende (It Depends) hosted by Jordi González; and, in 2000, a similar show, Quédate conmigo (Stay with Me), hosted by Ely del Valle on Telecinco.

Nowadays, she writes a monthly column called Entre Nosotras (Among Us) for the magazine supplement for women Mujer Hoy. She also writes a series of biographies for Hola magazine – Aventureras de Película, Vidas Rebeldes y Mujeres de Leyenda (Incredible Adventures, Rebel Lives, and Legend Women.

Prizes

She was awarded three times with the Pluma de Plata, given by the Mexican Secretary of Tourism for the best article written about this country in the Spanish press. In 2003, she was given the “Friend of Thailand” award by the government of Thailand – Tourism Authority of Thailand – for the spreading of this Asian country in Spain. She was the first Spanish journalist to receive this award, and she is the only one so far.

Exhibitions

As a photographer, she has launched several photography exhibitions in Spain: Los Hijos del Maíz (The Children of the Corn) (1993), about Mayan clothing and rituals; and Oaxaca: El País de las Nubes (Oaxaca: The Country of the Clouds) (1994), about the landscapes and the people of this beautiful Mexican state.

Drawn by the culture of the Mayan indigenous and their magnificent textile, for more than ten years she visited different small villages of the region of Cuchumatanes, Guatemala, and villages of Chiapas Highlands, Mexico, taking photos of their rituals and their rich ceremonial gowns. She has launched several exhibitions about the Mayan Textile in Barcelona and Madrid.

External links

Wikipedia Commons holds multimedia content about Cristina Morató
Cristina Morató