Juan Nicolás Böhl de Faber

Who was Juan Nicolás Böhl de Faber?

Juan Nicolás Böhl de Faber was a German lover of Spanish literature and culture. He was the father of Spanish/Swiss novelist Cecilia Böhl de Faber, aka "Fernán Caballero".

Böhl started his life in Spain at a shop owned by his bourgeois parents. In addition to the work of the store, he was also consul for Frederick William III of Prussia as well as overseeing the warehouses held by Sir James Duff and his nephew William Gordon at Puerto de Santa María. It was in Cádiz that he met Frasquita Larrea a Catholic lady of high society who had travelled through France and Germany and mastered their languages easily, read Shakespeare, was well-versed in the thoughts of Kant and Descartes, read Madame Staël, and delighted in the work of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The two were married in 1790 and lived for a short time on Lake Geneva, in the Canton of Vaud, where their daughter was born, the future novelist known as Fernán Caballero. Later, the couple would have two more children. Returning to Spain, they spent time living in Cádiz where they enriched the local cultural scene by introducing the first tertulias. In 1805, the pair journeyed to Germany for a second time where their union began to show the first signs of stress. Frasquita returned to Spain alone, where she would experience the Peninsular War with her two daughters while living in Chiclana de la Frontera. The family reunited after the end of the war in Cádiz.