Paradisos oceànics (1930) and El Marroc sensual i fanàtic (1936), Aurora Bertrana’s two most important texts, are marked by an irony that is characteristic of Western colonialist –and anti-colonialist– production. This irony, at once situational and narratological, thrives on an intricate interplay of positions and persons in which the extension of the colonialist and orientalist ‘gaze’–its zeal to know, penetrate and occupy an other space– is split, multiply, by an array of complications, contradictions, complicities and crises of conscience. The ‘impressions’ that inform the two ‘exotic’ travel books by Aurora Bertrana, so distant from the Catalan countryside extolled by her father Prudenci, evince an intricate –and ironic– tension between, on the one hand, the ideals of equality, liberty and fraternity of European humanism and, on the other, the realities of domination, control and distinction of European colonialism.