Despite the fact that Sylvia Plath’s Ariel has been in the spotlight, it is necessary to analyse her earlier poems in order to understand the writer’s evolution and development towards her final attainment. Plath and Hughes, after getting married in June 1956, visited Benidorm, Spain, for their honeymoon. In this paper Plath’s poems of this period are analysed together with her response to the alien setting. In order to assess Plath’s emotional and artistic response to her encounter with Spain, the most salient motifs in the corpus of Spanish poems written by Plath are identified and examined. Apart from a rhetorical analysis of these poems, a biographical examination of data from the author’s journals, correspondence and prose is carried out. As a final point, two subsequent poems are analysed in order to reveal the Spanish imprint in Plath’s style, as shown by the suggestive imagery which shifted the Spanish landscape into a violent mindscape.