Written after the author's own experience on the translation of the thirty-five Letters from Spain (1788) by the British diplomat and spy Alexander Jardine, this paper deals with the most common difficulties the translator has had to face in a travel book full of foreign terms and expressions, spelling mistakes, geographical and historical references to the late eighteenth-century Spain, not to mention the unavoidable spelling mistakes. Thus, the translation process has not only been a question of finding the lexical and stylistic equivalence of the original text but also, on certain occasions, a rather non simplistic matter of research.