Francisco Páez de la Cadena
Francisco Páez de la Cadena is a Spanish garden historian. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and is also an Agricultural Engineer specialized in landscape architecture. His Ph. D. thesis deals with the relationship between gardens and philosophical texts of the Renaissance, such as the dialogues of Erasmus' Convivium religiosum, Lipsius' De constantia, or Juan de Mariana's De morte et inmortalitate. He has written several books on gardens and gardening, like Historia de los estilos en jardinería , which has become a reference textbook in Spanish for the history of gardens. He's recently published a history of Spanish gardens, Jardines, la belleza cautiva with photographs by photographer and garden designer Eduardo Mencos. He is an active garden history and landscape professor at the University of La Rioja.
He has also written fiction. He was an active translator from English from the late-1970s onwards and among his translations into Spanish there are novels by V. S. Naipaul, Anthony Burgess, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, scientific works by Francis Crick and Antonio Damasio, and poetry, the so-called "landscape" poems by Cesare Pavese.
