En las primeras décadas del siglo XIX, José María Blanco White reescribió y reconstruyó sus múltiples identidades, individuales y colectivas, e intentó fijar en relación con ellas un relato de su vida, siempre inestable. Este texto sitúa su obra y, en particular, sus Letters from Spain (1822), en el marco del debate europeo sobre los caracteres nacionales. Un debate que descansaba, en buena medida, en esa concepción escindida de Europa en la que el Sur mediterráneo «atrasado» funcionaba como una contrapartida especular del Norte «moderno». La obra de Blanco White nos permite analizar cómo dicha concepción influyó en cómo se pensaron y construyeron las identidades en la Europa de principios del siglo XIX. At the beginning of the nineteenth-century, José María Blanco White rewrote and reconstructed his multiple identities, individual as much as collective. He tried to lay down the tale of his life, a tale that was always unsteady. This article connects his work, and especially his Letters from Spain (1822), with the European debate on national characters. To a large extent, this debate was based on an understanding of Europe in which the Mediterranean backward South worked as an opposite mirror for the modern North. Through the work of Blanco White we can analyse how this understanding influenced the way in which identities were designed and constructed in the Europe of the first decades of the nineteenth century.