This paper addresses Spanish road movies such as Antonio Cabal’s Sáhara (1984), Juan Miñón’s Luna de agosto (1985), María Miró’s Los baúles del recuerdo (1994), Francesc Betriu’s El paraíso ya no es lo que era (2000), and Mariano Barroso’s Kasbah (2000) in which Spaniards travel abroad. These movies showcase a shift in patterns of mobility and in the cultural imaginary of Spain. From being the object of the tourist/colonial European gaze and, thereby, subjected to a set of hackneyed images, Spain now constructs its own tourist/neo-colonial gaze—and its own set of stereotypes—in relation to other national spaces.  Spanish road stories depict encounters with cultural and racial differences that make characters re-evaluate their previous life.  Rather than a means of getting to know the “other,” though, these journeys push the Spanish characters—and spectators—to reflect upon Spanish national identity. In these narcissistic road stories, Spaniards go abroad and use unfamiliar spaces as mirrors that project a fabricated, fictional image of themselves. These narratives show how Spain re-imagines itself in a privileged position in relation to the African “Other,” which appears through ways that renovate orientalist practices of representation as defined by Edward Said, while still romanticizing its European neighbors in terms of a desired modernity that has not fully taken place in Spain. In my presentation, I will focus on Kasbah, which presents how Spain now goes to Morocco as a target for industrial outsourcing and therefore renews old ideologies of imperial expansion with the current neo-liberal capitalism. In this film, the aestheticizing of the Moroccan landscape and the stereotyping practices of representation of local inhabitants present a simplistic picture of Morocco as a homogenized, pre-modern, and uncivilized community.  In this way, Kasbah echoes a time-honored tradition of European travel writing that exoticizes non-European cultures and ends up legitimizing a European discourse of cultural superiority rather than undermining it.