Francisco Páez de la Cadena (Madrid, 1951) is a Spanish garden historian. He holds a degree in Philosophy and is also an Agricultural Engineer specialized in landscape architecture. He has written several books on gardens and gardening, like Historia de los estilos en jardinería[1] (Istmo, 1982) (A history of the gardening styles), 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 (2008) with photographs by photographer and designer Eduardo Mencos. He is active as a landscape senior lecturer at the University of La Rioja. He also writes fiction (La derrota más hermosa, Debate, 1985, was awarded the Short Novel Sésamo Prize for 1985), and poetry: Cabos sueltos, Cuadernos de la Granada, 2007). He has translated into Spanish more than sixty books, among them works by V. S. Naipaul (Nobel Prize for Literature 2001), Anthony Burgess, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and the "landscape" poems by Cesare Pavese lately.