Hondarribia: the walled town and the sailors' quarter: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
The frontier fortress and the sailors' quarter
Hondarribia sits on the Bidasoa, facing France, and its gates, castle and palaces carry the marks of its wars, from the siege of 1638 to the damage French troops did in 1794.
The stops
Santa María is the southern of the two entrances to the walled town, and Spanish Wikipedia says it was the main one until the San Felipe ravelin was built and left it in second place. The engineer Fratin built it in the middle of the 16th century, and to reach it you passed through a guard building and over a bridge with one movable section; excavations in 2009 brought those structures to light. Once the gate was open, Calle Mayor became the most important street in the town centre, and the town's coat of arms carved in sandstone on the gate was moved here from a convent.
Photo: Alberto-g-rovi — CC BY 3.0 The town council sits in this baroque palace on Calle Mayor, built in the 18th century. It has three floors, though from the street it seems to have two, and its ground floor opens in an arcade of three round arches. Above the arcade a large balcony on stone corbels has a wrought-iron railing and, between its openings, two big coats of arms. The Casadevante and Zuloaga palaces stand across the street from it.
Photo: Uranzu — CC BY-SA 4.0 A plaque on the front of this baroque house says that here the envoys of the Prince of Condé and the town's authorities negotiated the terms of the truce that followed the heroic siege of 1638, when a French army had held Hondarribia under siege for two months. Tuscan columns frame the doorway, and the three balconies of the first floor have triangular pediments, the middle one broken to make room for a coat of arms. The house has been run as a hotel.
Photo: Krzysztof Golik — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Zuloaga family already had a house on this spot in 1507, and it was burned and rebuilt several times before Pedro Ignacio Zuloaga Moiua raised the present baroque palace in the 18th century. The town council bought it in the 1980s, and it now holds the municipal historical archive and a library. A stone corbel facing Pampinot street carries the inscription "Christu vincit Christus regnat Christus imperat".
Photo: Maribuena — CC BY-SA 3.0 es Work on this church began in the late 15th century. It is a late Gothic building with three naves ending in polygonal apses, a monumental Renaissance portal at the west end and a walkway running through its triple apse that gives it a defensive look. It was built over the medieval town walls, and for a time work stopped because the height of the crossing interfered with the castle's military operations. Its first building was consecrated in 1549, and the baroque tower that dominates the old town's skyline is by Francisco de Ibero.
Photo: Krzysztof Golik — CC BY-SA 4.0 A castle already stood on this high point of the town by the year 1200, and Charles V had it enlarged, adding the great rectangular artillery platform that gives it its present front; the imperial coat of arms over the entrance dates the work to the middle of the 16th century. In 1660 the Spanish royal family stayed here during the betrothal of the infanta to the future Louis XIV of France, held on nearby Pheasant Island. French troops badly damaged it in 1794, and by the early 20th century it was a ruin, until it was restored in 1968 as the Parador, the only one in Gipuzkoa.
Photo: Krzysztof Golik — CC BY-SA 4.0 The house is named for Joanna of Castile, known as Joanna the Mad. A legend says that she and Philip the Handsome lodged here on their journey from Flanders to Castile, and Basque Wikipedia adds that she reportedly stayed in 1502, but the building itself dates from the late 16th or the 17th century. The coat of arms on its front belongs to the Egiluz family, originally from Álava, whose name the house also carries, and its dressed-stone front is in the Renaissance style of Herrera.
Photo: Uranzu — CC BY-SA 4.0 This is the north-western of the two entrances to the walls, and one of the town's oldest. San Nicolás street leads to it, and until the 16th century the street and the gate were among the most important in town, until the Santa María gate was opened and Calle Mayor took over. The gate stayed shut for several centuries and was opened again in the late 20th century, joined by a footbridge to what survives of the San Nicolás ravelin, and restored in the early 21st century. Seen from outside it is simple, with a lowered arch; on the inside a lintel rests on two pillars decorated with cushion-style ornament.
Photo: Josugoni — CC BY-SA 4.0 Colourful houses in traditional Basque style surround this square, where three streets meet and the Done Jakue gate stands. The Sevillian architect Manuel Manzano Monís designed the square and most of its buildings in the second half of the 20th century. Spanish Wikipedia credits his decisive intervention for the restoration of the town's walls and the rest of the walled quarter, which began in the 1960s.
Photo: Zarateman — CC BY-SA 3.0 es Outside the walls, beside the estuary, a fishing quarter grew in the late Middle Ages and is now called the Marina. It lay by the water so the fishermen could put out at dawn without waiting for the town gates, which shut at night, and in the early 16th century the sailors had to hear mass in its Magdalena church before the city gates opened. The church is a 20th-century reconstruction in an eclectic style, and the quarter's narrow houses, with balconies painted in the bright colours of the fishing boats, cluster along the Santiago and San Pedro streets. The fishermen's brotherhood of Saint Peter, founded in 1361, had its seat in this quarter, and each 25 July its Kutxa Eguna procession sets out from the brotherhood's seat for the parish church of Santa María del Manzano, with a young woman carrying a chest of the brotherhood's records on her head.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0
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