San Sebastián's Belle Époque: the Concha promenade to the Wind Comb: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Belle Époque, the Concha promenade, the Wind Comb
When San Sebastián became the summer resort of Spain's royal family and of high society, it gained a casino, a bandstand, a spa, a royal summer palace and a promenade with its own iron railing, all around the bay.
The stops
Opened in 1912, this luxury hotel is one of the buildings that best stand for San Sebastián's Belle Époque architecture. A group of San Sebastián residents founded the Sociedad de Fomento in 1902 to give the city a grand hotel and a theatre, and the two were built together on the Zurriola gardens beside the Urumea. Charles Mewès, an architect of Ritz hotels in Paris and Madrid, designed the hotel, and Queen María Cristina came to its opening.
Photo: Mike_el Madrileño (https://www.flickr.com/photos/notunlike/) — CC BY 2.0 The Sociedad de Fomento's theatre opened on 20 July 1912 with En Flandes se ha puesto el sol, a verse drama by Eduardo Marquina staged by the company of María Guerrero and Fernando Díaz de Mendoza. The architect Francisco Urcola tied his design to the Spanish Renaissance, and many authors call the style neo-plateresque; the house holds 1,322. In 1953 it became the venue of the San Sebastián International Film Week, later the film festival, and it reopened in 2007 after refurbishment that began in 2001.
Photo: SchiDD — CC BY-SA 4.0 Many people assume Gustave Eiffel made this bandstand, but it is the work of Ricardo Magdalena, an architect from Zaragoza, and dates from 1906. It is in the Art Nouveau style, with cast-iron columns and a French look. The street it stands on was officially named the paseo de la Alameda in 1866, yet the people of San Sebastián called it the Boulevard from the start, and that became its official name.
Photo: Kent Wang — CC BY-SA 4.0 This building was put up between 1882 and 1887 for the city's casino, then an important summer attraction, to a design by Adolfo Morales de los Ríos and Luis Aladrén Mendivil. It opened on 1 July 1887 with Queen María Cristina at the ceremony, and it stopped being a casino when gambling was banned in 1924. It later became the town hall, and bullet marks from the fighting at the start of the Civil War can still be seen on the facade facing the Boulevard.
Photo: Jl FilpoC — CC BY-SA 3.0 Alderdi Eder, Basque for beautiful place, was laid out in 1880 on a former military drill ground beside the bay, first as a leisure ground with a circus, a velodrome and a puppet theatre. When the casino went up in 1887 the whole area was remodelled. The garden was designed by the French gardener Pierre Ducasse and is known for about a hundred shade trees, flower beds, hedges, a pond, fountains and statues.
Photo: Josi — CC BY-SA 4.0 Two obelisks, one with a clock and the other with a barometer, stand on a platform with a ramp on each side, part of the remodelling of the Paseo de la Concha that ran from 1910 to 1916 under the municipal architect Juan Rafael Alday. They began as plain obelisks, the clock and the barometer came later, and each has a weather vane on top. The platform is built from limestone from Deva, Carrara marble, stone from Motrico and dark grey marble.
Photo: Luistxo — CC BY-SA 4.0 This white iron railing is one of the most recognisable sights of San Sebastián. Designed by the municipal architect Juan Rafael Alday and cast by Fundiciones Molinao, it went up from 1910 as part of a remodelling of the promenade that casino income helped to pay for, and King Alfonso XIII presided over its official opening in 1916. Every 29 April, International Dance Day, ballet students use stretches of it as a barre.
Photo: Luistxo — CC BY-SA 4.0 When high society came to La Concha, a huge red wooden barracks called La Perla del Océano was built on the beach in 1887. By 1910 the council thought it so shabby that it won a concession to widen the promenade and build a worthier building, and Ramón Cortázar designed the new spa, which opened on 2 July 1912. The original was demolished in 1993, so the building here today is a reconstruction by Joaquín Zubiría that keeps its use as a seawater thalassotherapy centre.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 Isabella II began to summer in San Sebastián in the middle of the 19th century to take sea baths. This Royal Bathing House replaced an earlier mobile bathing cabin, and the local architect Ramón Cortázar designed it, as he did La Perla; it opened in 1912. Today it is the home of the Gipuzkoa Canoeing Federation.
Photo: Luistxo — CC BY-SA 4.0 Eduardo Chillida made this stele in 1955, the year Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, died. The first version stood in a garden in Ategorrieta, then on Mount Urgull and then at a hospital in Amara before it vanished, so the city asked Chillida for a new one, and this granite replica was set up on the promenade on 25 July 1991. After its photo appeared in the press, a resident said they had taken the original from a dump and kept it, and Chillida moved it to Chillida-Leku.
Photo: Kent Wang — CC BY-SA 4.0 Queen María Cristina, widowed by Alfonso XII, moved the court's summer base to San Sebastián, a decision that shaped the city's future as a tourist destination. The royal summer house she commissioned from the English architect Selden Wornum was finished in 1893 in a purely English style with some neo-Gothic ornament. Building it needed a false tunnel for the city's trams, and the gardens now lie over it; the city council acquired the palace from Don Juan in 1972.
Photo: Enfo — CC BY-SA 3.0 es Ondarreta is the most westerly of the city's beaches and less than half the length of La Concha, yet its average width is greater because it is less exposed to the tides, and its average area of 60,000 square metres is 6,000 more than La Concha's. The promenade beside it still has stretches of the famous Concha railing, and the buildings facing it are low independent villas. Gardens beside it hold an early 20th-century sculpture of Queen María Cristina.
Photo: Joxemai — CC BY-SA 4.0 José Ramón Anda made Zeharki in 1983, a concrete sculpture that looks like a modern menhir and is built of three large irregular cylinders. It stands in the Ondarreta gardens. Anda, a Navarrese sculptor born in Bakaiku in 1949, won first prize at the San Sebastián Sculpture Biennial in the early 1980s, and visitors can step into the space between the three pieces to see it from a different angle.
Photo: Ksarasola — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Comb of the Wind is three steel sculptures by Eduardo Chillida, ten tonnes each, set into rocks that rise from the Cantabrian Sea at the western end of La Concha Bay. The Basque architect Luis Peña Ganchegui arranged them as an architectural work, finished in 1977, with a viewing area on the nearby shore where blow-holes release air and water driven by the waves. It is one of the best-known works of both men.
Photo: Joxemai — CC BY-SA 4.0
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