Avilés

The medieval town grew as two neighbours on either side of a small inlet, a fishermen's quarter and a walled centre of noble houses, and its shipwrights built with timber from the forests behind it. Its most famous son, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, born here in 1519, planned the first regular convoys across the Atlantic and in 1565 founded St Augustine in Florida for Philip II. In the centuries that followed, the estuary that had made Avilés a port silted up and closed to shipping. The town still had fight in it: in May 1809 a French brigade beat its poorly armed townspeople, but ambushes in the streets wore the occupiers down until General Kellermann made the local authorities answer with their lives for his soldiers'.