San Sebastián

In 1489 a great fire burned the timber town to the ground, and San Sebastián rose again in stone as a fortress on the frontier between Castile and France. Its sailors kept to the sea: by an account of 1580, thirteen or fourteen ships, each with 70 to 100 men, left the harbour every year for the fishing grounds of Newfoundland. A second fortune came with the Guipuzcoan Company of Caracas, chartered in 1728, whose ships sailed from San Sebastián to Venezuela and came home with cacao, tobacco and hides, and the town grew rich in those years. Its walls, though, made it a target in the wars with France, and the worst came in 1813, when British and Portuguese troops under Wellington stormed the French-held town and burned it.