Saint-Sébastien · Spain
Saint-Sébastien, Spain
San Sebastián's grand city hall began life in 1887 as the Gran Casino, built to bankroll the resort until the 1924 gambling ban shut it down; since the 1940s the councillors have governed from what was once its ballroom, in the seaside gardens of Alderdi Eder.
The neo-Plateresque theatre that opened in the miraculous 'Golden July' of 1912 and today serves as the red-carpet home of the San Sebastián International Film Festival, the oldest of its kind in Spain.
The grand riverside hotel designed by Charles Mèwes, architect of the Ritz Paris, opened in the miraculous 'Golden July' of 1912 and named for the Queen Regent, who was its very first guest. A neutral haven in WWI where Mata Hari intrigued and, since 1953, every film star at the festival has slept.
Completed in 1897 by architect Manuel de Echave, the neo-Gothic Cathedral of the Good Shepherd rises on a 75-metre spire of Monte Igueldo sandstone, anchoring Cortázar's Ensanche grid. It is San Sebastián's tallest building and the ceremonial heart of the new town — though it only became a cathedral in 1953.
La Perla, the 1912 royal bathing house now a thalassotherapy spa, and Juan Rafael Alday's 1916 white balustrade, whose shell-shaped lampposts gave the San Sebastián Film Festival its 'Concha' award. This is where the whole story began, in 1845, with a queen ordered by her doctor to bathe in the bay.
Queen María Cristina's English-cottage palace, designed by Selden Wornum and opened in 1893, crowns the headland that splits La Concha bay; its public gardens offer the tour's finest view, and below them the tide-dependent Pico del Loro passage appears only at low water.
Ondarreta is San Sebastian's westernmost beach, a family favourite with striped cabanas beneath the wooded slope of Miramar. On this same sand once stood the city's prison, where Republican detainees were held after the city fell in 1936; it was demolished in 1948.
The base station of the Monte Igeldo funicular, opened on 25 August 1912 and still climbing with its original varnished wooden carriages. It is the third-oldest funicular in Spain and the fourth of San Sebastian's great 'Golden July' arrivals of that miraculous summer.
Eduardo Chillida's Peine del Viento (Comb of the Wind), installed in 1977 with architect Luis Peña Ganchegui, is a set of three ten-ton iron sculptures bolted into the rocks at the bay's western tip where La Concha meets the open Atlantic. Created at the end of the Franco dictatorship, it has become the emblem of San Sebastian's post-Franco cultural rebirth.
Nous utilisons des cookies pour analyser le trafic du site et améliorer votre expérience. Vous pouvez accepter ou refuser les cookies d'analyse. En savoir plus