Mutriku · Spain
Mutriku, Spain
The town's civic heart, where a Carrara marble statue of Trafalgar hero Cosme de Churruca watches over the square that carries his name, ringed by the church, the town hall, and a cluster of old palaces.
The Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción is Silvestre Perez's severe neoclassical parish church, built between 1803 and 1843 behind a great Doric portico and declared a National Monument. Inside, tradition holds that it guards a crucifixion attributed to the Golden Age master Francisco de Zurbaran.
Palacio Arrietakua is the 18th-century palace built by Admiral Antonio de Gaztaneta, the naval engineer who redesigned Spain's warships, and the birthplace in 1761 of Cosme Damian de Churruca, the captain who died at Trafalgar. It anchors a warren of steep lanes thick with blazoned baroque houses in a town of barely five thousand.
The Torre Berriatua, known as 'Suilangoa', is a Gothic stone tower-house on the slope down to the port and the only building to survive the great fire of 1543, when the rest of wooden Mutriku burned. Reputedly the highest medieval tower-house in Gipuzkoa, it still watches over the harbour from the lane to the water and remains a private residence today.
The shell-shaped medieval harbour that is the whole reason Mutriku exists, worked by fishing boats since the 13th century and served by a 15th-century stone fish market, the Lonja Zaharra.
Since 2011 this breakwater has hidden the world's first commercial multi-turbine wave-energy plant, where sixteen air turbines turn the swell into electricity with a roar locals call 'el dragón'. Beside it lie two natural tidal pools, the sea domesticated twice within fifty metres.
The sea balcony at the old town's edge above the Puerto Viejo, marked by a whale mural, where the black flysch of the cliff face exposes roughly 100-million-year-old Albian seabed at low tide. It is the final stop of the tour and sits steps from the Nautilus geology centre and its giant ammonites.
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