Castles and Chateaux of Old Navarre and the Basque Provinces

At Feuntarrabia, but a step beyond Irun, one enters his first typical Spanish town. You know this because touts try to sell you, and every one else, a lottery ticket, and because the beggars, who, apparently, are as numerous as their tribe in Naples, quote proverbs at your head.

You may understand them or you may not, but since Spain is the land of proverbs, it is but natural that you should meet with them forthwith. Here is one, though it is more like an enigma; and when translated it becomes but an old friend in disguise: —

“Un manco escribio una carta,Un siega la esta mirando;Un mudo la esta leyendaY un sordo la esta escuchando.”“A handless man a letter did write,A dumb dictated it word for word;The person who read it had lost his sight,And deaf was he who listened and heard.”

One need not be a phenomenal linguist to understand this, even in the vernacular.

Feuntarrabia itself is a cluster of brown-red houses piled high along the narrow streets, with deep eaves over-hanging grated windows, and carved doorways leading to shady courts.

There is a certain squalid, gone-to-ruin air about everything, which, in this case, is but a charm; but one can picture from the blazoned stone coats-of-arms seen here and there that the dwellers of olden time were proud and reverend seigneurs.

Feuntarrabia, the little sea-coast town, called even by the French la perle de la Bidassoa is contrastingly different to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, though not twenty kilometres away. It is Spanish to the core, and on the escutcheon above the city gate one reads an ancient inscription to the effect that it belonged to the kings of Castile and was always “a very noble, very loyal, very brave and always faithful city.”

Feuntarrabia was once a fortress of renown, but that was in the long ago. It was a theatre of battles without end. Here Condé was repulsed, together with the best chivalry of France, and it was then that the grateful Spanish king ordered that for evermore it should be styled “the most noble, the most leal, the most valorous of cities” – a title which does actually appear on legal documents unto this day. The Duke of Berwick, King James Stuart’s gallant son, once succeeded in taking the place, and it was then so utterly dismantled by the French that it has never since been reckoned among the fortified places of Spain. But the city must indeed have felt the old war spirit stir again when it beheld those two great generals, Soult and Wellington, strive for victory before its hoary walls in 1813. Inch by inch the British had forced Napoleon’s men from Spain; and here on the very frontier of France, Maréchal Soult gathered his forces for one last desperate stand. No British foot, he swore, should dare to touch the soil of France. But one chill October day, when the rain was falling on the broken, trodden vineyards, and the wind came moaning from the sullen sea, the word was given along the English ranks to pass the Bidassoa. And across the river came a line of scarlet fighting men, haggard and war-worn, many of them wounded, all of them weary. The result of that day is written on the annals of military glory as “one of the most daring exploits of military genius.” Long afterwards Soult himself acknowledged it was the most splendid episode of the Peninsular War.

THE END

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“Castles and Châteaux of Old Touraine and the Loire Country.”