The English Cemetery

Hidden in the trees on the north slope of Monte Urgull, there is a moss-covered cemetery that almost nobody visits. No signs point to it. No tour groups come here. But this quiet patch of ground tells one of the strangest stories in Basque-British relations.

In the eighteen thirties, Spain was tearing itself apart in the First Carlist War -- a brutal succession crisis over who should be king. Britain, backing Queen Isabel the Second, sent the British Auxiliary Legion: ten thousand volunteers who crossed the sea to fight in someone else's civil war. Many of them ended up here in San Sebastian, and many of them died -- from combat, disease, and the general misery of nineteenth-century warfare.

Here is where it gets interesting. Most of these British soldiers were Protestant. In eighteen thirties Spain, that meant they could not be buried in Catholic cemeteries. Consecrated ground was off limits. So the dead were carried up the hillside and buried here, on the exposed northern slope of Monte Urgull, overlooking the sea they had crossed to get here.

The cemetery was largely forgotten for decades. Headstones crumbled, vegetation grew over the graves, and the soldiers who died fighting for a Spanish queen faded from memory. It was not until nineteen twenty-four that someone finally restored the site and erected a monument honouring the fallen.

Today the graves sit in dappled shade under the trees. You can still read some of the inscriptions if you look closely. It is one of the most peaceful spots in the city, and one of the least visited. Ten thousand men volunteered for a war that was not theirs, in a country that was not theirs, and the ones who did not make it home ended up here -- Protestant graves on a Catholic hillside in the Basque Country.