San Sebastián is not the sort of city in which you expect to discover dark secrets. Once the resort of choice for Europe’s 19th-century aristocracy and strung out along a perfect arc of Spain’s northern coastline, this most elegant of cities stands as an enduring symbol of Europe’s belle époque.
And yet even its mayor, Odón Elorza, admits that San Sebastián possesses ‘a treacherous beauty’.
Barely three years ago, San Sebastián’s old town was the militant heartland of the Basque terrorist group ETA (Euskadi Ta Akatasuna—Basque Homeland and Liberty). Its narrow lanes—the so-called Comanche Territory—were sinister recesses of violent nationalism which seemed entirely out of place in modern Europe. Bloodied footprints left behind by perpetrators of political crimes led into ETA bars where no police dared follow.
Now, a street called Juan de Bilbao is the last remaining bastion of those dangerous days. A sign in a window announces: ‘Tourist! You are not in Spain, nor in France. You are in Basque Country. Welcome.’ Painted on a wall a few doors away, next to the Belfast Irish Pub, is the ETA symbol, a serpent coiled around a hatchet.
Just across the laneway is the Herria Bar—part of a network of tabernas across the Basque Country whose profits, prosecutors have claimed, directly finance ETA operations—with pictures of ETA prisoners above the bar and a jar prominently placed for collections to help ‘the cause’. The street is still off-limits to Basque police.
However, although ‘Gora ETA!’ (‘Long Live ETA!’) graffiti is still evident throughout the Basque Country, particularly along rural roads and in the old town of the Basque political capital of Vitoria, ETA’s territory is shrinking. In the streets surrounding Juan de Bilbao and throughout Spain it is being whispered that, after half a century, ETA’s time has forever passed.
The first underground cells of ETA were founded in 1952 at the height of the Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco’s repression of the Basque Country (Euskadi). After the end of the Spanish Civil War, in 1939, more than 20,000 Basques were imprisoned in concentration camps, and 21,780 were executed by Franco. Standing alongside San Sebastián’s graceful curve of sand, the Playa de la Concha was a prison where the sound of Franco’s soldiers executing Basque prisoners could be heard almost every day until 1947.
The founders of ETA considered themselves to be intellectuals. They wanted independence, but their primary goal was the publication of an