San Sebastián Audio Tour: Belle Époque Wonders & Coastal Charms of Centro

In front of you rises a pale sandstone church with a sharply pointed façade, clustered buttresses, and a needle-like tower set directly above the main entrance.

The Cathedral of the Good Shepherd is San Sebastián’s great vertical gesture: neo-Gothic, ambitious, and still the largest church in Gipuzkoa. From where you stand, near the front-left side, the building seems to pull itself upward in stages, from the pointed doorways to the pinnacles and then that seventy-five-metre spire, which local architect Manuel Echave designed with Cologne Cathedral very much in mind.

And yet the secret of this place is that it began in improvisation.

In the eighteen eighties, this part of the city was expanding southward, and residents wanted a parish of their own. The council gave over this plot in eighteen eighty-seven, land between the Urumea and La Concha that had been sand and marsh. While builders prepared the foundations with painstaking drainage, the faithful gathered somewhere much humbler: a provisional wooden church dedicated to the Sacred Heart, near the old San Martín Market. The first parish life of this grand stone church took place in timber.

Pause for a moment and let your eyes travel from the doorway up to the tower. It is rather extraordinary to think that all this confidence in stone grew out of a stopgap wooden chapel.

Royal summers in San Sebastián gave projects like this a very particular charge. When Queen Regent María Cristina stayed in the city with her children, local ceremonies acquired the sheen of national theatre. This church benefited from that attention twice: at the laying of the first stone in eighteen eighty-eight, and again at its inauguration in eighteen ninety-seven, when María Cristina and the young Alfonso the Thirteenth both attended.

If you glance at the historic exterior on your screen, you can see how quickly the cathedral became one of the city’s fixed silhouettes. But the most delicious detail lies beneath the stone, almost like a scene from a novel. At the cornerstone ceremony, a lead box was sealed inside with portraits of the Pope and the royal family, coins, and copies of the official newspapers of the day. Then came the signature on the ceremonial document: Alfonso the Thirteenth was only two years and four months old, so María Cristina guided his hand herself. A formal act, yes, but intimate too, as though monarchy wished to leave its fingerprint inside the foundations.

Echave and his builders gave the church real substance: sandstone from Mount Igueldo, roof slate from Angers in France, and stonework by Basque labourers throughout. The tower was not even fully finished when the church opened for worship; that final completion came in eighteen ninety-nine. Later, when San Sebastián gained its own diocese in nineteen fifty, the city chose this church as its seat, and in nineteen fifty-three it officially became a cathedral.

If you look at the interior image in the app, the bright central hall and ribbed vaults show the reward of all that ambition. Yet what matters most, perhaps, is the contrast: grandeur resting on necessity, ceremony resting on makeshift beginnings.

We shall carry that thought to San Martín Market, about a three-minute walk from here, where the practical life of the city once sheltered this parish before stone took over from wood.

On your right, San Martín Market looks like a broad glass-fronted block framed in pale stone, with a long rectangular facade and a wide covered passage opening through its centre.

This site is one of the city’s great memory-palaces of ordinary life. Long before this polished shell appeared, people came here for fish, vegetables, gossip, bargains, and the small rituals that make a city feel inhabited rather than merely admired. Even the ground seems to remember footsteps.

In eighteen eighty-four, the architect José Goicoa gave San Sebastián a proper municipal market here, taking his cue from the iron-and-market tradition of Les Halles in Bayonne. He raised two pavilions. Then, in nineteen oh seven, the municipal architect Juan R. Alday stepped in and did something clever: he joined those two buildings with a structure over the street between them, creating a third pavilion and turning San Martín into the city’s most important food market. Commerce, in other words, did not simply fill this place; it shaped it.

And yet trade was not its only role. Before the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd was ready, this very plot even hosted a provisional wooden parish in March of eighteen eighty-eight, the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For a time, the market ground doubled as an emergency church for the neighbourhood. That is a very San Sebastián habit: one urban stage, several acts.

If you glance at the before-and-after image, you can see just how completely this place changed from open market sheds to the enclosed hall before you now. That instinct to adapt did not come gently. At the end of nineteen ninety-nine, Mayor Odón Elorza broke a long, tacit consensus when he argued publicly that the old building should come down, saying its facades held nothing worth protecting. The council then set up a mixed commission with stallholders, political parties, the Chamber of Commerce, merchant groups, and baserritarras - farmers from the Basque farmsteads - to negotiate a reform and avoid repeating mistakes made at La Bretxa. It was a row about heritage, certainly, but also about who a city centre is really for.

In two thousand and five, after demolition and two years of unusually complex works, Luis Uzcanga’s new market opened. He kept one important idea from the older place: a broad covered central street, now turned into a pedestrian spine, with large expanses of glass to hold a visual link to the past. Around it came three pedestrianised streets and a six-hundred-space underground car park. Within a year, San Martín drew seven million visits; in two thousand and six, it even won a national award for integrated retail. Not everything ran perfectly - a dilatation joint, that is, a gap that lets a building expand and contract safely, shifted in two thousand and twelve and lifted floor tiles, forcing a brief evacuation - but the market reopened the same morning.

Now the local pulse beats behind that glass, while the city’s more polished face waits ahead. We’ll head next to Hotel Continental, where San Sebastián turns everyday energy into refined welcome. If you want to return later, San Martín generally opens from early morning until late evening, with shorter hours on Sundays.

Look for the tall pale seafront building with its stacked wrought-iron balconies, rounded corner, and long façade facing the sweep of La Concha; this is the site where the Hotel Continental once stood.

The Continental told the world exactly what San Sebastián wanted to become. In eighteen eighty, a Basque banker named Agustín Galíndez, living in Madrid and thinking ambitiously, took his proposal to the city council. He asked architect José Goicoa to draw a new hotel here, first under the name Hotel La Concha. That name slipped away. By the time the doors opened on the fifteenth of May, eighteen eighty-four, the house had borrowed a grander identity from fashionable Biarritz and called itself the Continental.

That choice was not accidental. This city was learning how to present itself, and the beachfront was its stage. The Continental became only the second major hotel in San Sebastián, after the old Hotel de Londres y de Inglaterra, and it faced the bay as if it fully understood the value of being seen. It followed a French-influenced resort style, with a basement for the unseen machinery of luxury: kitchens, cold rooms, and wine cellars. Above that came the performance. A long dining room, family dining rooms, a restaurant, and a salon opened toward La Concha. Even the circulation of the building had social rank: one staircase for guests, another for staff.

And then there were the bragging rights. The Continental gave San Sebastián two novelties before most local rivals could dream of them: a lift and a winter garden, meaning a glassy indoor garden lounge beside the restaurant, where elegance could continue under cover without losing any of its display.

The human touch here belongs, for me, to François Estrade. He arrived as director in the eighteen nineties, after Emiliano Lestgarens and P. Hourcade, part of that distinctly French management culture that hotel owners trusted to signal polish and reliability. Estrade did not simply run the place; he sharpened its ambitions. In eighteen ninety-nine, dinner here appeared entirely in French, with dishes such as filet of sole Orly and savarin with rum. By the new century, Estrade pushed for larger windows toward the beach, an open central courtyard, and a more commanding silhouette. In nineteen eleven he bought the neighboring house from architect Luis Elizalde, expanded the building from four floors to seven plus a mezzanine, and rechristened it Palacio Continental. More rooms, more visibility, more bay.

That glittering address also connected to power. The hotel kept close ties with the San Sebastián Casino and later entered the Palace hotel group led by Georges Marquet, the same businessman linked to the Casino. So this was never just a place to sleep. It was part of a network of prestige, gaming, business, and carefully managed appearance.

Then history altered the mood. During the Civil War, militias used the hotel as a command post and barracks. Later, it hosted political banquets. In nineteen seventy-two, it closed for good, and developers demolished it for a more profitable residential block with sea views. That, too, says something rather sharp about this promenade: glamour always answered to real estate in the end.

Still, the real luxury remains where it always was - out there, along the curve of the bay. Walk on to La Concha beach in about two minutes. And, as a practical note, this stop sits on a street that never really sleeps: access here is available at all hours.

In front of you lies a broad crescent of pale sand, edged by a stone promenade and marked by the white iron railing that has become La Concha’s signature.

La Concha Bay is not simply a beautiful accident of geography. It is a natural curve that San Sebastián carefully edited into an urban emblem, a place where scenery could be arranged, admired, and quietly turned into prestige. Its shell-like form gave the beach its name, and that very shape helped the city sell an image of order, elegance, and ease. If you glance at the image on your screen, you can see that composed sweep for yourself.

In the nineteenth century, Queen Isabel the Second came here to take sea baths, and the shoreline’s reputation changed at once. Then Queen María Cristina raised the stakes further: in eighteen ninety-three she chose the slope above the bay for Miramar Palace, making this whole waterfront feel like a royal stage set. What had been a beach became a backdrop for high society, and the city understood the opportunity.

Pause for a moment and let your eyes travel from the curve of the sand to the promenade and that railing. How much feels natural, and how much feels carefully arranged for an audience?

By eighteen seventy-nine, the bay had become a grandstand for the rowing races now called the Bandera de La Concha. Traditional traineras, long racing boats with thirteen rowers and a helmsman, cut across the water while spectators packed the edge of the beach. Then, around nineteen ten, Juan Rafael Alday gave the promenade its white railing, and with one design gesture he fixed La Concha in the city’s visual memory. You can study that detail on your phone here.

Yet this stage has seen stranger arrivals too: French aviator Hubert Le Blon crashed into the sea here in nineteen ten, and in nineteen forty-five Léon Degrelle, fleeing the collapse of Nazi Europe, made an emergency water landing in the bay.

That is La Concha’s secret: civic theatre never really stopped. It simply changed its music. In about seven minutes, we’ll follow that thread to Jazzaldia, where the city still knows exactly how to turn itself into a performance.

On your right, look for a compact stone square with steep stepped sides and high masonry walls, a surprisingly theatrical hollow carved into the old city.

Jazzaldia is not a monument in the usual sense. It is something more interesting: a festival that taught San Sebastián to treat the whole city as a stage. What once belonged mainly to elegant interiors now spills across beaches, terraces, theatres, and plazas, until music feels woven into the streets themselves.

The festival began in nineteen sixty-six, and that matters. Jazzaldia is the oldest jazz festival in Spain and one of the oldest in Europe, and it has continued without interruption ever since. The first edition lasted only two days, the tenth and eleventh of September, with an international amateur contest and just one professional act, the guitarist Mickey Baker. The following year, the organisers shifted it to July, where it has remained.

But here is the turn in the story: behind all the polish, Jazzaldia started with scarcity and a quiet streak of defiance. In that first edition, while Franco’s regime still restricted public expressions of Basque culture, the festival included a demonstration of txalaparta, an ancestral Basque percussion instrument played by striking wooden boards in rhythm. That single gesture tied an imported art form to local roots. From the beginning, this was never just fashionable entertainment.

Its soul settled in Plaza de la Trinidad, the festival’s most storied setting. Musicians adore it because the audience sits so close, almost breathing with the band. Yet closeness brought pressure. When Charles Mingus played here in nineteen seventy-four, the organisation still operated with a kind of inspired precariousness. Mingus did not even have his own double bass to hand, so the musician Jimmy Leary lent him one. Even so, the concert blazed with such force that it changed the festival’s future. Crowds swelled; the city had to think bigger. Jazz moved from this intimate square to sports halls and the velodrome, not because the spirit had faded, but because too many people wanted in.

And that is the real revelation. San Sebastián did not simply decorate itself with culture; it engineered public desire around it, then kept widening the circle. Jazzaldia now spreads through roughly a dozen venues, with close to a hundred concerts, some ticketed, many free. The vast gatherings on Zurriola Beach and the terraces of the Kursaal opened the festival to younger audiences and enormous crowds. In two thousand and twenty-four, attendance reached about one hundred and eighty-five thousand.

There are delicious human footnotes too. In nineteen seventy-five, an amateur British group called Last Exit slipped into the contest almost unnoticed. Its blond young bassist was Gordon Sumner, long before the world knew him as Sting. Miles Davis came later and reportedly diverted his taxi through the city hunting for one very particular fur coat before vanishing into hotel seclusion. Even Van Morrison, not famous for warmth, called his nineteen ninety-nine concert here one of the best of his career.

Soon we’ll make for the Victoria Eugenia Theatre, where San Sebastián gave performance an even grander frame. If you fancy carrying the jazz mood into the evening, the nearby venue linked to this stop usually opens from Tuesday to Sunday and closes on Mondays.

On your right, the Victoria Eugenia Theatre shows itself as a grand pale sandstone block, palace-like and symmetrical, with carved balconies and a row of sculpted busts set into the main façade.

This theatre opened in nineteen twelve, and it was never meant to be just a playhouse. Francisco Urcola designed it as part of a larger act of civic self-invention, paired with the luxury hotel across the river so San Sebastián could greet visitors with culture on one side and hospitality on the other. Even the exterior tells that story. While so many buildings in the city borrowed French manners, Urcola looked instead to the palace of Monterrey in Salamanca, giving this place a distinctly Spanish grandeur.

Its first night carried a delicious little irony. The official inauguration took place on the twentieth of July, nineteen twelve, but Queen Victoria Eugenia, whose name the theatre bears, did not attend. She came the following day instead, with King Alfonso the Thirteenth and Queen Mother María Cristina, after the curtain had already risen on Eduardo Marquina’s En Flandes se ha puesto el sol, performed by the celebrated company of María Guerrero and Fernando Mendoza.

That blend of glamour and careful staging never really ended. For decades, every edition of the San Sebastián International Film Festival played through this building until nineteen ninety-nine, and that is how a Belle Époque theatre became part of film mythology. Alfred Hitchcock stood here in nineteen fifty-eight for the world premiere of Vertigo. Most visitors hear that and picture suspense, spirals, and icy blondes. Locals tend to remember something more earthly: from his room at the hotel just opposite, Hitchcock became enchanted by Basque cooking, especially chipirones en su tinta, baby squid in its own ink, which he later insisted Eva Marie Saint must try.

Then came another astonishing evening in nineteen seventy-seven, when Star Wars received its European premiere here. Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher posed on these steps, full of youthful promise, and inside, the audience sat in baffling silence. Festival-goers expected solemn art cinema; George Lucas gave them a space opera. The festival director, Luis Gasca, later admitted he feared disaster before the world fell in love with it.

And yet this elegant shell has held more than applause. In July nineteen thirty-six, Republican militiamen occupied the theatre and fired from here toward the hotel opposite, where rebel officers had barricaded themselves. Later, Franco’s regime turned the building into a propaganda venue. So the city’s polished stage could become, with alarming ease, a battlefield and then a political instrument.

If you fancy it, take a quick look at the before-and-after image in the app; the façade barely flinches, even as the world around it changes completely. And if you glance at your screen, image five gives you the auditorium before the great renovation, when it still held around one thousand two hundred and fifty seats beneath Ignacio Ugarte’s painted vault. The reforms from two thousand one to two thousand and seven modernised the machinery, improved access, and even created new rooms, though some mourn the loss of the older pink-and-gold entrance in favour of rather too much marble. That, too, belongs to this theatre’s story: permanence on the outside, reinvention within.

Now cast your eyes across toward the hotel that faces it; we’re heading there next, to Hotel María Cristina, only about two minutes away. If you want to return, the theatre generally opens from late morning to early afternoon and again from early evening, with Saturday starting a little earlier.

On your right, the Hotel María Cristina shows itself in pale stone, with a long symmetrical façade of tall windows and wrought-iron balconies, all lifted by a dark mansard roof pricked with neat dormer windows.

There is something wonderfully calculated about this building. It does not simply offer rooms. It presents San Sebastián to the world.

At the start of the twentieth century, local business leaders understood that a fashionable resort needed more than scenery. In nineteen hundred and two, a group of ambitious Donostiarras created the Sociedad de Fomento, a private development society that set out to reshape the city’s image in a very public way. Their great idea was bold and rather theatrical: build a luxury hotel and a grand theatre together, so culture and hospitality would arrive as a pair.

They studied several locations, including the edge of La Concha, then chose the gardens of Zurriola by the Urumea. The city council agreed to give up that land, but attached a condition with real foresight: after seventy years, both the theatre and the hotel would pass into municipal ownership. That is the cleverness of this place in one stroke. Private money created prestige, but the city made sure the prize would one day belong to the public.

The hotel itself came from Charles Mewes, the architect behind several Ritz hotels in Europe, including Madrid and Paris. Francisco Urcola directed the project here, while also shaping the neighbouring Victoria Eugenia Theatre. Construction on both began in nineteen hundred and nine, and in nineteen twelve Queen María Cristina attended the inauguration. From that moment, the pair announced that San Sebastián intended to stand among Europe’s refined resort cities, not as a provincial imitation, but as a confident equal.

Its early glory matched the city’s belle époque, when the royal summer presence and the disruptions of the First World War turned San Sebastián into a gathering place for the wealthy. Yet this hotel has never belonged only to luxury. In July nineteen thirty-six, at the opening of the Civil War, political violence briefly turned it into a kind of improvised stronghold. Much later, in twenty twenty, the hotel of film stars took in recovering covid patients. Even here, glamour has never entirely escaped history.

And then there is the folklore. Trotsky stayed here. So did Mata Hari, Maurice Ravel, Coco Chanel, Audrey Hepburn, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Mick Jagger. During the film festival, the hotel became part of the performance itself, its closeness to the theatre allowing stars to move between bedchamber and spotlight with almost absurd ease. One of the people who knew that ritual best was Miguel Ángel Aldazábal, the doorman who began work in nineteen ninety. He opened the door to Jerry Lewis and Peter O’Toole in his first days, and over the years became nearly as familiar to festival followers as the celebrities he welcomed.

The building changed shape in the nineteen fifties, when a new wing gave it a U-shaped plan instead of its original L. In nineteen eighty-two, just as that old municipal clause intended, the hotel passed to the city council. Later renovations restored its five-star status, and in two thousand and twelve a major refurbishment refreshed the belle époque air without erasing its character.

So as you stand before this polished façade, one question lingers: did San Sebastián build a hotel for guests, or a monument designed to persuade the wider world that the city belonged on the grand European stage?

We leave that polished answer now and walk toward power in a sterner language: the Provincial Palace of Guipúzcoa.

On your left, look for the pale stone façade with its ground-floor round arches, its steep mansard roof, and the Guipúzcoa coat of arms set high at the centre.

This palace tells a quieter, tougher story than the hotels and theatres nearby. After the abolition of the fueros - the old provincial rights and self-government that had shaped local identity for centuries - Guipúzcoa needed more than office space. It needed a public face that could say, with perfect calm, that the province still knew who it was.

So this building answered a political wound with architecture. In September of eighteen sixty-six, the square itself took the name Plaza de Guipúzcoa because the provincial palace stood here. Later, when the great project took shape, municipal architect José Goicoa conceived something wonderfully strategic: not one institution, but three, hidden behind a single grand front. One wing served the Treasury, another the Civil Government, and another the provincial council. A unified façade for a newly complicated relationship with the Spanish state.

And what a façade. Its style belongs to the Second Empire, the richly formal language of nineteenth-century power, and its main elevation deliberately echoes Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera. Notice the rhythm: arches below, then windows with triangular and curved pediments - those little stone crowns above the openings - then pilasters and columns lifting the eye upward. Along the attic run medallions with illustrious Guipuzcoans: Elcano, Urdaneta, Oquendo, Legazpi, Blas de Lezo. It is a roll call in stone.

Yet the palace very nearly vanished. Builders finished the first campaign in eighteen eighty-five, then fire tore through the interior and left little beyond the shell and foundations. Luis Aladrén and Adolfo Morales took on the reconstruction and, with almost archaeological patience, rebuilt the palace while preserving what they could. By eighteen ninety, it had recovered its dignity without pretending nothing had happened. That resilience is part of its meaning.

Inside, the most revealing flourish may be the great stained-glass window of Alfonso the Twelfth swearing to respect the fueros. The council commissioned painter José Etxenagusia in eighteen eighty-nine to prepare the design, then craftsmen in Munich turned it into glass for the main staircase. It was not mere decoration. It taught every visitor a lesson about memory, legitimacy, and continuity. If you glance at the image in the app, you can see that the palace still serves as a living ceremonial stage, not a frozen relic.

In a moment, we head toward Alderdi Eder Park, where official power loosens its collar and meets the promenade and the sea. If you plan to come back inside, the palace generally opens on weekdays, with shorter hours on Fridays.

Ahead of you lies a formal green garden of clipped hedges and gravel paths, shaded by rounded tamarind canopies and marked by fountains and sculpted stone details.

Alderdi Eder means “beautiful place” in Euskera, the Basque language, and San Sebastián chose that name with unusual honesty. This is not simply a park. It is one of the city’s great front rows: to the bay, to public life, and, for a long while, to spectacle itself.

In eighteen eighty, the city took an old military drill ground beside La Concha and turned it into pleasure space. First came amusements: a circus, a velodrome for cycle racing, even a puppet theatre. Then ambition grew grander. More than three hundred shareholders, mostly local people, backed a casino on municipal land, and the young architects Luis Aladrén and Adolfo Morales de los Ríos won the design competition with a proposal called Aurrera, meaning “forward.” When the casino rose behind these gardens, the whole setting changed with it.

If you glance at the image in the app, you can see the park as it still works best: a green balcony between the promenade and the city’s grand public face.

The French gardener Pierre Ducasse gave that balcony its poise. He planted nearly a hundred trees here, along with formal flowerbeds, hedges, a pond, fountains and statues. He was designing more than decoration. He was arranging an audience chamber in the open air. During the casino years, the access terrace hosted two orchestra concerts each day, and the music drifted across every corner of the garden. Downstairs in the building, people drank coffee, read newspapers, dined, and talked. Upstairs, in the more secret rooms, they played roulette and baccarat, the card game beloved by high society, even though gambling was illegal.

Locals, with that dry Donostiarra wit, gave the casino a nickname most visitors never hear: Santa María de la Roulette. Its twin towers made it look faintly church-like, while roulette wheels spun inside. That little joke tells you everything about this place. Respectability in full view, temptation just above it.

When Primo de Rivera closed the casino in nineteen twenty-four, the twist was exquisite. The palace of private pleasure became the City Hall, and Alderdi Eder turned from fashionable forecourt into civic stage. Even so, it kept gathering the city to itself: for concerts, for festival rituals, for grief as well. In two thousand and seven, Aitor Mendizábal’s Oroimena-Memoria memorial gave the garden a new gravity, a place where remembrance joined leisure. If you look at the detail on your screen, you can feel that quieter layer.

That is the secret of Alderdi Eder: San Sebastián learned to perform itself here, then learned how to remember here too. As you head towards the Central Municipal Library, remember that Alderdi Eder never closes; the park remains open twenty-four hours.

Look for the pale stone base with deep round arches and iron-railed openings, set into the lower level of a grand civic building with a formal balustrade above.

There is something quietly moving about a library at the end of a walk like this. So many of the places in central San Sebastián perform themselves in public. This one keeps the city’s inward life: its reading, its memory, its paper trail. And even that memory does not live in one room alone. The Central Municipal Library now spreads across three homes: the adult service here in Alderdi Eder, the children’s library and documentation centre for children’s books on Fermín Calbetón, and the historic collections, activity room, technical unit and direction in the Plaza de la Constitución. One institution, several addresses, as if the city had learned to shelve itself in chapters.

Its story begins with a man named Sebastián de Miñano. In eighteen forty-four, he offered the city his own collection of books. It was a generous, almost tender gesture. Then he died the following year, and his library project did not come to life. The idea had to wait. At last, in eighteen seventy-four, San Sebastián opened the Municipal Library in the old institute building at Andía and Garibai. The first shelves grew from donations, and the place began, quite literally, as a civic act of trust.

The figure I would keep in mind here is José Manterola. He took over in eighteen seventy-six. He was a writer, a teacher, and a man marked by conviction: the authorities removed him from his teaching post after he protested the law that abolished the Basque fueros, the old regional rights. He turned that loss into energy. In the library, he built the collection with fierce purpose and created what he called the Sección especial bascongada, a special section bringing together any work, in any language, that helped people study the Basque country. It gave the library a distinct soul. This would not be merely a room of books. It would be a place where a region could recognise itself.

The library kept moving, but it never lost that task. It lived in the School of Arts and Crafts on Urdaneta, then in San Telmo, then in nineteen fifty-one in the former Town Hall on the Plaza de la Constitución. Under director Rufino Mendiola, it also became guardian of something fragile: local newspapers. He saw that San Sebastián’s old press survived here almost alone, and he created the hemeroteca, the newspaper and magazine archive, so those voices would not vanish. Daily life, arguments, notices, scandals, theatre listings, griefs, triumphs: the city speaking in its own hurried ink.

Then the library changed again. In nineteen eighty-six it began lending books for ordinary home reading, not only research. The children’s section moved to larger quarters in nineteen ninety-four. The adult service came here in nineteen ninety-nine. More recently, the collections stepped into digital life, first online and then through DonostiaTEKA, so memory could travel without leaving the shelf behind.

That, perhaps, is one of this city’s finest habits: it lets institutions survive by changing their rooms, and lets buildings survive by changing their meaning. In a moment, we’ll make the brief walk to San Sebastián City Council, where that quiet transformation becomes gloriously visible. If you wish to return, the adult library generally opens Monday to Friday from ten in the morning to half past eight, and on Saturdays from ten to two and from half past four to eight.

On your left, look for the pale stone façade with its broad, symmetrical front, two towered corners, and a formal central balcony that crowns the old casino turned city hall.

This building tells San Sebastián’s secret in plain sight. It governs the city now, but it began as a stage for pleasure. Builders started it in eighteen eighty-two in the Alderdi Eder gardens, and they opened it on the first of July, eighteen eighty-seven, with Queen María Cristina herself attending for the first time. That entrance mattered. The city was presenting itself to power, to fashion, to Europe.

At first, this was the casino, and people nicknamed it Santa María de la Roulette. The joke hung on those two towers, which cheekily echoed the towers of the Basilica of Santa María del Coro. Inside, money moved with astonishing speed. The profits from gambling did more than enrich shareholders; they helped pay for the city’s modern face, including the Paseo de la Concha, the Paseo Nuevo, and the asylum of La Misericordia. There was, however, a delicious hypocrisy at the heart of it all: the gaming rooms upstairs admitted foreigners only, supposedly to protect local morals, while many locals found ways to laugh at that rule and slip around it.

If you glance at your screen, the older casino identity comes into focus beautifully there. It helps you see this façade not as a sober office block, but as a place designed to dazzle.

Then came the First World War, and the glamour sharpened into intrigue. Spain stayed neutral, so San Sebastián filled with refugees, aristocrats, and intelligence agents. The casino became, in effect, a nest of spies. The most famous visitor was Mata Hari, the dancer and spy, who lodged at the nearby Hotel de Londres and came here often. Local memory insists that amid these salons and glasses raised in conversation, she carried on a romance with the journalist Enrique Gómez Carrillo while whispers about the European front drifted between the dance floor and the card tables.

The performance could not last. Gambling was banned in nineteen twenty-four, and the casino closed. After that, the building passed through grim reinventions: it served as a hospital for wounded soldiers from the Rif War, and in July of nineteen thirty-six, at the outbreak of the Civil War, rebel troops and Carlist requetés barricaded themselves inside. The fighting was fierce enough that chroniclers say bullet scars could still be traced on the Boulevard side.

Then came the most revealing transformation of all. In nineteen forty-five, the city hall moved here from the building that now houses the municipal library in the old town. Luis Jesús Arizmendi, the municipal architect and, wonderfully, also the city’s fire chief, reshaped the old casino with a practical but respectful hand. The grand ballroom, where the Belle Époque had danced waltzes and foxtrots, became the council chamber where ordinances are debated. If you open the second image, you can feel that double life almost at once.

Even in democracy, this building kept absorbing the city’s joys and wounds. After the return of democratic elections in nineteen seventy-nine, mayors and coalitions changed, arguments sharpened, and public life found new rhythms here. One absence cut especially deep: after E-T-A murdered deputy mayor Gregorio Ordóñez in nineteen ninety-five, his empty chair in the chamber stood for years as a sign of grief and division.

And so this façade resolves something essential about San Sebastián. Here, elegance did not vanish; it learned responsibility. A house of spectacle became a house of decisions, and the bay beside it kept watch through every costume change. The city never stopped changing costumes, but it remained recognizably itself.

If you’d like to go inside on another day, city hall usually opens Monday to Friday from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon.