On your left stands the San Sebastián Aquarium, and it feels like a fitting last word for this city. So much here began with the sea as labour, danger, hunger, trade, spectacle. This building turns that long experience into something calmer and rather finer: knowledge.
The story begins in nineteen oh three, when Albert the First of Monaco came to San Sebastián. He was not only a prince but a serious student of the sea, and his ideas helped inspire the creation, in nineteen oh eight, of the Oceanographic Society of Gipuzkoa. From that came something remarkable. In nineteen ten, the society opened a laboratory to analyse samples brought in from the water and preserve specimens. In nineteen eleven, it began publishing a quarterly bulletin on oceanography, meteorology, fishing, and restocking fish populations, the first publication of its kind in Spain. Then, in nineteen twelve, it opened a fishing school here on the harbour, when no similar school existed anywhere else in the country.
That early spirit was practical, ambitious, and deeply civic. A local figure named Vicente Laffitte carried it forward for twenty-five years as president of the society. He rarely receives the grandest applause, but without his persistence this place might have remained a fine idea discussed over papers and plans. Instead, on the twenty-second of September, nineteen twenty-five, builders laid the first stone for this Palace of the Sea on an exposed site chosen for clean seawater, though it stood open to the fiercest storms. The official inauguration came on the first of October, nineteen twenty-eight, with King Alfonso the Thirteenth and Queen Victoria Eugenia in attendance, and Laffitte there too, quietly representing years of stubborn work.
If you glance at the image on your screen, you can see the façade that grew from that ambition. Inside, generations of local children met the great whale skeleton from the nineteenth century and imagined themselves in a Jules Verne adventure. Later, the Aquarium reinvented itself again. The major reform of nineteen ninety-eight created a vast oceanarium - a giant living sea tank - holding one point eight million litres, with a three hundred and sixty degree tunnel and bull sharks that quickly became its stars. Since nineteen forty-seven, the institution has also taken the sea’s temperature every day, building the most complete marine temperature record in the Basque Country.
That, I think, is the true measure of San Sebastián. It does not simply admire the water at its edge. It watches, studies, teaches, remembers. Here, the sea becomes not only scenery, but a responsibility, and perhaps even a way of thinking.
