Palamós is a fishing town on the central section of the Costa Brava with a permanent population of around 18,000 people. It is neither the capital of its comarca (that’d be La Bisbal d’Empordà) nor the largest town (either Sant Feliu de Guíxols or Palafrugell, depending on who you ask), but it is definitely one of the most important.
As well as being home to one of the biggest fishing fleets of La Costa Brava (you’ll have heard of Gambas de Palamós, right?), Palamós is also where the county hospital for El Baix Empordà is situated, and in the past it was an important producer of cork stoppers for champagne, cava and wine bottles but since the 1960s or so tourism has become one of the main industries in the town.
But how did it all begin?
The area that is today the Municipality of Palamós has been inhabited by humans for at least 5,500 years and almost certainly even longer. There are numerous dolmens in the hills around the town, and the remains of a 6th century BCE Iron Age settlement of the Iberian Indikete tribe can still be seen today on a hill overlooking Platja Castell, and there were other similar settlements dotted around the region. A short distance away at La Fosca beach, the ruins of the Castle of Sant Esteve de Mar we see today are medieval and were built on top of the ruins of an earlier Roman villa. It is believed the villa may in turn have been built on top of another Iberian settlement that was there long before, though excavations have not yet taken place to confirm this. The principal Indikete town of that time was located next to where the medieval village of Ullastret is today and their interaction with the Greek trading post at Empuries, next to L’Escala, was instrumental in the development of the local Iberian culture
Later, in the 3rd century BCE, the Romans arrived in the region at the start of their Second Punic War with Carthage, and, following their victory in that war, so began the Romanisation of the entire Iberian Peninsula. The Indiketes coexisted with Greeks and Romans for quite some time but Iberian culture was gradually subsumed into the Roman way of life and their language also disappeared. When the Western Roman Empire eventually collapsed Visigoths occupied these lands, but as much of the history of that period went unrecorded not as much is known about happenings in the region until medieval times.
Palamós is born
Hitting the fast-forward button a little, we come to the year 1277 when King Pere el Gran of Aragón & Catalunya (Peter the Great) purchased the aforementioned Castell de St Esteve de Mar in La Fosca as he wished to build a port to allow for increasing trade, especially with Sicily, of which his wife Constance was a princess and of which he had also become king by conquest, wresting it from French control. An existing Royal Port on the River Ter to the north (near today’s town of L’Estartit) had become silted up, and the deep natural harbour of what was to become Palamós was the logical choice as its replacement. On 3 December 1279 (to be exact!) the town of Palamors (as it was known for the first century or so of its existence) was officially founded to protect the new port, with a charter, or carta magna, declaring that its new settlers were to be permitted to build new homes and live free from any servitude. The charter also bestowed certain benefits that included a weekly market to take place every Tuesday – as it still does to this very day! That’s almost 750 years of Tuesdays! So next time you’re tempted to grumble about Avenida de Catalunya being closed to traffic for the market, just remember, the market has been around a lot longer than the traffic!
The French come and go
In 1282 Pere El Gran was excommunicated by Pope Martin IV (who was French) and his Kingdom of Sicily was confiscated and returned to France. This triggered hostilities between France and the Crown of Aragon (which included Catalunya) and, with Palamors still only a few years into its existence, it was taken by King Philippe of France in 1285 to support his siege of Girona. It wasn’t “taken” for very long though as a French fleet was defeated in a couple of naval engagements that took place over three days that came to be known as the Battle of the Illes Formigues (Ant Islands). The name of the victorious Admiral Roger de Llúria still lives on in street names throughout Catalunya, including in the fishermen’s quarter en El Pedró in Palamós, which seems appropriate, being seafaring folk all. Because of this naval defeat as well as setbacks in their land campaign, the French were forced to withdraw from Catalunya. At least for a while…
The First “Religious War”
Although permission had been granted in 1334 for a church dedicated to Santa Maria to be built, strong opposition from parishioners of the Church of Santa Eugènia de Vila-romà, which had existed since 1319 in St. Joan de Palamós (although the parish was founded at least as far back as 1163 and a primitive oratory is recorded as having existed on the site in 1191). This opposition meant that only a small chapel to Santa Maria was erected instead, and even that wasn’t until 1371. Eventually Sta. Maria de Palamós was separated from Sta. Eugènia to become its own parish and construction of the church proper got underway in 1439, with a second phase beginning quite some time later in 1521. The building was badly damaged in a pirate attack in 1543 (more about which in a moment) and was subsequently renovated during the latter half of the 16th century. It had to be repaired again after an attack by English ships in 1742, and once again suffered considerable damage during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) which was not repaired until 1942. Despite all its trials and tribulations, it has survived to be the oldest building in the old town of Palamós still standing today as the original church in St. Joan de Palamós was completely rebuilt in 1765.
The Pirate Menace
The original pier was built in the port in the mid-1400s and Palamós was the second most important port of Catalunya through the 15th and 16th centuries. Most Catalan Mediterranean towns of the day were built at a distance inland from the coast because of the constant threat of pirate raids and those masias (traditional Catalan farmhouses) that were closer to the coast usually had lookout towers to warn of approaching danger. Ports, naturally, are right on the coast (okay, some might be up a river a ways!) and so Palamós was susceptible to attacks by pirates of varying nationalities. At the time of its founding there was a relative lull in pirate activity in the western Mediterranean due to the strength of the Catalan navy, allowing Palamós to grow. When we say “relative lull” we just mean that things were not quite as bad yet as they were to become later. Palamós was attacked twice by Genoese pirates in its first couple of centuries of being a port, but it was between the 16th and 19th centuries when Mediterranean pirates, especially from North Africa, were at their worst and an ever-present menace to coastal towns everywhere. Despite the watchtower warning system hundreds of small raids resulted in many families falling to ruin over the years having to sell their property and possessions to pay ransoms for the rescue of loved ones taken by pirates.
Redbeard
Many Pirates of the Mediterranean attacked and raided wherever and whatever they could get their hands on, but many others were privateers and raided on behalf of kingdoms to which they were allied. One such example was a Franco-Ottoman alliance forged in 1543 – against the Habsburg monarchy that ruled Spain at the time – meaning that French and Ottoman corsairs wouldn’t attack each other’s ships or ports, focusing instead on Spanish towns. That very same year, the Ottoman pirate known as Barbarossa (Red Beard), attacked the town of Nice (at the time under the control of the Duke of Savoy, a Hapsburg ally), capturing it for France, before continuing on to raid Cadaqués and Roses. On 5 October Redbeard arrived at Palamós with over 20 ships. The pirates fired their cannons at the town from their ships before then breaching the walls of the town. Most of the townspeople managed to escape but all of the men who remained to try and defend the town against the pirates, along with some reinforcements from Palafrugell, were killed and many of their bodies mutilated and impaled. Both aforementioned churches were burned and severely damaged and the church bells were taken. Another chapel called Nostra Senyora de Gràcia (Our Lady of Grace) at Sa Punta, the highest point in the town, as well as most of the houses of the town were totally destroyed. Barbarossa and his men hung around for two full days before continuing south on their rampage. A large proportion of the inhabitants never returned to Palamós but stayed to live in the neighbouring villages to which they had fled, such was the destruction. The news of the sacking of Palamós spread far and wide and even Pope Paul III intervened to aid in the town’s recovery.
A fuller account of the raid, along with illustrations, was designed and produced by the Fishing Museum of Palamós in 2018 to mark the 475th anniversary of the Redbeard attack. If you’d like to read it (it’s not long), we’ve translated it from Catalan into English and you can read it here.
Wars, walls and defenses
Following the deadly pirate attack of 1543, the construction of Palamós’ walls and bastions was accelerated to bolster the town’s defenses by completely encircling it, except for one opening out to the sea itself at La Planassa, and a gate at Plaça dels Arbres, the edge of the old town. It turned out that those new defenses would prove to be very necessary.
A hugely destructive pan-European war known as the Thirty Years War (1618-48) was fought right across the continent during which France and Spain found themselves on opposite sides. The ensuing Franco-Spanish War (1635-59) was effectively a war within a greater war and it actually continued on after hostilities ceased elsewhere. And within the Franco-Spanish War took place yet another: the Reapers’ War (or Catalan Revolt: 1640-59) which saw the Catalans ally themselves with the French against the Spanish. All this meant that Palamós became an important strategic military port and, as it changed hands a number of times, soldiers of many nationalities – Spaniards, French, Neapolitans, Milanese, Flemish, Irish and Germans, among others – were garrisoned inside and outside the town at different stages, some in barracks but mostly in private homes. The Catalan Revolt effectively ended as a contest with the Siege of Barcelona (1651-52) when the Spanish recaptured the city from French and Catalan forces. The war would continue for a few more years and although Spain managed to defeat the Catalans, they lost the overall war to France. The result was the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) in which Spain ceded the Province of Roussillon, including the important city of Perpignan, to France, where it remains to this day.
Palamós’ defenses were further fortified in the decades following the war when it was decided that a citadel was to be built on what was the highest part of the town at Sa Punta where the lighthouse is today, on the site of the chapel of Nostra Senyora de Gràcia that was razed during Barbarossa’s “visit”. An Augustinian convent had been built on the site of the original chapel and a compromise was reached with the resident monks that they could remain where they were and the citadel was effectively built around them.
The Black Death
As if all that warfare wasn’t enough, the bubonic plague struck Barcelona during the aforementioned siege of the city in 1651 and it wasn’t long before the Black Death arrived in Palamós. The first fatality is recorded as having been buried on 26 March 1652 and the gates of the town were promptly shut, not reopening until almost six months later on 7 September, but with a series of quarantine restrictions – something we can all relate to now, following our recent Covid-19 experience! From the outset, the overwhelming number of fatalities was such that recording deaths became an impossible task and was given up as a lost cause, and so the final death toll was unknown. What is known is that in early 1653 a piece of land outside the walls of Palamós was blessed by the parish priest and up to 400 bodies were buried there, possibly more than half of the population of the town at that time.
The Second Destruction of Palamós
If the hope was that the presence of those monks within the citadel would provide some sort of divine protection, that hope was in vain. The French were back in Catalunya in 1694 during the Nine Years War (1688-97), another war whose theatre was so vast it reached far beyond the continent of Europe. They overran Verges and Torroella de Montgrí before turning their attention to the port of Palamós, whose capture was imperative if they hoped to achieve their ultimate goal of Barcelona. The Spanish had already retreated south towards Barcelona, abandoning Palamós, but about 4,000 Neapolitan soldiers remained. French troops numbered about 12,000 plus 5,000 cavalry and they knew Palamós well having been garrisoned there previously. Despite their numerical inferiority, the defenders managed to resist for over a week, so heroically in fact that an impressed King Louis XIV of France had a special coin struck in commemoration. In the assault, which began in May 1695, the citadel that had been built only a relatively short time before was completely demolished, convent and all, as were the bastions and parts of the new town walls built around Palamós following the Barbarossa raid. The purpose of such a scale of destruction was to make the town and port easier to capture in any future wars, such was its strategic importance. A little later that same year the town was also shelled by enemy ships during the French occupation causing further damage. At the end of the Nine Years War the French withdrew from Catalunya once more in order to gain favour with Spain in the upcoming dispute over who should sit on the Spanish throne.
The War of Spanish Succession
As it turned out, the French were right about future wars. Without going into too much detail here, King Charles II of Spain (a Hapsburg) died in 1700 without a direct heir. Philippe of Anjou, grandson of King Louis XIV of France (a Bourbon) was named King of Spain over his Austrian Hapsburg rival, Archduke Charles of Vienna. This caused the outbreak of the War of Spanish Succession in 1701 and this would rage on until 1714. It pitted France and Spain together on one side against a Grand Alliance of other European states, who feared that a potential union of those two nations would eventually come to completely dominate all Europe. Catalunya, by now sick and tired of both the Spanish and the French, supported the Hapsburg cause, resulting in Palamós again changing hands a number of times and soldiers of even more nationalities occupying the town on various occasions, among them Germans, Dutch, Swiss, Belgian and, of course, French and Spanish. As before, most of the cost of accommodating all these soldiers was borne by the inhabitants of the town. The outcome of the war was that Philippe became King of Spain, but with a definitive separation of the crowns of Spain and France. Archduke Charles didn’t do too badly either though as he became Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor.
Peace and War!
Philippe may have become King of Spain and there was finally peace for a time in Catalunya, but the death of Charles VI (Holy Roman Emperor, remember?) in 1740 triggered another pan-European war, this time the Austrian War of Succession (1740-48). (So many wars about who got to sit on which throne!) During this war British ships, being on the opposite side to the Spanish and French, bombed Palamós in 1742 with around 2,000 cannonballs, mostly damaging the port area and the Church of Santa Maria. The almost constant warfare during the first half of the 18th century meant that all the young and able-bodied men were away fighting (or dead!) and only the women, the old and the very young remained, and living conditions for Palamosinos were, for the most part, pretty desperate and poverty was widespread. This led to a significant decline in the population of the town.
More piracy
After this latest European war eventually ended there was no one dominant navy that could control the Western Mediterranean and pirate ships from North Africa began marauding again. English pirates, operating as privateers, also attacked Spanish ports on behalf of their crown. Not to be outdone, the Catalans decided to get in on the act themselves with Catalan corsair ships operating out of Mallorca, and the ports of Barcelona, Mataró, Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Cadaqués and, of course, of Palamós. One such Palamós corsair, Martí Badia, along with his brother Constantí, was so successful in defeating Algerian, English and Maltese privateer ships that he was made lieutenant in the Spanish navy by King Charles III.
Napoleon
Wider European events were to impact on Palamós again in the early 1800s during the Napoleonic Wars. In the Peninsular War between Spain and Napoleon’s France, the French once again occupied the town from July 1809 until March 1813 (apart from briefly in September 1810 when it was retaken by the Spanish, and then lost again almost immediately). As the tide in the greater war began to turn against Napoleon, the French slowly but surely began withdrawing from most of Catalunya as their troops were needed elsewhere and by March 1813 they had left Palamós once again. During the gradual French retreat from Catalunya the once-important Castel de Vila-romà, in the hills just outside Palamós near Vall-llobrega, was mostly blown up so that it could not be used by enemy soldiers. The ruins can still be visited today if you enjoy a little hiking or mountain biking, although you can actually drive most of the way up.
The Count of Palamós
Back in 1484 Palamós was made into a County and a Catalan nobleman with the rather long-winded name of Galcerán de Requesens i Joan de Soler, was made its first Count in recognition of his services to the Crown of Aragón – although by this stage the Crowns of Aragón and Castilla had been united by the marriage of King Fernando and Queen Isabella, known as the Catholic Monarchs, effectively creating the country of Spain. Remember the founding charter of the town that guaranteed that its citizens would forever live free of servitude? Yes? Well, so did the “Palamosinos” and they refused to recognize the new Count until he agreed to recognize those guarantees. Interestingly, although lordships were abolished throughout Spain from 1811, the title of ‘Count of Palamós’ still exists day, although it was incorporated into the Duchy of Soma in 1502. There’s a guy somewhere out there today called Jaime Ruiz de Bucesta de Mora y Aragón who is still officially the Count of Palamós!
The Cork Industry
Although the cork industry in Palamós started in the mid-1700s it didn’t really become hugely significant until the mid-1800s, no doubt due to the instability and turbulent nature of the times. Ironically, seeing as the French were involved in much of that turbulence and instability, the first manufacturers of cork stoppers, (or ‘tapers’ in Catalan, from the Occitan ‘tapiers’) were French descendants. With the regulation of champagne production in France in 1681 came the need for cork stoppers. The production of these cork stoppers started in Occitanie but soon crossed the Pyrenees due to the vast cork oak forests in Les Gavarres and Albera in the Empordà region. Initially traditional cork makers working in small workshops required only a knife and a batch of cork, but, little by little, small manually operated machines and then motorized machinery were introduced that made the production processes easier and faster.
Once it did take off the cork industry was the driving force behind most of the growth and improvements to life in town, boosting the economy and leading to population growth once again. Towards the end of the 19th century services such as running water, gas and electricity were established and various cultural, political and recreational societies were formed. Cork was also a huge contributing factor in the construction of a railway line that linked Palamós to Girona and also the pier that we see today, built in 1902 using rubble from the citadel and convent destroyed in 1695 at Sa Punta. The pier was further remodeled in 1910. At its peak it is estimated that the cork industry employed around 4,000 people and in the early 1900s the Baix Empordà in particular was a worldwide point of reference in cork production.
Although Spain remained neutral, the outbreak of World War I in mid-1914 quickly caused the Palamós cork industry to crash and collapse almost completely, with around 1,500 of the town’s population already having left to look for a livelihood elsewhere by mid-1915. The bad times were back. Poverty, hunger and inflation caused things to get so bad for the remaining inhabitants that by mid-1916, when things were at their worst, well over 800 Palamosinos were relying on charity for food.
Although the exploitation of cork forests was largely abandoned the cork industry did re-emerge on a smaller and more specialized scale in the decades following World War II. Today, although the cork factories of Palamós are gone, Catalunya remains one of the foremost regions in the production of cork stoppers for sparkling wines (60% of the world quota) and is right up there for natural cork stoppers for still wines too.
Bleak times
After WWI came to an end there was a sharp decline in foreign trade in Spain, huge labour unrest, the denial of basic workers’ rights by large companies, including by violent means, the repression of trade unions by the government and even some domestic terrorism. This all ended with a military coup in 1923 by the General of the Catalan Army, one Miguel Primo de Rivera, with the support of King Alfonso XIII, and a dictatorship that only ended at just around the same time as the stock market crash in New York in late 1929, beginning the global Great Depression. Not exactly great times to be living in! And if the Spanish Second Republic that began in 1931 gave a brief cause for hope, this was dashed by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), immediately followed by WWII (1939-45). Tough times indeed!
Spanish Civil War
Palamós, being on the Republican side, was bombed a number of times during the Spanish Civil War; five times from the sea by Nationalist ships as well as from the air by Mussolini’s Italian air force, allied with Franco. The air attacks were especially accurate and lethal with one such attack in 1938 destroying 30 buildings, killing 10 people and wounding 40 more. Another airstrike the same year sank a British merchant ship in the Bay of Palamós.
The Franco Years to Recent Times
The first 20-25 years of Franco’s dictatorship (1939-75) were another bad period for the country as a whole, and for regions like Catalunya or the Basque Country in particular. El Generalissimo, as he was called by his followers, had more arbitrary power than any Spanish leader before or since and under his rule the Catalan language and culture was suppressed, including even the (let’s be honest, kinda boring!) Catalan national dance, the Sardana, as it was not deemed by Franco to be “properly” Spanish. The Catholic Church became the established church of the Spanish State once again, civil servants had to be Catholic with many jobs even requiring a “good behavior” reference from a priest. Divorce, contraceptives and abortion were illegal and many civil marriages which had taken place in Republican Spain were annulled, and women could not work in certain jobs or have a bank account without the written approval of their father or husband.
Despite Franco’s rule, certain sectors of the economy started seeing some progress in the 1960s, the most notable amongst them probably being tourism, and especially package tourism, with northern Europeans being attracted by the almost guaranteed sunshine and cheap prices. In the 1960s Franco’s grip on everyday life loosened to some degree and isolationist Spain started looking outwards. The Costa Brava was earmarked for development to attract tourists from the extremely popular and, by that stage, overcrowded Côte d’Azur in France. Unfortunately the tourist boom happened too late for the railway – which was badly damaged during the Civil War, abandoned and finally dismantled under the Franco government – but, on the other hand, Girona-Costa Brava Airport opened to national and international civil air traffic in 1967. The espigons (breakwaters) were built to prevent sand from St Antoni beach drifting over to the Port of Palamós (and to preserve the beach at St Antoni too, of course) and land was reclaimed from the sea at La Planassa where people nowadays park their cars. Previously, the sea used to come right up as far as El Mur (the wall), as that part of Av. 11 de Setembre with all the restaurants is affectionately known by locals. The seafront promenade was built and tourism gradually overtook fishing in most of the coastal towns as the main source of income, although thankfully most of the Costa Brava escaped the short-sighted and ugly high-rise developments of much of the Spanish Mediterranean coast further south.
People of Palamós
In the early days after the founding of Palamós the only migrants who came to live in the town would have come from the surrounding region and, periodically, some others, mostly men, from southern France looking for temporary seasonal work and, very often, wives. As the port became more important some immigrants from other Mediterranean countries arrived, mainly Italy and Greece, as well as from other Spanish Mediterranean towns. When the cork industry was at its peak it attracted many workers from other parts of Spain, as did the railway. With the discovery of new fishing grounds in the 1950s many fishermen migrated to Palamós with their families, mainly from Valencia and Tarragona, with many of them settling in the neighbourhood of El Pedró, in houses built especially for them by the Fishermen’s Guild. From the 1960s onward tourism was the main factor attracting workers to the town, many of those from Andalucía. The population passed the 10,000 mark for the first time around 1970 and has continued to grow ever since.
Famous folk
Apart from migrants looking for work and a better life, the Costa Brava has also attracted a whole host of celebrities to its shores over the years. Palamós has been host to actors Ava Gardner, John Wayne and Madeleine Carroll, and the American novelist Robert Ruark lived for a time before his death in Sant Antoni de Calonge and is buried in Palamós. It was Ruark who convinced Palamós’ most famous resident to come to live in the town: Truman Capote. Capote spent 18 months in Palamós in three stints between 1960 and 1962, living for a while in the seafront Hotel Trias and later at La Catifa. It was there he wrote much of his most famous book: In Cold Blood. In the world of sport, Palamós is home to Adel Mechaal, a former European athletics champion over 3000m. Although born in Morocco, Mechaal came to Palamós when he was a baby and grew up there and so is very much considered a Palamosino.
Palamós today
Nowadays, Palamós remains a popular town with tourists and has a very busy summer season with thousands of visitors from the Netherlands, Belgium and France in particular, and it has been twinned with the town of Rheda-Wiedenbrück in northwestern Germany since 1995. The port also welcomes upwards of 30 cruise ships every year. But Palamós is not just a tourist town. Unlike many other Mediterranean towns, it does not go into almost total “hibernation” during the off-season as the local economy is kept ticking over thanks to all those employed in the hospital, the fisheries, and a whole raft of local businesses. The year-round population today stands at just over 18,000 (14% of whom are foreign), making it the 3rd most populous town of the Baix Empordà and 5th of the entire Empordà region. It is famous nationwide for its Gambas de Palamós and its high-quality D.O. Empordà wines, and it is also home to the second-oldest football team in all Spain and the oldest in Catalunya. Yep, Palamós C.F. was founded one year before the mighty F.C. Barcelona! Their colours are blue and gold (yellow), as they are on the shield of the town itself.
The original harbour of Palamós, the biggest on the Costa Brava, is now known as Port Vell (old harbour) since the Palamós Marina was built in 1992 on the other side of the promontory, to the east of the lighthouse. Apart from the fishing fleet, the Port Vell has 250 moorings for leisure boats of up to 25 metres long while the Marina has a total of 866 further moorings for yachts of up to 30 metres.
If you’re interested in historic photographic exhibitions and the like, we recommend that you check out the Fishing Museum of Palamós. Housed in a former boat shed, it claims to be the first museum dedicated to fishing around the entire Mediterranean. Apart from fishing-related “stuff”, such as the fish auction and market or cooking classes, they also have temporary exhibitions from time to time including some with old photos and stories from around the region. Well worth checking out.