French Influence

Où sommes-nous? A Paris? Est-ce la rue de Rivoli? Non! This is a street in the heart of Donostia.

The designers and builders of Donostia in the late 19th century took their cue from Baron Haussman and his rebuilding of Paris. The streets are laid out in a grid that makes getting around very easy. There are beautiful parks, plazas, squares and pedestrian streets everywhere.

Here is the Plaza de Bilbao.

This could be the Seine but it´s the beautiful Urumea, and just beyond those buildings is the Bay of Biscay.

In the foreground is the Hotel Maria-Cristina and in the background the Teatro Victoria-Eugenia. Both are named for women who were queens of Spain about a hundred years ago. The first was regent of Spain during the minority of Alfonso XIII and the second was Alfonso´s consort after he came of age. It was during this era that the royal family summered in San Sebastián. This hotel has always been San Sebastián´s swankiest.

Some few years after the elaborate beaux-arts Pont Alexandre III was inaugurated in Paris, the Puente Maria-Cristina was opened. Although visibly very different than its Parisian model, it is almost as ornate although it has more art nouveau detail.

I don´t know if, at closer inspection, this facade with its beautiful balcony could be mistaken for a Parisian building. There´s something freer and more playful in the details of the buildings in Donostia than the French would have allowed, I feel. I look up at windows like these and wonder about the rooms inside and what it´s like to wake up in them, what it´s like to open these shutters and look down at the city outside.