Aieteko Jauregia

This guide to Aieteko Jauregia in San Sebastian opens at the gravel drives where, in 1940, General Francisco Franco set off to meet Adolf Hitler at Hendaye, and returned to decide inside this palace. It traces the building back further, to 1878 and the Dukes of Bailen, who hired French architect Adolfo Ombrecht and hosted kings, queens and an empress here long before Franco ever arrived. It follows the city's 1940 purchase of the estate as a gift for the general's summer holidays, and the three decades of cabinet meetings held behind its gates. Walk the gardens laid out by a Versailles-trained gardener, and look for the tree planted decades later by Mikhail Gorbachev.