Pasealeku Berria

This guide to Pasealeku Berria, San Sebastian's sea wall promenade, opens with a simple fact: on stormy days the Cantabrian Sea still leaps clean over this wall and the police close it. It traces the wall back to army land handed to the city at the turn of the twentieth century, the engineers who raised a ten-meter wall tapering from six meters at its base, and Queen Maria Cristina's visit to open the first stretch in 1916. Stand close to the wall on a rough day, at a safe distance, to feel why the engineering was ever needed.