Santa Clara Island

This guide to Santa Clara Island in San Sebastián opens in 1968, when the last lighthouse keeper switched on the newly automated light and walked away for good, ending generations of family life on the tower. You'll hear about the island's darker earlier use as a plague chapel in the 1590s, where the sick were rowed out and left alone, and about the 1864 lighthouse whose lamp came from the same French firm that later worked with Gustave Eiffel. Every five seconds its flash still cuts through the dark for ships crossing the bay.