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Ferrol has an estuary and the estuary has a mouth and the mouth has a molar… La Muela del Segaño emerges from the waters next to the last portion of coast before the open sea. Firm rock that, like a warned gatekeeper, controls entrances and exits and demands their respect… Woe to those who get too close… There, one sad night in 1947, the transport Castillo de Coca and 26 of its crew succumbed.
Although navigation through the long channel, more than 3 kilometers, gives access to the Ferrol estuary, avoiding the peak currents of the tides, it is friendly and has beautiful blue-green landscapes, the bottom is deceptive, the draft is narrow and sinuous with numerous changes course and medium and large vessels require a pilot to safely lead them to port or take them out to sail the oceans.
Up to four tugboats sometimes require the monstrous 300-meter-long gas tankers that continually visit the regasification plant dangerously located inside the estuary between the towns.
And there were some events throughout history, the ship Ragazzona, survivor of the Invincible Armada, the battleship Howe or the destroyer Císcar were stranded here.
This estuary, once impregnable, had its channel flanked by a dozen forts whose artillery and a thick chain stretched across the width between two of them prevented access by sea to any enemy squadron.
Of so much strength, only some remains remain of the smaller ones and the two large castles, San Felipe, started by the second king of that name and consolidated in the 18th century, and that of La Palma in the 19th century, more modern but more ruined.
Looking at each other – old sentinels of the estuary – they wink at each other. He saved the Palm from that Tejero who wanted to make us retreat and first saved others who tried to make us advance: some of the well-intentioned protagonists of the Democratic Military Union.
The one from San Felipe impatiently hopes to be, one day, along with other 18th-century elements of the Ferrol of the Enlightenment, a World Heritage Site and has more tragic stories in the memory of its cells and its moats and memories of resistance and victory of that time. August 25, 1800, resisting, with very few means and a waste of courage, the attack of a large English army, with one hundred ships, which, unable to enter by sea, landed on the nearby beaches of Doniños and San Xurxo and tried to set up another Gibraltar in Ferrol or at least destroy the fleet and what were then the first arsenals in Europe.
They did not succeed, the battle of Brion made it difficult for the sons of the perfidious Albion, as they then said. Marshal Conde de Donadío and Navy Lieutenant General Juan Joaquín Moreno gathered a little more than 3,000 men, soldiers and civilians, ready to confront them with blood and fire, and General Pulteney and Rear Admiral Warren embarked again with their 15,000 troops and set out to always sea in between. They say that Napoleon toasted that day with champagne “to the brave Ferrolans…”.
All those memories, legends, old novels, about swordsmen, betrayals, loves and adventures, oral traditions lovingly preserved and transmitted float between the little houses of San Felipe, a fishing neighborhood in other times, with their feet almost in the sea and their clothes hanging to the air and the sun.
