Every English-language guide to San Sebastián describes the same three things: a curved beach, a pile of Michelin stars, and a pintxo bar crawl through the old quarter. What that framing leaves out is that the elegant look of the city, the Belle Époque buildings, the formal seafront promenade, the sense that everything was built to be looked at, was not designed for tourists at all. From 1887 until the late 1920s, the Spanish royal court relocated to this city every summer, and the government effectively moved with it. San Sebastián, known as Donostia in Basque, was Spain’s seasonal capital before it was ever a resort.
This matters because the resort framing makes the city sound like a product of modern tourism marketing, curated beaches and curated food scenes built for visitors. The actual history runs the other direction. A 19th-century queen regent built a palace here and brought the state with her. A 1950s film festival grew into one of only fourteen in the world holding the same accreditation as Cannes and Venice. A 2009 university project turned the region’s cooking into an accredited academic discipline. The postcard version of San Sebastián is real, but it is the surface of a provincial capital with a working fishing port and centuries of documented civic history underneath it, not the other way around.
This article draws on the city’s own tourism board historical archive, Mondragon University’s institutional records, the San Sebastián International Film Festival’s own archive, and cross-verified encyclopedic sources, checked against each other rather than repeated from a single guidebook.
The Summer Capital, and Why the City Looks the Way It Does
Spain’s royal family began visiting San Sebastián as early as the mid-19th century, when Isabel II came for sea bathing. The relationship became structural under Queen Regent María Cristina of Austria, widow of King Alfonso XII, who chose the city as her summer residence starting in 1887 and kept the practice going for more than four decades. She stayed first at the Palacio de Aiete, then commissioned the Palacio de Miramar, built between 1889 and 1893 on the bluff overlooking La Concha bay. She and her son, later King Alfonso XIII, continued summering in the city into the late 1920s.
Because the court itself relocated each summer, San Sebastián functioned during this period as something closer to a seasonal seat of government than a vacation spot. Aristocracy, diplomats, and the cultural elite of the era followed the crown north, and the Belle Époque architecture that still defines the city’s appearance, including the building that now serves as its city hall, originally a casino built in 1887, was constructed specifically to serve that role. The “elegant resort” look every guidebook mentions is inherited royal urban planning. It existed before anyone thought to market the city to visitors. Even the pastry counters served that court: the pantxineta, the trademarked puff pastry and custard tart born at Casa Otaegui, came out of exactly this French-facing kitchen culture.
The Film Festival and the Building That Houses It
The San Sebastián International Film Festival, known as Zinemaldia in Basque, was founded in September 1953. It began as an International Week of Spanish Cinema, created to promote the domestic film industry under the censorship conditions of the Franco era, before expanding into a genuinely international competitive festival. It became FIAPF-accredited in 1955 and has held FIAPF’s non-specialized competitive “A-category” status on a stable basis since 1985, a tier held by only fourteen festivals worldwide, the same list that includes Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Locarno, and Karlovy Vary. It is the oldest film festival in Spain.
Since 1999 the festival has been based at the Kursaal Congress Centre and Auditorium, designed by architect Rafael Moneo after he won a 1989 invited competition against five other internationally known architects, including Norman Foster and Arata Isozaki. Construction ran from 1996 to 1999 on the site of a former grand casino that had been demolished in 1973. The building’s two glass volumes are known locally as “Dos Rocas Varadas,” two beached rocks, and the project won the Mies van der Rohe Award for Contemporary European Architecture in 2001. A film festival with this tier of international accreditation, housed in an award-winning building, is not a tourist attraction in the ordinary sense. It is a serious cultural institution that happens to also draw visitors.
The Food Reputation Has an Actual Institution Behind It
Guidebooks count Michelin stars and stop there. What that count misses is that San Sebastián also hosts an accredited academic and research institution built specifically around Basque cuisine. The Basque Culinary Center was created in 2009 by Mondragon University together with a founding board of the region’s most established chefs, among them Juan Mari Arzak, Martín Berasategui, Pedro Subijana, Karlos Arguiñano, Andoni Luis Aduriz, Hilario Arbelaitz, and Eneko Atxa, with its campus opening in October 2011.
The center is not a cooking school in the casual sense. It houses the Faculty of Gastronomic Sciences, the first institution in Spain to offer an official university-level degree in gastronomy, alongside a dedicated food and gastronomy research and innovation center. Its founding partners include Mondragon University, the AZTI-Tecnalia technology center, the Basque Government, the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, and the San Sebastián City Council. That is a materially different claim than “the city has good chefs.” It means the region’s culinary output is backed by a standing accredited research faculty, which few food cities anywhere can claim.
A Founding Older Than the Crown, and a Port That Still Works
San Sebastián was founded in 1180 by King Sancho VI “the Wise” of Navarre, near a monastery dedicated to Saint Sebastian, and granted a fuero to formalize it as a port town. In 1265, use of the port passed to the Kingdom of Navarre as part of a royal wedding pact, cementing its role as Navarre’s outlet to the sea. The city has been destroyed and rebuilt more than once: a 1489 fire led to reconstruction in stone rather than timber, and in August 1813, Anglo-Portuguese forces, having taken the city from Napoleon’s occupying garrison during the Peninsular War, burned nearly the entire town. Only a handful of buildings on what is now Calle 31 de Agosto, named for the date, survived.
Down the coast toward France sits a neighbor with an even more direct version of that same Navarre connection. Hondarribia’s own fortress was built by a king of Navarre, and the town itself belonged to the kingdom until Castile took it by force around the year 1200.
Today Donostia / San Sebastián is the capital of the province of Gipuzkoa, within the Basque Autonomous Community, with a population of roughly 188,000. Its historic economy, still active alongside tourism, includes fishing and manufacturing. This is worth stating plainly because standard coverage skips it entirely: the city functions as a real provincial capital with its own working port and industrial base. It is not the administrative capital of the Basque Country as a whole, that is Vitoria-Gasteiz, and it is not the industrial, Guggenheim-defined city that Bilbao is. All three get folded together by visitors who assume any Basque city with a nice old quarter must be interchangeable with the others. Even their summer festivals get confused: Donostia’s own Semana Grande and Bilbao’s Aste Nagusia share a name in Spanish translation and nothing else, including the dates.
Where the Modern Pintxo Actually Began
One more fact belongs here because it connects directly back to Pamplona. The modern pintxo, the composed, skewered bar bite that defines Basque bar culture from Donostia to Pamplona, was invented at Bar Casa Vallés on Calle Reyes Católicos in San Sebastián’s old quarter in the late 1940s, when a regular customer skewered an anchovy, a guindilla pepper, and an olive onto a single toothpick and created what came to be called the Gilda. The bar’s founder, Blas Vallés, had moved to San Sebastián from Olite, in Navarra, to open it in 1942. Pamplona’s own pintxo scene, covered in Encierro’s pintxos guide, descends directly from what started on that bar counter. The traditional pairing for a pintxo in either city is txakoli, the lightly effervescent Basque white wine whose acidity cuts through cured fish and olive brine.
San Sebastián’s most photographed landmark beyond the bay itself is Eduardo Chillida’s sculpture ensemble “El Peine del Viento” (The Comb of the Wind), installed in 1977 at the western end of Ondarreta beach at the foot of Mount Igeldo, developed with architect Luis Peña Ganchegui, who designed the surrounding terraces. Chillida had begun the Peine del Viento series in 1952 and continued producing variations after this specific ensemble went in.
The city’s own festival calendar runs on a different week than San Fermín entirely. San Sebastián’s Semana Grande, built around a judged international fireworks competition over La Concha bay, is frequently and mistakenly conflated with Bilbao’s similarly named Aste Nagusia, a separate festival held on separate dates.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is San Sebastián the capital of the Basque Country?
No. San Sebastián (Donostia) is the capital of the province of Gipuzkoa. The administrative capital of the Basque Autonomous Community as a whole is Vitoria-Gasteiz. San Sebastián is often mistaken for the regional capital because it is the most visited of the three major Basque cities.
Why was San Sebastián called Spain’s summer capital?
Because the royal court itself relocated there each summer starting in 1887, under Queen Regent María Cristina, who built the Palacio de Miramar for the purpose and continued the practice with her son Alfonso XIII into the late 1920s. Aristocracy, diplomats, and government business followed the crown north for the season, which is why the label refers to an actual seasonal seat of government, not simply a fashionable vacation habit.
What makes the San Sebastián Film Festival significant?
It holds FIAPF’s “A-category” accreditation, a tier held by only fourteen festivals in the world, alongside Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Locarno, and Karlovy Vary. Founded in 1953, it is the oldest film festival in Spain and has been based at the Kursaal Congress Centre, designed by Rafael Moneo, since 1999.
Where was the pintxo invented?
At Bar Casa Vallés on Calle Reyes Católicos in San Sebastián’s old quarter, in the late 1940s, when a regular customer skewered an anchovy, a guindilla pepper, and an olive onto a toothpick to create the Gilda. Every composed pintxo served in Basque bars today, including in Pamplona, descends from that bite.
One practical note for anyone routing through the region for San Fermín: Pamplona’s own airport serves a limited route network, so many visitors use San Sebastián or Bilbao as their actual point of entry instead.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.