The War of Independence
(19th century)
The Fort in the 19th century
In the 19th century, the Fort of San Damián did not undergo any major modifications.
At the beginning of the new century, Ribadeo continued to be an important commercial port in the Cantabrian area. Pascual Madoz in his ‘Diccionario geográfico – estadístico – histórico de España y sus posesiones de ultramar’ referring to the port of Ribadeo says: ‘it is the best known and most frequented from Ferrol to Santander’.
In the second half of the 18th century, the massive importation of flax and hemp from northern European ports for the manufacture of linen on Galician looms made the port of Ribadeo the main recipient of these vegetable fibres in Galicia. This intense commercial traffic increased even more towards the end of the century when the local port was opened for trade with America.
All of this would cause Ribadeo to experience a period of splendour and economic and social development that would last until the end of the first quarter of the 19th century.
The Fort of San Damián continued, therefore, to play an important and strategic role in the defence and surveillance of the coast for the Crown.
In the Relación topográfica de las plazas y puestos fortificados del Reino de Galicia (Topographical report of the squares and fortified posts in the Kingdom of Galicia) drawn up in 1800 by the then Director of Engineering in Galicia, Miguel Hermosilla y Carvajal, with the aim of analysing their condition and, if necessary, proposing the necessary works in each of them to put them in a state of defence, the excellent conditions of the local port for trade and the existence in the town of Ribadeo of ‘administrations of all the revenues that produce much for the King’ are expressly noted.
After analysing the situation of the fortification, Hermosilla pointed out the existence of a flaw in its design that needs to be corrected.
The natural sling where the ships moor is located right in front of the location of the fort. But of the fourteen arrow slits it has, eleven point towards the entrance to the estuary, being very poorly oriented towards the sling landing area, and three towards the interior of the port, so they do not defend the sling landing area, which is in front of the most acute angle of the battery. As a result, it was unable to prevent several ships anchored there from being ‘insulted’ by the enemy in the summer of 1798.
To solve this problem, he designed a solution that rounded off the aforementioned acute portion and modified the distribution of the arrow slits to adapt them to the fort’s artillery complement of 10 cannons (one of which was reported to be unserviceable). The work is estimated to take 2-3 months at a cost of 38,354 reais. However, this reform will never be carried out.
At the beginning of the century, however, we know that the fort was in a situation of semi-abandonment. The detachment of troops made up of more than 40 men that had been regularly based in San Damián since the end of the previous century, was reduced in 1805 to just two soldiers and a corporal from the regiment of León, and eight villagers. This provoked a complaint from the Town Council, which, in the context of the Anglo-Spanish war, unsuccessfully requested the Captain General to send troops to protect the port and the castle.
Dismantling and abandonment of the Fort
The War of Independence and the French occupation will be a decisive turning point in the history and evolution of the fort.
After taking Mondoñedo without any opposition, the behaviour of the French in Ribadeo was to provoke reactions in the local population that were to spread throughout the Mariña Lucense.
On 25th January 1809, the French general François Fournier left Mondoñedo for Ribadeo in command of 150 men. Before his arrival, soldiers and villagers stormed the castle of San Damián, set fire to the gunpowder magazine and threw the cannons into the sea.
On his arrival in the town, Fournier set up a barracks in the convent of Santa Clara. He proclaimed Joseph Napoleon king of Spain and demanded bread, meat, wine, eggs, straw, barley and firewood from all the surrounding villages.
Tired of the excesses committed by the French, the residents of the parishes of Ribadeo got together and organised an uprising against the French troops. The resistance offered by the so-called ‘Ribadeo cordon’ caused Fournier to lose 60 soldiers and 25 horses in the space of a week in different actions.
At the end of January, General Joseph Worster arrived with his troops on the banks of the Eo. On the first of February he mounted a battery in San Román de Figueras, firing on Ribadeo and hitting some of the town’s buildings, repeating the attack the following day and landing in Ribadeo.
Once in the town, Worster’s auxiliary troops committed all kinds of excesses, trying to kill the members of the Junta de Defensa, whom they considered to be Frenchified, but they only succeeded with Don Antonio Raimundo Ibáñez.
Forced to ask for reinforcements from Lugo and Ferrol, Fournier received the support of 2,000 infantrymen. With these troops he eliminated the local resistance and on 5 February he entered Ribadeo. He left the town at the beginning of March.
After being used for a brief period of time as a military hospital to treat the wounded from the hospital built in Oviedo with the arrival of the French, the Fort of San Damián was finally abandoned in July 1810. It remained open and at the mercy of looting by the neighbours until its entrance was walled up in 1813.