Gela Urdina

An old legend tells that the waves threw a shipwrecked man to the beach of Zarautz. It was 1572. The stranger was taken care of by the owners of the Narros Palace and they put him up in the Blue Room so that he could recover.

Legend has it that the shipwrecked man was a fugitive Huguenot, who, after the massacre carried out by the Catholics on the night of Saint Bartholomew in Paris, tried to escape from France. He left La Rochelle, bound for England in a galleon, but a strong storm in the Bay of Biscay frustrated his voyage.

The shipwreck worsened and in his feverish delirium he cursed and disavowed the Catholic faith. He died in the Blue Room, without receiving the holy sacraments. It was August 23rd, Saint Bartholomew's Day. Evil tongues say that we can still hear his screams in the Palace and that if we are attentive the paintings speak trying to tell us what happened.

It was Luis Coloma, the Jesuit writer, who recovered this legend in 1912. In a story he narrates his own experience in the Blue Room of the Palace of Narros. He says that it was a mysterious night in which he felt a ghostly presence accompanied by screams that produced real panic.

In 2018, recalling the legend of the Blue Room, we wanted to start a hotel. But the mysteries of the Blue Room linger on.

Are you willing to discover, the who, the how and the why they killed the shipwrecked man?