San Antón Castle
San Antón Castle (A Coruña).
At the end of the Middle Ages, a chapel devoted to San Antón was built on a small islet in the ría of A Coruña as a place to shelter the sick navigators of the gangrenous evil "Fire of San Antón". This islet was later used as a lazaretto, a place to confine travelers suspicious of suffering leprosy.
The construction of San Antón Castle began in 1587, as indicated by the inscription located together with the coat of arms of the Marquis of Cerralbo in the frontispiece of the fortress. During the English assault by Francis Drake in 1589, the castle that was still under construction, effectively defended the walls of the city with its artillery. King Felipe II ordered that the fort be finished under the direction of the engineer Rodríguez Muñiz.
After the attack of 1639, in which the French squadron besieged the city, the bay of A Coruña remained protected by the cross fire between the castles of San Antón and San Diego (no longer in existence). After this assault, the Marquis of Valparaíso proposed to Felipe IV to reform the fortification. It was completed in the XVIIIth century, when the engineer Antonio López Sopeña built la Casa del Gobernador (The Governor's House) with its small neoclassical chapel in the shaft of the composition of the building. In the XXth century, the castle was joined to the land making it no longer an island. In the 1960s, the Ministry of the Army relinquished it to the city, after a long time of it being a military prison. In 1964, it was converted into the Historical and Archaeological Museum of A Coruña (Museo Arqueológico e Histórico de A Coruña).
WikipediaWebsite:http://www.coruna.gal/sites/Satellite?pagename=cultura/Page/Generico-Page-Generica&cid=1322783576553&itemID=1149055937727&itemType=Entidad
