San Carlos Garden, A Coruña

The garden of San Carlos was built as a defensive castle outside the walls in the 14th century and would be attached to the city in the 16th. It gradually lost importance as a bastion or "Old Fortress" and, after the explosion of the powder magazine it contained, it was abandoned until the 18th century when it was recovered as a garden by Charles F. de Croix.

The current appearance of the garden of San Carlos is due to the governor Francisco de Mazarredo in 1834 and presents a characteristic of a romantic garden. It has been declared a Historic-Artistic Site along with the walls.

Its value lies in its privileged location from which you can see, thanks to its viewpoint, the entire port of La Coruña, in its vegetation, and in the tomb, a sepulchre designed as a funerary monument, of the Scottish general Sir John Moore, who died in the battle of Elviña in 1809 fighting while defending the embarkation of the English army against the French Napoleonic troops of General Soult.

Numerous species of both native and exotic trees are present in the garden, of which two gigantic centenary elm trees stand out.

There are also plaques paying tribute to the 172 officers and men of the Royal English Navy who died in the wreck of the ship "Serpent" near Cape Villano on 10 November 1890.

The English general Lord Wellington addressed a proclamation to the army at the headquarters of Lesaca on September 4, 1813 after the Battle of San Marcial on August 31 of that year, remembered in San Carlos, in which he praised the army that he himself commanded: "Spaniards: dedicate yourselves to imitate the inimitable Galicians," said Wellington.

The City Council, at the proposal of the then Mayor Manuel Casas, agreed to place on July 14, 1927 two tombstones with fragments of poems dedicated to Sir John Moore. The first, in English, was written by Charles Wolfe and entitled "The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna", while the second was written by Rosalía de Castro in Galician and entitled "Na tomba do xeneral inglés Sir John Moore".

The building attached to the gardens is the headquarters of the Archive of the Kingdom of Galicia, the most important historical archive of the community of Galicia. It is a state-owned center managed since 1989 by the Junta de Galicia.