The old sea lions say, there, in the suffocating heat of the dark taverns that proliferate in the depths of the narrow streets bordering the port, that there was a time when from the small fortress where a humble lighthouse was later installed, the proud Knights Templar scanned the horizon, controlling every ship heading for port.

And that there, not far from the breakwater that the wild waters of the Cantabrian Sea constantly hit, preventing the seagulls from nesting, the sailors of their powerful fleet brought them news of the Holy Land, a place that, as everyone knows, was their origin and where they were. their Mother House, until they were definitively evicted by the great Muslim leader, Saladin, shortly after the terrible defeat of the battle known as the Horns of Hattin, which meant the beginning of the end of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem.

There was a time, disastrous for the Order, in which the ships of its fleet stopped coming and they also had to abandon their residences and the company of the imposing church of Santa María la Blanca, whose construction not only helped pay but also it also included the knowledge of the new style, the Gothic, which they had previously imported from the Holy Land when they returned to the continent.

Today, they are hardly a memory, but the old swear and perjure, especially when the golden wine that the Basques call Txacolí looses its tongue, that on the nights of every Friday the 13th, in the spectral light of the moon, a ghostly galley sets sail, hoisting the black and white banner of the Order, sets course for Jerusalem, in an unsuccessful attempt to regain that, their Mother House, which they once had to abandon.

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