Abbeygate Street lower: a street that drips with Spanish blood.

Heading east on Shop Street, heading towards Eyre Square, turn right at Lynch’s Castle, walking down by Powell’s Four Corners. Well! Can you feel it? Can you smell it? Can you hear it? Here on a June afternoon in 1589, William Fitzwilliam, Queen Elizabeth’s Vice-Roy, commanded his soldiers to ‘do their worst, and find the treasure!’ Just 9 months earlier, September 1588, some 20 ships of the Grand Armada, a 200 ship-strong Spanish invasion fleet, had been wrecked on the western shore of Ireland by a hurricane of two centuries' strength. Two thousand men were drowned, another two thousand butchered by the English on the beaches. Three hundred Spanish sailors and soldiers, noblemen, clerics and cabin boys were rescued by the O’Flaherties from a shipwreck at Carna, in Connemara. For their protection, they brought them to the city of Galway, where many Spanish ships traded with the merchants of Galway city. Unfortunately, word of Galway’s treachery was brought to the Queen and she sent her Viceroy with two thousand men to capture the helpless Spaniards. On one fateful afternoon they tortured the Spaniards, hoping they would reveal where their treasure, if treasure there was, was hidden. When they could not answer, for the treasure lay at the bottom of Galway with their ship, the English beheaded each Spaniard on this street. It was said the blood ran like red wine all the way to the harbour. Their bodies were buried in a pit at the back of the old Augustinian Abbey, now Forthill Cemetery, beside the harbour, and their heads, well, their heads, they lost their heads. They were placed on spikes at the gates of every town on Galway’s coastline as a lesson to the Irish. On quiet nights in September, when the city sleeps, wisps of mist drift up this street, carrying scents of terror and blood, and red wine, Spanish wine, running down the street to the docks.