The Marqués del Duero, founder of San Pedro Alcántara

Regular visitors to the town will recognise the name as that of one of the main streets in San Pedro, but did you know that the man after whom it is named – the founder of San Pedro – was actually born in Córdoba? What’s more, not Córdoba in Andalucía but Córdoba del Tucumán in Argentina.

The Marquis is best known as a famous Spanish general, who rose to fame as one of the leaders of the liberals in the Carlist wars – a series of civil wars that beset Spain in the 19th century. Though most of the main battles were fought in the north of the country, the famous military and political leader is best known in these parts as the founder of the town we lovingly call San Pedro Alcántara.

Born Manuel Gutiérrez de la Concha y Irigoyen, the Marqués del Duero is buried in the national pantheon in Madrid, though his living legacy lays here on the Costa del Sol, where he founded an advanced agricultural community on one of the landed estates of his wife, Francisca de Paula Tovar y Gasca, in the 1850s.

The sugarcane estates that were such a feature of the coast when the earliest tourists first began to arrive here in the 1950s were his creation, and remnants of the original sugar mill still remain in El Ingenio, the original part of the settlement. The Marquis proved to be a visionary, employing modern equipment imported from abroad and creating an advanced community that paved the way for what is now a bustling town at the heart of the Costa del Sol.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons