Coast of Hendaye
The Labourd shoreline where the twin rocks rise from the sea.
The Two Sisters of Hendaye
? Towers of a swallowed city ?
Quick facts
- • Place: Hendaye, Labourd
- • Basque name: Dunba Luzie eta Dunba Zabala
- • Figures involved: Inhabitants of the lost city
- • Motifs: sunken city, sea, rocks, punishment
- • Chronology: Ancient oral tradition
The legend
Off the coast of Hendaye, in Labourd, stand two rock formations known as the ?Two Sisters?: Dunba Luzie (the Tall One) and Dunba Zabala (the Broad One). Local fishermen have said for generations that they are not mere rocks.
According to the legend, they were once the highest towers of a prosperous coastal city. But its inhabitants fell into arrogance and sin, defying the laws of the sea and the sky. As punishment, a terrible storm was unleashed upon them.
The sea raged and swallowed the entire city in a single night. Waters covered houses, palaces and temples, dragging all its inhabitants to ruin. Only the two towers remained, standing as eternal witnesses to the catastrophe.
People say that on stormy nights, when the waves strike the rocks in fury, the bells of the sunken city can still be heard ringing beneath the water, a ghostly echo of what once stood in the depths.
Associated places
Bay of Txingudi
The bay where the Bidasoa flows into the sea, near the Two Sisters.
The twin rocks that guard the memory of a drowned city
The legend of the Two Sisters of Hendaye belongs to a wide family of stories in which the sea punishes human pride and leaves behind only fragments of what once stood above the water. In this case, the surviving rocks become a visible memory of an invisible disaster.
Such stories are powerful because they fuse landscape and moral lesson. The coastline is no longer just a geological shape: it becomes testimony. The rocks appear as towers, the storm as divine or cosmic punishment, and the sea as a force that keeps both memory and warning alive.
Storm, punishment and the echo of lost bells
The Basque coast preserves several narratives of drowned places, and this one fits especially well with the dramatic frontier landscape of Hendaye. There, the Atlantic, the cliffs and the estuary create the perfect setting for tales in which the world beneath the waves remains only half lost.
That is why the legend still resonates. It gives form to the uncanny sounds of the stormy sea and turns the Two Sisters into more than scenery: they are the last signs of a submerged city, still present through rumour, fear and imagination.
