José María de Torrijos y Uriarte

José María Torrijos y Uriarte, Count of Torrijos, a title granted posthumously by the Queen regent of Spain, also known as General Torrijos, was a Spanish Liberal soldier. He fought in the Spanish War of Independence, and after the restoration of absolutism by Ferdinand VII in 1814 he participated in the 1817 pronunciamiento of John Van Halen that sought to restore the Constitution of 1812, for which he spent two years in prison until he was released after the triumph of the Riego uprising in 1820. He returned to fight the French when the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis invaded Spain to restore the absolute power of Ferdinand VII, and when they triumphed, ending the Trienio Liberal, he was exiled to England. There he prepared and led an expedition, landing on the coast of Málaga from Gibraltar on 2 December 1831, with sixty men accompanying him. However, they fell into the trap that had been laid for them by the absolutist authorities and were arrested. Nine days later, on 11 December, Torrijos and 48 of his fellow survivors were shot without trial on the beach of San Andres de Málaga, an event immortalised by a sonnet by José de Espronceda entitled To the death of Torrijos and his Companions, by Enrique Gil y Carrasco's A la memoria del General Torrijos, and by a well-known 1888 painting by Antonio Gisbert. "This tragic end to his life explains why he has gone down in history, quite rightly, as a great symbol of the struggle against despotism and tyranny, with the epic nobility and serenity characteristic of the romantic hero, immortalised in the famous painting [by Gisbert]." The city of Málaga erected a monument to Torrijos and his companions in the Plaza de la Merced, next to the birthplace of the painter Pablo Picasso. Beneath the monument to Torrijos in the middle of the square are the tombs of 48 of the 49 men shot; one of them, British, was buried in the English cemetery (Málaga).