Medes Islands

The Illes Medes is a small and craggy organization of 7 islets inside the northwestern Mediterranean Sea. Administratively, the Medes Archipelago belongs to the Baix Emporda comarca, Catalonia, Spain. The islands are positioned close to the shore, east of the coastal metropolis of L'Estartit. In the 15th century, the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem built a castle on Meda Gran. They subsequently left and pirate assaults inside the 16th century broken the castle. The fortress have become a jail throughout the 18th century and on the time of the Napoleonic Wars was again fortified.

On 29 August 1811 General Joaquin Ibanez Cuevas de Valonga, Baron de Eroles, on the behest of Luis Roberto de Lacy and with the assistance of HMS Cambrian, a Colonel Green, and British troops, landed, captured, and destroyed the fortress the French had constructed on Meda Gran. Green then ordered the castle abandoned, and symbolically renamed the islands the Isles of the Restoration. The last military garrison left in 1890.