Stroms Hellier (Stroms Heelor) is a steep-sided rocky cove located off the
Swartz Geo inlet on
Fair Isle
Fair Isle (; sco, Fair Isle; non, Friðarey; gd, Fara) is an island in Shetland, in northern Scotland. It lies about halfway between mainland Shetland and Orkney. It is known for its bird observatory and a traditional style of knitting. Th ...
in the Scottish
Shetland Islands
Shetland, also called the Shetland Islands and formerly Zetland, is a subarctic archipelago in Scotland lying between Orkney, the Faroe Islands and Norway. It is the northernmost region of the United Kingdom.
The islands lie about to the no ...
.
On 27 September 1588 one of the vessels of the
Spanish Armada
The Spanish Armada (a.k.a. the Enterprise of England, es, Grande y Felicísima Armada, links=no, lit=Great and Most Fortunate Navy) was a Spanish fleet that sailed from Lisbon in late May 1588, commanded by the Duke of Medina Sidonia, an aris ...
, ''
El Gran Grifón
''El Gran Grifón'' was the flagship of the Spanish Armada's supply squadron of Baltic hulks (built in and chartered from the City of Rostock, in modern-day Germany); see List of Ships of the Spanish Armada. She was shipwrecked on Fair Isle, Shet ...
'', foundered here during the night, and many of the ship's crew climbed her masts as she was sinking and made it to shore. According to one account, despite the fact that the Spanish were officially enemies of all of the subject's of
Queen Elizabeth, the islanders welcomed them and the Spanish behaved well and stayed for two months. According to another, the arrival of so many Spaniards nearly doubled the population of the island which was already at the subsistence level, and although the Spanish paid well for what they took, competition with the local families for resources became scarce over time, and some soldiers, weakened by lack of food and water, may even have been murdered by the locals.
An archaeological investigation was carried out in the cove in 1970 by Colin Martin and Sydney Wignall.
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{{coord, 59.517, N, 1.628, W, display=title
Fair Isle