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 n ...

. 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 ar ...

, '' El Gran Grifón'', 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 Queen Elizabeth, Queen Elisabeth or Elizabeth the Queen may refer to: Queens regnant * Elizabeth I (1533–1603; ), Queen of England and Ireland * Elizabeth II (1926–2022; ), Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms * Queen ...

, 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