This is evidenced by a letter from U.S. Hispanist Walter Cook addressed at that time to Teresa’s Republican art advisor, Josep Gudiol. Recently, historian Guillem Cañameras has found four love letters that Sapiens magazine has released exclusively. Thanks to these texts we know that, after the failure of the military uprising of 18 July in Catalonia, Amatller fled to Turin, spent the summer of 1937 in Paris, but on 4 October of that year he was already in San Sebastian and there he remained until the end of the war.

Inherited from the chocolate company of his father Teresa and from the house Amatller, located in the Passeig de Gracia, the house Amatller is a modernist work by the architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch, located next to the well-known Casa Batlló of Antoni Gaudí and open to the public. Like 60,000 other Catalans, he took refuge in Francoist territory.

San Sebastian easily fell into Franco's hands in September 1936. The war did not cause great damage to the buildings, but according to the Falangist Unit newspaper, 48% of the Donostiarras fled the city when the Francoists entered it. Many Madrilenians and, above all, Catalans fled the Republican zone and then headed to the Gipuzkoan capital, where they remained in detention. Before the Republic, the place of summer of the royal family became a refuge for the high bourgeoisie.

We don’t have much detail about Teresa Ametller’s stay, only she stayed “at a friend’s house.” But most of those who took refuge in the national area were not falangists and did not have a concrete political profile. They were Conservatives and Catholics, and their main concern was the maintenance of social and political status. And let the war go as comfortably as possible. Most people lived in hotels such as Nice, Biarritz, San Ignacio, Hispano-American or Prince of Saboya. Many others in the houses of the Gros neighborhood, where there was so much talk of Catalan, the neighborhood was called Barceloneta. In the pastry shops they sold panellets and in the charcuterie, butifarras.

And not only did the city take care of the gastronomic culture, but the Falangist magazines La ametralladora y Vértice were published in it, thus becoming the main cultural center of the Francoists during the war. At the end of the war, Teresa Amatller and company returned home to resume the task they had left behind. But when the “flowering” of San Sebastian in those years seemed to fall, Franco decided to spend the summers in the palace of Aiete.