The success of the fictional Netflix drama La Palma, depicting a volcano-triggered tsunami in the Canary islands, has echoes of a very real disaster that began in Portugal in the 1700s, but may have had major reverberations – literally – on a local West Cork beach.
AT about two o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, November 1st 1755, ‘the sea swelled in an uncommon manner in the Bay of Kinsale, rushing in like a mountain flood’, according to The Dublin Journal newspaper, dated November 4th that year.
