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Siege of Roses (1808) 1808

Siege of Roses (1808): Siège de la ville de Roses et du château de Trinité
Image: https://www.photo.rmn.fr/archive/07-519124-2C6NU0CMYGMA.html, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Recorded location from Wikidata; battle sites are often approximate.

Key facts

Date7 November 1808 – 5 December 1808Wikidata
Year1808Wikidata P580 (start time)
Era19th century (1800–1913)derived from year
LocationSpainNatural Earth (modern borders)
ContinentEuropeNatural Earth
War / conflictPeninsular WarWikidata P361
ParticipantsFirst French Empire, Kingdom of Italy, Kingdom of Spain, United Kingdom of Great Britain and IrelandWikidata P710
Coordinates42.2667, 3.1833Wikidata P625

About the battle

The Siege of Roses or Siege of Rosas from 7 November to 5 December 1808 saw an Imperial French corps led by Laurent Gouvion Saint-Cyr invest a Catalan and Spanish garrison commanded by Peter O'Daly. After a siege lasting a month in which the haven and town of Roses was captured and the nearby Trinity Castle invested by over 13,000 French and Italian infantry, artillery and cavalry with heavy siege trains on the hills above, the citadel was surrendered to the Napoleonic forces. Roses (Rosas) is located 43 kilometres (27 mi) northeast of Girona, Catalonia, Spain. The action occurred during the Peninsular War, part of the Napoleonic Wars.

In the summer and fall of 1808, an Imperial French corps under Guillaume Philibert Duhesme was isolated in Barcelona by a 24,000-man Spanish army led by Juan Miguel de Vives y Feliu. With 23,000 men, Gouvion Saint-Cyr moved from the French border to relieve Duhesme's troops. The first obstacle to Gouvion Saint-Cyr's mission was the haven of Roses defended by a large citadel with sea approaches defended by a headland castle. The 3,500 Catalan and Spanish defenders of Roses were mostly local miquelets (militia) stiffened by a small unit of regulars from the Fija de Roses garrison.

Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Siege of Roses (1808) (revision 1370744845), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section; shortened by selecting paragraphs and trimming at a sentence boundary; formatting and citations removed. No text added.

Location

42.2667, 3.1833 · Spain

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