The galleys had sailed from the Spanish base at Blavet in Brittany on 26 July, hunting for a place to bleed the English coast. After calling at Penmarch and sinking a French barque manned by an English crew, Amésquita turned north. He needed someone who knew where to land. He had brought one: Richard Burley, an English Catholic from Weymouth, who guided the squadron onto a rocky beach a few hundred yards west of Mousehole's harbour. The choice of Cornwall was deliberate. Since the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, when Cornish parishioners had risen against the imposition of English-language worship, Madrid had nursed a quiet hope that the Cornish might welcome a return to the old faith. Amésquita came partly to test that hope, partly to recoup the treasure England had seized off Pernambuco four months earlier, partly to spook Francis Drake before his planned expedition against Panama. The villagers of Mousehole knew none of this. They saw galleys, and they ran.

The vanguard struck inland and reached the parish of Paul, half a mile up the slope, before any defence could form. The village was defenceless. The Spanish sacked and burned it, and put the church of St Pol de Leon to the torch. Amésquita, in a letter home, called the building a 'mosque', the language of a man steeped in the Reconquista applied to a Cornish parish church. Four residents of Paul were killed. Several more were taken prisoner. By the time Francis Godolphin, the local landowner and Sheriff of Cornwall, had scraped together about a hundred lightly armed men, the Spanish artillery scattered them; the Cornish fell back toward Marazion and the shelter of St Michael's Mount. Newlyn burned next. Then Penzance. The galleys swung their guns onto the town itself, and the bombardment destroyed roughly 400 houses and sank three merchant ships laden with wine. Godolphin tried again to rally his men. They ran again.

On the third day, before re-embarking, Amésquita did something almost theatrical. He sent Brother Domingo Martínez ashore with a field altar and celebrated a Catholic mass in the open air on the Western Hill outside the smoking ruins of Penzance, the first Latin mass on English soil since Elizabeth's accession nearly forty years before. It was less a religious act than a flag planted in scorched ground, a message that the war was not over and that Spain could put priests on Cornish hills whenever it chose. Then Amésquita released his prisoners, herded his men back to the galleys, and on 4 August stood out to sea. Sir Nicholas Clifford arrived with a relieving force soon after, too late, and spent his fury on the villagers rather than the enemy, accusing the common folk of abandoning Godolphin. The next day, off Penmarch, Amésquita met a Dutch squadron of forty-six ships, sank two of them, and limped back to Port Louis on 10 August. He had lost twenty men. He had also, briefly, broken England's myth of an inviolable coastline.

Newlyn and Penzance rebuilt. Mousehole, the smallest and the first to burn, never fully recovered. For generations afterwards Cornish families on this coast carried the story without quite knowing what to do with it: a defeat with no battle, an invasion with no occupation, a war their inland countrymen seemed to forget. The Spanish never came back in force. The Armada year had been 1588; this was a coda nobody had asked for, a reminder that the long sea-war between Madrid and London still had teeth. Centuries later the novelist Winston Graham, better known for the Poldark books, built his historical novel The Grove of Eagles around the raid, sending his fictional protagonist running through the burning villages in search of a woman married to the Vicar of Paul. The fiction stays close to the record. The record itself stays close to the houses that were rebuilt: in Mousehole, the Keigwin Arms still stands on the harbour, named for the man who died in 1595 defending his door.

From the air the geography of the raid is laid out in a single sweep. Mousehole's tight stone harbour sits at the western horn of Mount's Bay, with Newlyn and Penzance climbing the curve to the north and east, and St Michael's Mount itself a granite punctuation mark four miles across the water. The whole arc that Amésquita sailed and burned can be flown in a few minutes.