Dragut - known in Turkish as Turgut Reis - was among the most feared naval commanders of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, a corsair admiral who operated from North Africa and inherited the mantle of the great Barbarossa. Cullera was one stop on a raiding campaign. He had already struck Benalmádena, Benissa and Sant Joan d'Alacant with a fleet of twenty-seven galleys, then sailed north to sack Valencia itself before turning on Cullera. For a town without walls strong enough to hold off a professional war fleet, resistance was hopeless. The corsairs took the goods, and then they took the people.

Before the captives could be shipped across the sea, they were held in a cave beneath Cullera's mountain - a holding pen for human beings about to be sold. From there they were carried to Algiers, then the busiest slave market of the Barbary coast, where captured Europeans were ransomed back to their families if they were lucky and sold into bondage if they were not. For those taken from Cullera, the raid meant the sudden, total loss of home, livelihood and often of one another. Some would have spent years in captivity; some never returned at all. It is worth pausing on that reality, because it is easy to let a word like 'sack' hide the individual grief behind it.

Cullera's fate was not unique. Through the sixteenth century, corsair raids made the entire Valencian shore a dangerous frontier, and communities responded by building watchtowers along the cliffs and headlands, manned to raise the alarm when strange sails appeared. The scattered towers that still stand on this coast are monuments to a century of fear, links in a coastal alarm network meant to give villages a few precious minutes to flee inland. For those already taken, hope often rested with the religious redemption orders, which raised money across Spain to ransom Christian captives home from North Africa - though many were never bought back at all. Dragut, meanwhile, sailed on. After Cullera he crossed to Majorca and struck Pollença, where roughly 130 more people were killed or captured. His name would echo along these coasts for decades as a byword for sudden violence from the sea.

The cave where the captives were held has become the town's memorial to what happened. Today it holds a museum commemorating the attack, and - in a strange twist of historical memory - a statue of Dragut himself, the raider now cast as a fixture of local legend. Much of what is known about the event comes from the Valencian chronicler Pere Joan Porcar, whose diary preserved the date and the memory for later generations. Standing in the cool dark of that cave, it is not hard to imagine the frightened people once crowded there, and to feel how close the past can still be.

Cullera is now a sunlit resort of long beaches and busy restaurants, and most visitors climb its castle-topped mountain for the view rather than the history. But the story of 1550 is woven into the town's sense of itself, a reminder that this gentle coast was once a raw edge of a wider Mediterranean struggle. To know the raid is to see Cullera differently: not only as a beach town, but as a place that endured one of the darkest days in its long history and chose to remember it.