I had driven the short distance here after a leisurely lunch of squid-ink paella at Restaurante Garum in Huelva’s center, with my hosts, Juan Antonio Márquez, a dentist and president of the Asociación Huelva Nueva York, and his wife, Maricruz Navarro, a physician. Now approaching the pedestal’s base, we entered an interior crypt-like shrine, which holds a stone statue of Columbus’s patrons, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. Describing her subjects, Whitney wrote: “A romantic queen emerged in royal regalia, strong, proud and yet feminine too, a king thoughtful yet full of pomp.”

Back outside, the fading sun at our backs, my companions regaled me, in animated, splintered English, with tales of the monument, of grandparents who played in its shadow and swam at the beach next door, of Huelva’s connections to America, of their friend Diego a Walt Whitman-reciting ecologist and astronomy buff, who gives tours dressed in the top hat and dark wool suit favored by the American lawyer William Page, who hatched the idea for this public sculpture in 1917. I met a caricaturist named José Manuel who showed me some of the fanciful cartoons he has published of my great-grandmother with her statue. Listening to them, I realized just how meaningful this imposing, noble statue is to Huelva’s people. It has become their city’s symbol, and my great-grandmother is a revered figure in this place so far from her home.

Image Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney with the head of her Columbus Monument in Huelva, Spain. Credit... Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

As I glanced up at the monument again, the sun glinting off its time-softened edges, I marveled at Gertrude’s creation, her imagination and technical skills, and couldn’t help wondering what my progressive great-grandmother would think of the current controversy and fissures surrounding Columbus — and other polarizing historical figures — in the United States today. Given criticism of Columbus as a European colonizer whose journeys led to the decimation of American indigenous populations, I can imagine she too might prefer Indigenous Peoples’ Day to the Columbus Day holiday.