Tower of Hercules

The tower is known to have existed by the first century and is the oldest known Roman lighthouse still extant. Its origin is unknown; it was built, or perhaps rebuilt, by the emperor Trajan, possibly on foundations of Phoenician design and on a plan taken from the Lighthouse of Alexandria, though pottery from the site has also been used to place the work between the reigns of Nero and Vespasian. A votive stone at the base reads MARTI AVG.SACR C.SEVIVS LVPVS ARCHITECTVS ÆMINIENSIS LVSITANVS.EX.VO, naming the architect as Gaius Sevius Lupus of Aeminium, the present Coimbra in Portugal, then in Lusitania, and offering the work to Mars. It has been in continuous use since the second century.

The oldest written notice of it is in the Historiae adversum Paganos of Paulus Orosius, written about 415 to 417, which records a very tall lighthouse at the Gallaecian city of Brigantia, raised for looking towards Britannia. Until the twentieth century the building was called the Farum Brigantium. It probably lost its maritime use in the Middle Ages, when it was turned into a fortification. Throughout the Middle Ages naval crusading itineraries to the Holy Land named the lighthouse as an obligatory stopover, and crusader fleets would usually disembark there to reach the shrine of the Apostle James the Greater at Santiago de Compostela on foot. Two of those works, De expugnatione Lyxbonensi and De itinere Frisunum, helped perpetuate the legend that Julius Caesar had built the tower, perhaps from a misreading of the ancient inscription.

Several stories have been told about the tower's origin, and they are legend rather than record. In one, Hercules landed on this coast, killed the giant Geryon, king of Brigantium, buried his head beneath a mound topped with a great torch and founded a city beside it. That version comes from a general chronicle of the late thirteenth century that drew on Mediterranean mythology to give the Brigantia lighthouse a past, and it was promoted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the Farum Brigantium was renamed the Tower of Hercules and Hercules displaced Breogán in the telling. In the coat of arms of A Coruña the lighthouse stands atop a skull and crossbones representing the buried head. In the Irish Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of Invasions, king Breogán, the founding father of the Galician Celtic nation, raised a tower so high that his sons saw a distant green shore from its top and were drawn north to Ireland, where their descendants are said to have stayed as the Celtic ancestors of the Irish. Some have identified that tower with this one, and a colossal statue of Breogán has been raised near the lighthouse.

In 1682 the Duke of Uceda commissioned an architectural restoration from the architect Amaro Antune, who ran a wooden stair up through the vaults to two small towers at the top that carried the lanterns. Under Charles III the rebuilding was complete: the surviving 34-metre Roman core was cased in neoclassical work and given a new fourth storey of 21 metres, directed by the naval engineer Eustaquio Giannini, begun in 1788 and finished in 1791. The face the tower presents is that eighteenth-century remodelling, and within it the much-repaired Roman and medieval masonry is still visible.

In 1931 the tower was declared a historic and artistic monument, and it holds the protected status of bien de interés cultural. A candidacy for the UNESCO list was launched in 2007, and on 27 June 2009, at a session held in Seville, the tower was inscribed as a World Heritage Site, a bid that had wide popular and institutional backing in A Coruña. Between April 2013 and May 2014 it was carried on the Red List of Endangered Heritage. It works still as a lighthouse, the oldest in operation in the world.