Torre del Tostón

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Torre del Tostón
Castillo de El Tostón 2018 2.jpg
Alternative name (s): Castillo de El Cotillo
Creation time : 1741-1743
Conservation status: restored
Place: El Cotillo , municipality of La Oliva
Geographical location 28 ° 40 '48 "  N , 14 ° 0' 38"  W Coordinates: 28 ° 40 '48 "  N , 14 ° 0' 38"  W.
Torre del Tostón (Canary Islands)
Torre del Tostón

The Torre del Tostón , also Castillo de El Cotillo, is a defense tower from the 18th century in El Cotillo , the former Puerte del Tostón , on the Canary Island of Fuerteventura .

history

The Canary Islands were repeatedly exposed to attacks by Berber , French and British pirates well into the 18th century . After a British raid in 1740, the Spanish captain general of the Canaries, Andrés Bonito y Pignatelli, ordered the construction of additional military fortifications. For Fuerteventura, he commissioned the military engineer Claudio de L'Isle to build two defense towers to protect the ports of Tostón and Caleta de Fuste . De L'Isle erected two almost identical towers by 1743, but died shortly before their completion. The Torre del Tostón is dedicated to Our Lady on the Pillar and Saint Michael (Nuestra Señora del Pilar y San Miguel) . Since the end of the pirate raids coincided with the time of its completion, the tower never had to actively demonstrate its ability to effectively defend the port of Tostón.

In many travel guides and also on the information board in El Cotillo you can read that de L'Isle built the Torre del Tostón on the foundations of the fortress Rico Roque , which was built in 1404 under the Norman conqueror of the eastern Canary Islands, Jean de Béthencourt , built, but conquered and destroyed by the old Canaries . This assumption is considered outdated in research. Reference is made to the French chronicle Le Canarien , according to which Rico Roque was standing on a spring on a steep slope at a distance of one leuge (about 4.8 kilometers), which is not the case for the Torre del Tostón. The real location of Rico Roque was found near Pozo Negro on the east coast of Fuerteventura.

description

The Torre del Tostón is strategically dominant on the steep coast southeast of El Cotillo. It is made of dark volcanic natural stones that were broken near the church. The tower has the shape of a truncated cone with a circular base. Its diameter decreases from 14.5 m at the base to 12.5 m at the top. Behind the more than one and a half meter thick walls there are two floors, the lower one being occupied by the powder chamber and a second storage room and the upper one by the crew quarters. The access is on the land side on the upper floor and is accessed via a stone staircase and a wooden drawbridge attached to iron chains. There is a loopholes above the entrance to defend it. Behind the entrance a staircase leads to the lower floor on the left, another staircase to the right to the platform at the top of the tower. There is a cistern here that was used to supply the crew with rainwater. From the platform, the coast could be defended with the help of three cannons. Plans to secure the tower against the risk of storming with an additional trench were never implemented. The tower was designed for a crew of up to 12 men.

  • Detailed views

  • Platform with stair opening (left) and cistern (right)

  • cistern

  • Stairs and drawbridge

  • Powder chamber

Aftermath

The construction principle of the defense towers built in the Canary Islands in the 1740s has been adopted many times. They initially served as a model for two Spanish towers on Menorca , the Torre d'Alcalfar and the Torre de Son Ganxo , each from 1787. These in turn were the prototypes for the British Martello towers that were built between 1798 and 1802 on this island and in the years Built in Ireland in 1804 and 1805 . The Martello towers on the English south coast were directly inspired by the Canarian defense towers.

Todays use

The tourist information office is now located in the tower. On the upper floor there are changing exhibitions of contemporary artists. For a small fee, the entire structure can be viewed and the platform stepped on. In the immediate vicinity of the tower there are other objects of tourist interest: two restored lime kilns from the 19th century and the skeleton of a Cuvier's beaked whale that stranded in July 2004 .

The Torre del Tostón has been a listed building since 1949 . It is now registered as a monument in the Spanish database for cultural assets ( Bienes de Interés Cultural ) under the number RI-51-0008264 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ alternatively also "de Lisle" or "Delisle"
  2. ↑ Alejandro Cioranescu, Elías Serra Rafols (ed.): Le Canarien: crónicas francesas de la conquista de Canarias . tape 3 . Instituto de Estudios Canarios, La Laguna 1964, p. 118 (Spanish, ulpgc.es ).
  3. ↑ Maximiano Trapero: La toponimia de Canarias en Le Canarien: Problemática de una toponomástica inaugural . In: Eduardo Aznar, Dolores Corbella Díaz, Berta Pico Graña, Antonio Tejera Gaspar (eds.): Le Canarien: Retrato de dos mundos . tape 2 . Instituto de Estudios Canarios, La Laguna 2006, ISBN 84-88366-59-0 , p. 273-329 (Spanish, academia.edu ).
  4. ↑ Elena Sosa Suárez, Antonio Tejera Gaspar, María Antonia Perera Betancort: El castillo betancuriano de “Rico Roque” and the “Puerto de los Jardines de Fuerteventura” . In: Francisco Morales Padrón (ed.): III Coloquio de Historia Canario-Americana; VIII Congreso Internacional de Historia de America (AEA) (1998) . Cabildo de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas 2000, ISBN 84-8103-242-5 , p. 1816–1823 (Spanish, ulpgc.es ).
  5. ↑ Jason Bolton: Martello Towers Research Project (PDF; 1.7 MB), 2008, p. 25 ff.
  6. ↑ Cultural heritage database at the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (note: search for "Castillo de El Cotillo"), accessed on March 9, 2018.

Web links

Commons : Castillo de El Tostón  - Collection of images, videos and audio files