Tower of Hercules
— — a Roman fire still keeping watch.
Not only on a wall.
“The oldest Roman lighthouse still working, on a granite headland at the edge of Galicia. The tower has guided ships into A Coruña since the second century, rebuilt in 1791 but the core still Roman. Sailors used to call it the Farum Brigantium. Walkers come at dusk for the way the granite turns honey under the beam.
Tower of Hercules, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Tower of Hercules sits on a low granite peninsula at the northern edge of A Coruña, in Galicia on Spain's Atlantic coast. It rises about 55 metres above the headland and has guided ships into the port since the second century, when Roman engineers built the original under the emperor Trajan. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage site in 2009, the one surviving Roman lighthouse still functioning as a working aid to navigation. The surrounding sculpture park looks out over the Bay of Biscay.
The exterior the visitor sees today is the neoclassical refurbishment finished in 1791 by the engineer Eustaquio Giannini, who wrapped the Roman core in a new ashlar skin of local granite. The three-tiered tower shows that eighteenth-century discipline from the outside, but the Roman walls survive within, and an interior staircase still climbs the original masonry to the lantern room. The square base sits directly on the bedrock of the headland, where Atlantic salt has worn the lower courses into a soft grey patina.
The lantern still turns. The current beacon rotates from a height of about 106 metres above sea level and is visible roughly 23 nautical miles out, where the Atlantic opens past Cabo Prior. The Spanish Maritime Authority lists it as an active lighthouse, not a museum piece, which is why ships entering A Coruña on a dirty Galician night still pick it up first. Visitors who climb the 234 steps inside reach a viewing gallery just below the lantern room and walk back out into the salt wind.