Castle of Santa Ana

The Castle of Santa Ana, also sometimes referred to as the castle-lighthouse of Santa Ana, is a fortress standing on a rocky promontory in Castro-Urdiales, on a peninsula where there are also the fortified church of Santa María de la Asunción (13th century), the ruins of an earlier church (that of San Pedro, 12th century), and the hermitage of Santa Ana, built in the manner of a watchtower and linked to the castle by a bridge. The complex has very fine views over the sea, the harbour and the town. Within the enclosure a lighthouse was built in 1853, whose machinery occupied the chapel. It is one of the best preserved castles in northern Spain.

It is pentagonal in plan with cylindrical corner towers 15 metres high, which protect a rectangular enclosure of 22.75 x 12.35 metres; within this, in turn, there is a hall of 17 x 7 m covered by a barrel vault. One of the cylinders is in fact the covering of a triangular space projecting from the inner rectangle towards the town, while the other four act as buttresses to the vault of the habitable space. Another, lower, battlemented defence is visible on the lighthouse side. It entirely lacks openings, so that defence could only be conducted from the towers. The fabric is of cyclopean stones set with lime. The castle, like the citadel, was protected by a wall between 6 and 7 metres high, of which a small, very deteriorated stretch is preserved with its original crenels and merlons. The entrance is on the seaward side, through a small door.

Machine-translated from “Castillo de Santa Ana (Castro-Urdiales)” on the Spanish Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Castle of Santa Ana ranks #6,288 of 8,134 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #331 of the 602 mapped in Spain. 1 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is Vitoria-Gasteiz, 74 km away. See how Spain compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia (in Spanish) ↗