Castillo de San Buenaventura

Until the early eighteenth century the coast of Fuerteventura had no fortifications at all and suffered constant raids by Barbary, English and French corsairs. The captain general of the Canaries, Andrés Bonito y Pignatelli, commissioned the military engineer Claudio de L'Isle to raise two almost identical towers: this one and the castle of El Cotillo. The work at Caleta de Fuste was finished around 1743, its task being to defend the bay and its landing place. Within a few years the walls grew from about three metres thick to nearly six, apparently after damage from a cannon shot.

The tower is circular in plan and rises through two levels, with a vault carried on a thick central pillar, and it is entered by a stone stair and a drawbridge on iron chains. It was armed with two small-calibre iron cannon and held a military garrison. It passed into private hands in the nineteenth century once its military value had gone, and in the 1980s a resort grew up around it whose swimming pools still surround the walls. The Cabildo and the town council of Antigua restored it in 2013; it is mainly appreciated from the outside and is regarded as a twin of the tower of San Andrés on Tenerife.