Marbella Lighthouse

There has been a light at Marbella since 1864, but the tower you see is not it. The original was an eleven-metre masonry cone; by the 1970s the town had grown so far around it that mariners were confusing its light with house windows, so in 1974 it was replaced by a twenty-nine-metre concrete tower on a new site. The same decade a marina opened four kilometres west and took all the attention. The lighthouse still does the work; Puerto Banús got the photographs.

The tower

The tower standing today is a white cylindrical concrete shaft of twenty-nine metres with a double balcony and lantern, near the seafront gardens and promenade. Its focal plane is thirty-five metres above sea level and its range is twenty-two nautical miles, roughly forty-one kilometres. The characteristic is two white flashes every 14.5 seconds, from a two-metre lantern and a 1,500-watt lamp behind a third-order Fresnel lens by Barbier, Bénard & Turenne, one of the great nineteenth-century French optical houses. Operation is automatic, controlled remotely and triggered by photoelectric cell.

Why 1864 matters on this coast

Marbella’s light belongs to a specific wave of Spanish lighthouse building, and to a specific engineer. Antonio Molina drew up both projects: Calaburras, at the rocky point off Mijas, lit in 1863, and Marbella, lit on 15 March 1864. The reason for Marbella’s was commercial rather than purely navigational — it lit a busy anchorage 200 metres west of the town, at a place called Los Barronales, from which agricultural produce and above all locally mined iron ore was shipped to Málaga. The first lamp burned olive oil and reached twelve miles; paraffin replaced it in 1882, then petroleum, then an acetylene burner in 1923, and electrification in 1944. Only in 1974 did the tower itself change, and it moved because the resort boom had swallowed the old site.

What to do with it

It is not a visitor attraction and there is no tour. What it is good for is orientation: the tower is the fixed point at the eastern end of Marbella’s seafront promenade, and the walk out to it along the paseo marítimo, then on toward the old town, is the most straightforward way to get the shape of the place. Aim for late afternoon, when the light on the white tower is at its best and the promenade is at its busiest with locals rather than day-trippers.

Frequently asked questions