The tip of Ortegal is surrounded by a dangerous chain of boulders in zone of breakers. Already in the Middle Ages it is reflected in the marine and portulan charts and in the 19th century it will continue to be used as a landing point for transit ships to America and northern Europe, being considered in our days as the imaginary dividing line between the waters of the Bay of Biscay and The Atlantic.
Since 1847 numerous requests have been made to address the construction of the lighthouse that were not serviced until 1982, when the project is commissioned by the engineer Jaime Arrandiaga, becoming one of the most modern lighthouses in Galicia.
The construction takes the standard form of a cylindrical tower of 3 m of diameter and 12,70 m of height painted in two wide strips of colors white and red for its better visibility and with a range of 18 miles.
In 1993 it underwent a deep reform being monitored to be controlled by computer from the Control Center of the port of Ferrol.
Curiosities, myths and legends
Three stingers with their own name "Cabalo Xoan", "A Insua" and "Tres Irmans" guarded Ortegal Cape, a geological referent for the presence in this rock formation of amphibolite or "black granite". The geological studies carried out on the whole of Ortegal Cape attribute to it an antiquity of 1156 million years, the oldest of the Iberian peninsula and comparable to those found in Ukraine, Thailand, Australia or Canada.
When the environment and life were not as we know them today, between 400 and 500 million years ago and following the author of the drift of the continents, the German Alfred Wegener, as a consequence of the movement of tectonic plates a single continent, Pangea , It would fracture and the continents would appear, giving rise at the same time to cliffs of more than 600m of height, the highest ones of the European southwest.
