Crawford Tower
Point of interest
Torre Crawford, San Nicola Arcella - Luca Fregola
An ancient Saracen tower by the sea has a fascinating and mysterious story to tell. Crawford Tower, in San Nicola Arcella, owes its name to the American writer Lord Francis Marion Crawford, who last inhabited it and found inspiration here for his stories, some of them horror.
The wild coastline, the enchantment of the Arcomagno and Dino Island, thunderstruck the writer who, in the early 1900s, was exploring Italy aboard a small sailboat with his beautiful wife and a sailor. So it was that, paying a derisory rent, Lord Francis rented the tower and settled in Calabria for some time. Here, in this lonely and silent place on the Tyrrhenian Sea, the writer captured the charm of isolation and filled pages with stories set in the tower and the wild bay that surrounds it, noir stories with vampires and supernatural creatures as protagonists. The echo of those tales is still in the air, in the mysterious and elusive atmosphere of the tower.
Crawford Tower is one of the many watchtowers built during Spanish rule around the 16th century to defend the Calabrian coast from constant attacks by pirates and privateers. Time has not tarnished its austere and mysterious beauty that has remained intact, shrouded in the legend that the stories of the American writer have bestowed on it. A spectacle that the light of sunset colours pink, in the incredible glance that encloses in an embrace the Gulf of Policastro, Dino Island, the Pollino mountains and the Arcomagno.
It is possible to visit it to enjoy the view and discover the rooms that housed the American writer. Inside the tower, a very characteristic element are the stairs leading to the first and second floors. These are stone blocks about fifty centimetres long and twenty centimetres wide, supported by two large overlapping arches. The first arch leads to the first floor, the second arch leads to the second floor. At the top of the tower is a large terrace that was used to communicate with the other watchtowers when it was necessary to signal pirate raids. On those occasions, large fires were lit and smoke signals were raised during the day, while at night it was the flames that warned of danger.
