Torre de San Garcia, Algeciras

The Tower of San García was a crenellated tower located on the point of San García, in the Andalusian town of Algeciras, Spain. This defensive construction, of which little remains today, was part of the surveillance system of the Strait of Gibraltar and the Bay of Algeciras from the seventeenth century along with other watchtowers and the defense system completing the action of the fort of San García from the eighteenth century.

The tower was built between 1585 and 1580 being able to keep artillery pieces in its roof. It had a circular plan and a truncated cone-shaped elevation, unlike other nearby beacons such as the Torre del Fraile or the Torre de Entrerríos which were built with a square plan.The height it may have had is unknown due to the scarcity of sources of the time and the few remains preserved today, although the diameter of its base, whose foundations remain, was 13 meters. Other similar artillery towers built at the time had two interior rooms so it is possible that the tower of San Garcia also had them.

In the 1730s an artillery fort was built nearby, the Fort of San García, which relegated its artillery function to that of a gunpowder store although it continued to function as a beacon maintaining visual contact with the Fraile tower to the south and with the city of Algeciras and the forts of Isla Verde and Santiago to the north. In 1810 on the occasion of the War of Independence the fort was destroyed by the British troops and the tower was partially unusable when its roof was dismantled. The complete destruction came in 1898 when, during the Spanish-American War, it was dynamited together with other towers in the region, such as the Tower of the Adalides.