Castle of Los Zúñiga was built in the 15th century by D. Pedro de Zuñiga. Its objective was to defend the passage of Barca del Río Piedras.
Its structure is rectangular in shape and consists of a wall circuit with seven square towers at the corners and on the front and side canvases. The most important towers are the bell tower and the homage tower. In addition to these towers, there was a second outer low wall, already disappeared.
In the 16th century the castle was refortified. Barbican was added, which was specially conditioned. It was an ideal refuge for citizens before the attacks of the Portuguese occurred in the 17th century and ended up consolidating the current town.
In the 18th century, it was planned to convert it into a barracks for the guard corps but discarded the project ended abandoned in 1812.
In 1815, the Duke of Béjar transferred the property to the Villa. In 1817, it was disarmed and adapted for cemeteries, dismantling the barbican and building barracks of vaults attached to the walls inside. He kept this use up to 1,872. Then it was destined to deposit coals and wood, after its desacralization.
In 1880 the file for the demolition is instructed, for its state of ruin, which is understood to threaten to collapse, and the corpses that are still preserved in the vaults, not those on the ground, are exhumed. As on other subsequent occasions, the demolition was not carried out due to the difficulties involved, acting simply to consolidate the most dangerous.
References:Towering 52 meters above the sea, Bengtskär lighthouse is the tallest one in Scandinavia. The building started in in 1905 after the shipwreck of S/S Helsingfors and was completed in 1906. The lighthouse was designed by architect Florentin Granholm. On December a special petrol lantern, designed and built in Paris, was brought to Bengtskär and installed atop the tower.
German fleet bombarded Bengstkär in the First World War in 1914. Since the Gulf of Finland was heavily mined, it was not until 1919 that the surrounding seas were declared safe for shipping, that the light was lit again.
After the war the military value of Bengtskär increased as part of the defence system of independent Finland. In Second World War (1941) Soviet Union made a suprise attack to island. After a bloody battle, the small Finnish garrison emerged victorious. Intermittent repairs to the facility continued during the post-war period.