Formentera is an island south of Ibiza, off the eastern Spanish coast in the Mediterranean Sea. Ibiza is the party island, and Formentera is a bit more sedate, though it is apparently popular with artists and nude sunbathers. It's a good place for snorkeling and day-tripping. I got all this from Wikipedia.
Rather than rely on the Lighthouse Directory, which I rely on a lot, this time I'll rely on a Web site called "What's On In Formentera". It has a page about the Far de la Mola lighthouse, which is this week's feature.
So, let's derive some info from that page about the lighthouse. And this is a pretty interesting one.
The lighthouse was opened on the 30th November 1861. The first light consisted of a fixed 2nd order catadioptric lens manufactured by the French firm of Henri Lepaute and a Degrand oil burning lamp."Catadioptric" is the optical term for what is more commonly called a Fresnel lens, the classical kind of lighthouse light.
In 1928 a rotating lens with 12 catadioptric panels from the Formentor lighthouse was installed, adapted to state of the art French technology, where the lens floated in a bath of mercury thus increasing rotation speed and reducing the interval between flashes – it is still in use today producing a light pattern of isolated flashes every five seconds."
It's a 22-meter tower on a square building.
On a cliff.
I grabbed several pictures, including an artsy black-and-white one.
 |
| Featuring the light at the top |
No comments:
Post a Comment