Stephen Phelan

I HAVE always longed to be a lighthouse-keeper and now, at last, I am one. (If only for the weekend.) Look ye upon my chunky jumper! Feel the waterproof weave of my Donegal tweed cap! Truth be told, I am way too toasty in this quasi-nautical ensemble, having hoped and dressed for ominous fog, murderous gales, oceanic rainstorms. Instead it is bright, calm, and warm on an early spring afternoon in the famously pretty fishing village of Cudillero, where the “Green Coast” of northern Spain drops away into the deep blue Bay of Biscay.

Built in 1858, the local lighthouse – the Faro de Cudillero – stands on a shelf of rock just beyond the harbour, a short walk up stone steps and along a narrow cliffside service path. Its hexagonal beacon tower has been remodelled a few times over the years. The signal lamp inside was first fuelled by olive oil, then paraffin and petrol, before being electrified and eventually automated. With no further need for a human operator, its sturdy keeper’s cottage was left derelict decades ago. Sad to contemplate that absence, and the general obsolescence of the role itself. But if I can’t man the light, I can at least occupy the house.

That living space has been purchased, converted, and partitioned into two loft-style holiday apartments by the German company Floatel, who specialise in this kind of repurposing. Moving in for a couple of nights with my girlfriend and our six-year-old daughter, I find the interior much plusher than whatever salty quarters I might have imagined.

We’ve got heated floors, a wood-burning stove, a fitted kitchenette, a nice high airy ceiling, and a Nordic timber whirlpool bath with bench seats, big enough for all of us. Our priorities in proper order, we begin hot-tubbing without delay, while pretending to be a 19th-century lighthouse family mystified by modern luxuries. “Fierce fond of yon bubbles, aren’t ye lass?” “By Triton’s prongs ‘tis foamy bliss upon my cockles!” And so on.

Large flanking windows look east and west to sunrise and sunset, and as the latter approaches we go out to watch the lamp come on. The sky dims to indigo, a faint moon floats up over the tower, and visibility fades along the shoreline, tripping the sensors and flipping the switch. I expected a searchbeam to shoot from the lantern room and sweep the bay in whooshing gyres, but this light is programmed for a sequence of static flashes known as “occultations”. Put in Tolkienesque terms, it’s like an eye that opens for one long stare followed by three short blinks, repeating in cycles of 16 seconds. Or dash-dot-dot-dot, to represent the letter “B” in international morse code. It should really be “C” for Cudillero, but that letter was already taken by Candás, another coastal beacon some 30 miles due east.

I learn all this and more back inside by the fireplace, where the honesty bar is well-stocked, and the bookshelves support a small library of lighthouse-related literature. Between the novels by Virginia Woolf and Jules Verne are historical journals and photographic surveys that reference this site in particular. Progressing from tangy, cloudy Asturian cider to a decent midrange Spanish red, I read how ancient mariners set signal fires more or less where I’m sitting, and may have lured a few ships in to wreck and plunder on these rocks.

Since the lighthouse entered service there’s no record of a major disaster though, no defining loss of local menfolk in the unforgiving Cantabrian Sea. An Italian cargo vessel called the Amelia C sank just offshore in 1877, though it seems the lighthouse-keeper mobilised a rescue effort from the village, and all aboard were duly saved.

This makes for a consoling bedtime story. I’ve always been a twitchy insomniac, and even more so lately with the planet as it is, but now I discover the sublime and fathomless comfort that comes of drifting off beside your family in the belly of such a refuge, between the winking lantern and the sighing sea. So here we are asleep and dreaming in “lighthouse world”, as Floatel co-founder Tim Wittenbecher described it when I spoke to him by phone.

“A lighthouse is the most purely positive structure we can think of,” Wittenbecher told me. “It has only good associations.” He discovered just how many people feel this way 20 years ago, when he and his wife turned a ruined beacon into a guest house on the Baltic Sea. Hundreds responded immediately to their first online ad, and their pet project became a business model. As Floatel, they’ve since entered public-private agreements to take over the empty lodgings of lighthouses from the Venetian lagoon to the Canarian Island of La Palma.

“They are always in super-attractive positions, in dramatic, romantic, and mostly quite abandoned areas,” said Wittenbecher. All broadly true of the Faro de Cudillero, though it’s not as far removed from civilization as some others in his portfolio. Close enough to the village that this lighthouse used to serve double-duty as the local schoolhouse.

Also handy enough for the present housekeeper Cristina to bring us breakfast the next morning, in a wicker basket full of pastries, yoghurt, juices, meats and cheeses. A single seagull hovers at the window to watch us eat. “Clear off, you varmint,” says our daughter, shaking a fist and quoting one of her own favourite books, The Lighthouse-Keeper’s Lunch.

Then we wander Cudillero itself, which forms a kind of amphitheatre in the tight arc of the adjoining cove, with steep vertical staircases and narrow lateral laneways stitched between tiers of brightly painted houses. Some have strips of curadillo hung outside – the dried sharkskin that’s been a totem around here since the days when fishermen used that rough flesh to polish their boats, and ate it when they couldn’t catch much else.

The seafood is still great in these parts. After walking near-deserted beaches at Playa del Silencio and Playa San Pedro La Ribera, we ascend to lunch at the stonebuilt mountain inn Cabo Vidio, where the house special is a coastal variation on the region’s renowned bean stew, fabada asturiana, made with salt cod fresh from those cold waters below.

Cudillero fishmonger Manolo Fernández supplies every restaurant in the vicinity. “The quality of the produce is the same in each place,” Fernández assures me at his shop beside the port, while cleaning and gutting a hake. “The only difference is the chef.” He’s quick to laugh but also prone to lamentation. “This used to be a real seafaring village,” says Fernández.

“I remember 230 boats out there, now we’re down to about 30.” This shop has been in his family for three generations and almost a century, “but me and my brother will be the last, I think.” As he cheerfully, morbidly lists off the reasons – supermarkets, politics, overfishing, climate change – it occurs to me that I’d forgotten all those worries while staying at the lighthouse. There it is above us, and ahead of us: salvation on a stick to sailors in trouble.

We climb the path back to our perch, and watch our little girl sit cross-legged in a sunbeam on the windowsill, scanning the horizon for mermaids and orcas with the house binoculars. Some day, I’m thinking, this will be a bright spot in my memory – a signal light out of the distant past, flashing dash-dot-dot-dot. B for “beautiful”. B for “bygone”.