Punta Crena, Varigotti site features

The tower is the thing you see from below. An ancient watchtower, described in the record as Saracen, built in 1559 on the summit of the promontory. It is intact enough that the closing scenes of a national television series were filmed at it in December 2021.

The convent beside it is a ruin. The record says only that the remains of a convent stand at the tower's side. Nothing read for this page names its order, its dedication or its dates.

The olive grove is the surprise. A secular olive grove — centuries old — covering the seaward flank and overlooking the sea. It is the surviving fragment of an agriculture the whole village lived on: in 1853 Varigotti's roughly 700 people worked at fishing, at olives and citrus, and at a stone quarry.

The oldest ruins are the least visible. The Byzantine castrum, destroyed by Rotari, and on the eastern flank the perimeter wall of the civil settlement that stood beside the harbour. Higher on that slope and the adjacent saddle are medieval remains of the fifteenth century, from the village that was abandoned when the port silted.

And the views go two ways. Down into the enclosed baia dei Saraceni on one side; east along the coast towards Capo Noli, vertical crumbling rock hundreds of metres high, on the other. The torretta delle Streghe, built by Genoa in 1582, stands on that stretch and still marks the boundary between two comuni.

The watchtower of 1559

Built on the summit after a Turkish invasion, and called Saracen in the record. It is the landmark of Varigotti, it appears in the Disney album Paperino e la notte del Saraceno — also published in Latin — and the final scenes of the Rai 1 series Blanca were shot at it in December 2021.

The Byzantine perimeter wall

On the eastern flank, where the civil buildings of the Byzantine settlement stood beside the harbour. The record says a perimeter wall of them still remains today — which makes it, with the old church's upslope wall, the oldest standing masonry in Varigotti.

The castrum ruins

The fortification that defended the harbour below, destroyed by Rotari in 643. The chronicler pseudo-Fredegar listed that destruction alongside the sacking of Albenga, Savona, Genoa, Oderzo and Luni.

The secular olive grove

Centuries old, on the flank overlooking the sea. The record pairs it with the tower as the promontory's defining feature, and it is the last working trace of the village's pre-tourism economy.

The convent remains

Beside the tower, and almost undocumented: the record gives their existence and nothing more. They are the one thing on this headland that nothing read for this page can date.

Fifteenth-century remains on the saddle

On the eastern slope and the adjacent saddle, where the settlement stood until the harbour silted. Medieval remains dated to the fifteenth century survive there — the abandoned half of Varigotti, as against the living half west of the promontory.