The Fort of Santa Caterina, which you can immediately admire upon your arrival at the port of Favignana, is a castle that stands on the highest peak of the mountain of the same name on the island.
The Fort of Santa Caterina, built with large ocher tuff bricks, brings together a history particularly intertwined with the Norman peoples in Sicily and with the events of the island itself.
Count Roger II, who was then crowned King of Sicily in 1130 by the Antipope Anacletus II, was preparing to gather his fleet of 300 ships and his militias to leave near Marsala, on the western coast of Sicily, in 1123. heading to Africa in search of new conquests.
Three years before this historic event, Roger II with a Royal Edict had established that the island of Favignana was fortified with the construction, around the Arab watchtowers, of three castles which centuries later would take the names of Santa Caterina, San James and Saint Leonard.
If, therefore, the first fortifications date back to the Norman period, Andrea Riccio, lord of the island, later built the castle (and probably its current shape) in 1498.
Until this moment the fortress of Santa Caterina had not yet been used as a place of punishment.
All this began a few centuries later, when Favignana was considered the island of the Fossa of Santa Caterina.
