Builder of the Tower, Father of Íth
Breogán was the Iberian ancestor of the Milesians — the man who built the great tower on the Galician coast from whose top his son Íth mac Breogáin first saw Ireland. He made the seeing possible. That is his place in the story.
The tower stood on a headland on the Atlantic coast of Spain. The tradition identifies it with the Tower of Hercules at A Coruña in Galicia — the oldest working Roman lighthouse in the world, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On a clear winter’s evening, Íth mac Breogáin climbed to the top and looked north across the ocean. He saw a faint gleam on the horizon. He sailed toward it. It was Ireland.
Íth was killed there. When his body came back to Spain, the invasion fleet was assembled. Everything that followed — the Milesian conquest, the end of the Tuatha Dé Danann‘s rule over Ireland — flows from the moment Breogán’s son looked north from his father’s tower.
Breogán himself is celebrated in Galicia as a founding ancestor of the Galician people. His name appears in the Galician national anthem, “Os Pinos,” written in 1890. He is the one Milesian ancestor actively claimed by another living Celtic nation as their own.
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