While on vacation in southern Spain (Ayamonte) my son and I encountered http://img137.echo.cx/img137/8463/urbanexploration1024x6829jv.jpg]this structure You can’t see it in the pic but the top area has vertical slits cut into the stone which would signify some sort of defensive tower to me. The structure was fenced off so of course we didn’t dare climb over 
and neglect to take a pic of the spanish only sign for later translation. :smack: No amount of googling has been able to shed light on this for us. Moorish? Anti-Moorish?
It looks to me like the Torre Canela (photo in middle of linked page). According to this Ayamonte-based site:
Those would be Barbary pirates (i.e. from North Africa), not “Aargh, matey!” pirates with peg legs and parrots on their shoulders.
Here is a page (in Spanish), complete with maps, giving further details of coastal fortifications of the province of Huelva (including the Torre Canela).
Bingo!! That’s it. The structure has obviously been completely restored however the perimiter is still not very secure. 
(And the fire escape type stairs lead to a modern (and locked) door) Thanks a million!!
You are most welcome, deevee.
BTW, I found it by Googling [Ayamonte Torre], since I figured that you’d tried [Ayamonte tower]. The first Google hit gave me a blank page, but already provides the name “Torre Canela” in the Google-cached description. I stripped the end off the URL to get “http://www.castillosnet.org/huelva”, which redirected me to here, which has a picture of your tower! Lots of bad links on that page, but with the tower identified it was just a matter of Googling on “Torre Canela” for the rest.
I was aware that there could be more than one tower of similar design on the same coast, but every time I found a photo of a tower that resembled yours, it was always the Torre Canela, so I guess it’s unique (or the only one of the chain still standing!). It’s also the only one in the Ayamonte district. In any case, the reason for building that defensive line would have been the same for all of the towers. They were built a couple of hundred years after the end of the Reconquista, so I’m not sure that it’s right to call them “anti-Moorish” as such, since the Barbary pirates weren’t culturally the same as the caliphs of Al-Andalus Al-Andalus.
[I must have passed within a few km of that tower a few years ago on my way from the Algarve to Seville. Back in those days there was no bridge over the Guadiana river, so we took the train from Albufeira to Vila Real (all in Portugal), took the ferry across to Ayamonte (in Spain), then bus to Seville (and on to Morocco in the same trip!). All good memories, which is one of the reasons why I was interested in identifying your mystery tower!]