A Coruña

A Coruña makes an impression before you properly arrive. The city sits on a headland that juts into the meeting of the Atlantic and the Ría do Burgo, and as you approach from the south the glassed gallery buildings along the Avenida de la Marina catch the afternoon sun and throw it back at you — a wall of reflected light along the harbour front that is among the most distinctive urban silhouettes in Spain. The galleries — enclosed glass balconies, built to catch the light while blocking the relentless Atlantic wind — are the architectural signature of A Coruña, and they appear throughout the city wherever a building faces the sea or the bay.

I spent a morning at the Torre de Hércules, the Roman lighthouse that stands on the northern tip of the headland above the city. It is the only Roman lighthouse still in operation in the world — built in the second century AD, restored in the eighteenth, and still doing its job. Standing at the base, looking out at the grey Atlantic with the wind pulling at everything, there is a particular pleasure in the thought of all the ships this structure has talked to across two thousand years. The surrounding park is scattered with sculptures and, on the day I visited, a man walking a very slow dog in a very determined circle.

The old city — the Cidade Vella — sits on the neck of land connecting the headland to the mainland, compact and walkable and considerably less visited than Santiago despite being equally old. The Romanesque church of Santiago — the oldest in the city, built in the twelfth century — is unassuming from the outside and overwhelming from the inside: carved capitals, smooth stone floors, and the light coming through small windows in columns that seemed calibrated to make you feel exactly as small as you should feel in front of something a thousand years old. The Jardines de Méndez Núñez along the harbour are formal gardens full of camellias that bloom in late winter when the rest of Europe is grey.

The food in A Coruña tilts toward the northern style — heartier, more reliant on the catch from the deeper Atlantic rather than the sheltered rías. Caldeirada de rape — monkfish stew with potatoes and peppers — appears on menus here in ways it doesn’t further south. The pulpo is excellent; the empanada de bacalao — salt cod pie in a thin pastry crust — is something I’ve eaten everywhere in Galicia but found best at a small bakery two streets back from the harbour that had no sign and a queue of locals every morning at nine.

When to go: A Coruña is a year-round city. The Carnival in February and March is among the best in Galicia — the local tradition is elaborate costumery and the whole city participates. June through September has reliable weather and the summer festival season. The camellias in the Jardines de Méndez Núñez peak in February and March, a particularly beautiful counterpoint to the winter rain.