It’s probably not inaccurate to say that the majority of people on a cruise probably don’t find commercial and industrial ports that interesting to look at (very experienced cruisers on the larger ships probably see enough of them to erase them from their memories for the most part). I am most definitely in the minority, loving the brute strength that this scale of industrialisation represents and finding much of the functional design fantastically attractive, and I’ll usually make sure I’m out for a look at the port as whatever ship we’re on is arriving or leaving.

This post, then, is merely a collection of the photos and a short piece of video taken from the Sapphire Princess cruise ship as she was entering and leaving A Coruña in May 2018. The dome structure seen in the photos stored coal for processing and was not an arena for entertaining the mutants who survived the apocalypse. But it might be one day.

Part of any possible future visit to the port of A Coruña looks to be the 16th-century fortress, now museum, Museo Arqueolóxico e Histórico Castelo de Santo Antón, apparently open from 10:00 on most days and only a couple of Euros entrance fee.

We were not upset at all about the late change to the cruise itinerary but it did mean that we didn’t really have much time to do any planning. Luckily for us, A Coruña is a very easy and charming place simply to get off and wander around anyway and that’s what we would end up doing.

We had visited this city once before but on that occasion we’d only docked in A Coruña aboard Sapphire Princess then headed off on an excursion. We didn’t fancy any hastily-arranged cruise tour this time around so had breakfast and headed ashore after a quick look at the map to see if there was anything we should head for. The Tower of Hercules (Torre de Hércules), a first century lighthouse, looked like it would suit us nicely so we plotted a route and wandered off in the general direction.

One thing you might see if you look online, watch any videos, read any English language travel accounts of this city, is that it’s sometimes called La Coruña and you might not be aware of the difference. Simply, A Coruña, as I spell it, is the Galician form of the name, while La Coruña is Spanish. The Galician form is the preferred term and the Spanish form is in decline as a result.

A Coruña’s architecture was very varied. While our intended destination of the Torre de Hércules dates to the Roman period, passing through the streets of the city presented us with a wide array of different styles from different periods through history, from medieval to modernist. The city has records of visits (in the euphemistic sense of pillaging) from Vikings, Normans, and Muslims, and its strategic location has led to numerous battles and sieges taking place around it in the latter half of the second millenium. The San Andrés drinking fountain below dates from the eighteenth century while the nearby church is a neoclassical structure from a hundred years later.

After passing through the close streets of the city we emerged at Orzán Beach. The golden sand was bright enough under the sunshine to make the light cloud cover seem darker and threatening in the pictures below but it was wonderfully warm with no fear at all that rain might make an appearance.

It was time to spot some artwork on the shore. Following the coastline around to the north we soon came upon a monument to surfers. The fountain sculpture was created by José Castiñeiras Iglesias and it wouldn’t be the only work of his we’d see in A Coruña on this day.

Most recently restored in 2022, the giant wristwatch sculpture – telling the correct time – we were next impressed by actually dates to 1994 and was created by the artist Antonio Vázquez Liñeiro.

By far the weirdest sculpture was that by Jorge Peteiro. A double-tailed swordfish chicken? Who knows? If you’ve a better explanation then feel free to share it. I liked it, though.

We now came within sight of the tower that had been our destination since getting off the ship a little earlier but we wouldn’t be heading straight for it as we’d suddenly realised that there was an aquarium close by, and we are fond of aquariums.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll be paying a lovely visit to the Aquarium Finisterrae in A Coruña.

This was Aquarium Finisterrae, opened in 1999, just on the coast near the Tower of Hercules, and home to a number of themed areas relating to different oceanic ecosystems.

Upon entering we had the chance to use the toilets then admire a lot of marine-themed photography lining the walls, but we didn’t have too long as we’d been told that the seals would soon be fed outside if we wanted to see them, and we decided we did.

There were some lovely rock formations on the shoreline outside the aquarium, making for plenty of pretty pictures.

A fair-sized crowd of visitors were already crowding around the pool area where the seals were fed as part of a reward system that involved them being given health checks by aquarium staff. It was interesting to see that the seals knew the order in which they would be called up because there were six of them and only two staff members so only two could be treated and fed at a time. The remaining seals swam around and kept an eye on things until they knew it was their turn.

We headed back into the main aquarium building before the seal-feeding had finished to get ahead of the crowd and made our way first to the Nautilus Room. Posters from the book and movie Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea lined the route to a themed environment based on the Jules Verne work and it was nice to sit down in front of the large tanks and listen to organ music playing.

We passed through other rooms in the aquarium with tanks focussed on marine life local to the Galician coast and also others more generally Atlantic. The size and clarity of the tanks in Aquarium Finisterrae was very good.

To finish this brief look at the aquarium from our visit in 2024 here are three photos of the most interesting specimens to me. I think the starfish is Luidia ciliaris given that it has seven arms. We’d not seen one with seven arms before. The giant sea snail was a first for us too. Finally, there’s the gorgeous cuttlefish. We both have a fascination with any creature from the cephalopod class as there’s something so otherworldly and intelligent about them.

In the next and final post in this Ventura cruise travelogue series we’ll complete our visit to A Coruña as we head to the Tower of Hercules and some final sights of the city. If you’ve read the posts from this series where we visited Lisbon then you won’t be surprised at how that turns out.