Islas Atlánticas

The Rías Baixas — the drowned river valleys of Galicia's southwest coast — each keep an island group at their mouth, granite breakwaters that take the Atlantic's violence so the rías inside can farm mussels in calm water. The national park, declared in 2002 as Spain's only Galician one, strings four of them together from south to north: the Cíes off Vigo, Ons off Pontevedra, Sálvora off Arousa's mouth, and tiny Cortegada tucked deep inside the Arousa ría — a maritime-terrestrial park where more than eighty percent of the protected area is water, over kelp forests and some of the richest cold-water sea floor on the Iberian shelf.

The Cíes are the celebrities. Two of the three islands, Monteagudo and Faro, are joined by the Praia de Rodas — a kilometre-long crescent of white sand enclosing a tidal lagoon, the beach a British newspaper once rated the world's best, an accolade the freezing water treats with irony. Behind the beach the islands tilt: gentle pine- and gorse-covered slopes toward the ría, hundred-metre granite cliffs into the open ocean, with one of Europe's largest yellow-legged gull colonies screaming above shag ledges. The climb to the Monte Faro lighthouse, hairpinning above the lagoon, is the park's signature hour.

Each lesser group keeps its own story. Ons still has a hamlet with a handful of year-round islanders, an octopus-caldeirada taberna culture and a blowhole, the Buraco do Inferno, that the islanders populated with the voices of the drowned. Sálvora's village emptied in the 1970s and its abandoned granaries and small castle stand in the gorse; offshore in 1921 the steamer Santa Isabel broke up in a winter night and three island women rowed out repeatedly into the storm, saving dozens — Galicia still calls them las heroínas de Sálvora. Cortegada, gifted to King Alfonso XIII in 1907 for a summer palace that was never built, spent a century untouched behind that expropriation and now carries what is claimed as Europe's largest laurel wood, a dripping green anomaly twenty metres from the mussel rafts.

What's worth knowing before you go

Access is by seasonal ferry — to the Cíes from Vigo, Cangas and Baiona, to Ons from Bueu and Portonovo — and the Xunta's visitor authorization must be booked online before the ferry ticket; the Cíes summer quota sells out weeks ahead. Sálvora and Cortegada are reached on small licensed boats from Ribeira and Carril, guided only. The only nights available are the campsites on Cíes and Ons, both reservation-bound. Galician weather is the real gatekeeper: June and September are kinder than the fog-prone high summer, and the Atlantic side is always ten degrees of wind worse than the lagoon side.

The connoisseur's crossing is the last Friday ferry to Ons in September with a camping booking: octopus and ribeiro at the taberna, the Buraco at dusk, and the Cíes lighthouses lit across ten kilometres of black Atlantic.