02/08/18 – 03/08/18 – A Coruña, Galicia Region
We chose A Coruna as a place to visit predominantly because of its cooler temperature compared to other parts of Spain (as Marley was struggling with the heat). It was definitely quite a bit cooler, but we weren’t quite prepared for how busy it was.
Maybe it was a silly idea as we’d decided to try and stay at the car park to the Torre de Hercules (Tower of Hercules) a popular tourist attraction. So not surprisingly, lots of other mohos had already stolen many of the spaces. Still, it was worth getting up close to the ancient lighthouse that sits on A Coruna’s peninsula. Built in the late 1st century by the Romans, it underwent significant reconstruction in the 18th century and is the only functioning Roman lighthouse in use today.
Having circled the lighthouse’s carpark in our moho about 4-5 times and after searching for about 40 minutes closeby, we almost left A Coruna for dust, but then came across a fabulous free spot at A Coruna’s aquarium overlooking the Atlantic sea. (GPS 43.3828538,-8.4110751) Already we could see that Marley was much happier, and we were very relieved.
Where we were staying, you could peak through the huge prison like bars to the Aquarium and see the sea lions bathing in the sun and bobbing their heads up out of the water. Whilst they were lovely to see and they amused me a lot, I did feel sad seeing them en-captured like this, and lots of ‘Free Willy’ type scenarios kept going through my mind. Sadly Dan wasn’t up for giving any of them a go!
We went for a stroll along the promenade and found a little pebbled cove where Marley had a sniff around for a few minutes. The walk there wasn’t particularly remarkable, but interesting enough. Mostly I noticed how many people were out exercising, both running and walking. I admired the weird looking lamp posts, bright orange and a bit alien like, and noticed that each one had a little hand painted picture on them.
It was quite late in the evening so we had dinner sitting on the rock just in front of our van and enjoyed looking out to see and watching the sun slowly go down.
Having enjoyed a peaceful and cool nights sleep, after our mornings stroll towards the lighthouse and back, we decided we had seen as much as we wanted, and headed off to our first Northern Spain doggie beach. Whilst it was a nice stay, it’s unlikely we’ll come back to A Coruna and I’m not sure that it’s one that will have a lasting memory.
