One of the jewels of this coast is on Las Islas Cies, a 40-minute boat trip from the pretty town of Baiona. Once a pirates’ haunt, Cies is now an uninhabited and pristine national park, open to the public only in summer. Galegos come here to spend long, lazy summer days on the Praia das Rodas, a perfect crescent of soft, pale sand backed by small dunes sheltering a calm lagoon of crystal-clear sea.
[Photos of the beach here]. Amazingly this was one of the worst affected areas in the 2002 Prestige disaster, when a tanker sank in Galician waters releasing thousands of gallons of crude oil onto the coastline of Northern Spain. The clean up operation, which involved the army and hoards of volunteers scraping oil from rocks by hand for moths on end, was obviously a resounding success.
Photo above, of the clean up, courtesy of wikipedia.
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 
