This past Saturday was a gorgeous day. We decided to head into La Coruña, which is about 30 minutes away from us. It’s the 19th largest city in Spain and has a nickname of A cidade de cristal (The Glass City). Most of the buildings in the city are covered in windows, and when the sun reflects off of them, they give a beautiful affect to the city.
But first, we headed to the Tower of Hercules, which is an ancient Roman Lighthouse as old as the 2nd century! It has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the surrounding area is full of bike and walking paths, as well as a golf course and a beautiful coastline.
We walked around the tower for a bit…
(it’s a soldier with a gun)
And then we went inside!
It was pretty cool walking in and seeing the ruins of what the tower was before renovations. The ceilings were so low at first, I was a little scared we’d have to duck the whole way! But once we got climbing the stairs, there was plenty of headroom. We climbed the tower (242 steps) and got a very rewarding view at the top!
From this view, you can see all of the space for the bike trails, and you can also see the city of Coruña in the last photo.
After we went down all 242 steps, we walked around the trails a bit.
Beautiful, right?? We decided that this would be an awesome place for a picnic, so we might just have to do that sometime soon!
After the Tower of Hercules, we went into the city of Coruña. We’ve been a couple of other times, but mostly at night after everything but the bars had closed. Of course, we got into the city right at seista, which is 2-4pm in this area of Spain. Um…I didn’t know people seista’d on Saturdays, but whatevs. Some shops were open and we had a nice time window shopping.
In that last picture, you get an idea of why it’s nicknamed the city of glass!
Mike and I feel great that there’s a city so close to us that we can explore on Saturdays (everything is closed on Sunday). It’s definitely not Philadelphia…the cuisine here is still all very traditional to the area and there isn’t a lot of ethnic cuisine, but there are some highly rated restaurants here that we’d like to check out! We already found one place called Abica that we truly love and I know we’ll be going back soon!
I do like the city though and I think it has a lot to offer! I look forward to knowing it well by the time we leave!
