The final stop on our short, inaugural UK season cruise aboard Sapphire Princess was at the port of A Coruña in the Galician region of Spain. A Coruña does seem like it has a decent amount to see in its own right – the city has a lot of history with some interesting and important monuments to view, and the prosperity that’s come from being a busy port in the Spanish region has apparently seen a lot of attractive investment – but our experience was simply that as seen from our state room balcony as the cruise ship was docking. Like many visitors (certainly many first-time visitors, I imagine) we would be heading straight for Santiago de Compostela.
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.
