Praia das Catedrais
Playa de Las Catedrales
Interesting facts
- The slate and quartzite of the arches is roughly 500 million years old, laid down as sediment along an ancient shoreline in the Southern Hemisphere.
- These Ordovician rock layers were folded and lifted out of the sea about 350 million years ago, during the continental collision of the Variscan orogeny.
- The official name, Augas Santas or Holy Waters, is thought to recall an old spring that local people believed had healing powers.
- Local geology describes the arches forming in stages: waves open fractures into sea caves called furnas, which merge and collapse into hollows called ollos before breaking through.
- In several caves the roofs have already fallen in from wave erosion, showing that the arches are a passing stage rather than a permanent shape.
- The beach sits on the Rasa Cantábrica, an almost flat raised coastal platform, which is why the rising tide floods the sand so quickly.
- On exceptionally low tides the sand links up with neighbouring coves, so walkers can pass beneath the cliffs to beaches that are cut off at other times.
Why it is worth it
The beach that everyone calls the Cathedrals goes by a humbler name on the map: Praia de Augas Santas, "Holy Waters", on the Cantabrian coast of Ribadeo in the far north-east of Galicia. At high tide it looks like an ordinary strip of sand under a cliff. When the sea draws back, the cliff turns out to be hollow. Waves have worked the slate and schist along planes of weakness into a row of arches and flying buttresses, some of them more than thirty metres tall, and you walk beneath them on wet sand as if down the aisle of a flooded church.
The comparison with Gothic architecture is not a stretch. The rock here is laid down in steep, thin sheets, so erosion leaves tall ribs and narrow pointed openings rather than the rounded arches of limestone coasts. Between the ribs lie sea caves, passages that open onto the next cove, and pools that keep a mirror of the vault overhead. The beach runs for about 880 metres, and the white sand at the foot of the arches is reshaped by every storm.
Everything depends on the tide. Only around low water can the arches be reached on foot, and the sequence of halls is exposed for a few hours before the sea returns to fill them. Choosing a good low tide, ideally near dawn or late in the day when the light rakes along the rock, makes the difference between a glimpse and a walk through the whole nave. From the clifftop path above, the same formations read as a row of stone teeth standing in the surf.
The regional government of Galicia declared the beach a natural monument in 2005. Its popularity grew so fast that in 2015 the Xunta introduced an advance pass for the busiest periods, limiting how many people descend to the sand at once.
Getting there
The beach lies about 10 km west of Ribadeo; the town of Viveiro is about 37 km away. The nearest airport is Asturias Airport (OVD), about 91 km to the east. The N-634 coastal road passes nearby, and the narrow-gauge FEVE line along the coast has stations at Esteiro and Reinante. The arches are only walkable around low water.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Praia das Catedrais is on the northwest coast of Spain. It is the name given by the tourism industry to Praia de Augas Santas. The beach is located in the Ribadeo municipality, in the province of Lugo (Galicia), on the Cantabric coast, and it lies about ten kilometres to the west of the town of Ribadeo. Its name is derived from its cliff formations.
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