Village
Camariñas is a fishing town on the Costa da Morte, in the province of A Coruña, with about 5,000 inhabitants, situated on a peninsula beside the ría that bears its name. It lives from fishing, shellfish gathering and tourism, with food industries devoted to processing octopus and a turbot fish farm, and is world-famous for its bobbin lace. The municipality includes the parishes of Camariñas, Camelle, Javiña and Puente del Puerto; in Camelle, the German artist Manfred Gnädinger built a house-sculpture by the sea that is now looked after by a foundation created after his death. On its coastline stands the Cabo Vilán lighthouse, which in 1896 was the first in Spain to be lit by electric light. Its festivities, on 16 July, draw numerous visitors every year.
Monument
A lighthouse opened on 15 January 1896, the first and oldest in Spain to operate with electric light, built with pink granite from the Piedra Mayor quarry, on the cliffs of Traba. It replaced an earlier lighthouse, lit in 1854, whose low height left a blind spot over the shoals of the cape; the wreck of the English training ship Serpent on 8 November 1890, with 172 dead, drew international attention and led to the approval in 1891 of a new first-order lighthouse. Its tower raises the light 125 metres above the sea, with a beam that reaches 55 kilometres, above one of the most storm-battered cliff fronts of the Costa da Morte. The site was declared de Interés Nacional (a historic Spanish landscape-protection designation, precursor of today's natural parks) in 1933 for its rocky, rugged character, and today it is also a natural monument.
Nature
Climbing dune formed by the Atlantic wind, which pushes the sand up the slope until it covers the hillside and places it among the largest in Europe and among the most notable climbing dune formations of the Galician coast; it is included in the protected area of the Costa da Morte, a site of Community importance and SPA.
Nature
A bay reachable only on foot between Cabo Vilán and Punta do Boi, with a wild beach and coastal scrub where the caramiña still survives; it is one of the least altered stretches of the whole Costa da Morte.
Nature
A rocky spur battered by the south-westerly swell off which the Serpent was wrecked on 10 November 1890; its shoals are one of the most feared points on the whole coast of the Costa da Morte.
Nature
Estuary opening between the peninsula of Camariñas and that of Muxía, the smallest and most sheltered of the rías of the Costa da Morte and closed to the north by Cabo Vilán; its sandy bottoms sustain the shellfish beds and the fishing port that support the concello's economy, on its shores stand the towns of Camariñas and A Ponte do Porto, and the waters of the Río do Porto reach it.
Curiosity
The Cemiterio dos Ingleses, in the eastern bay of the punta do Boi, in Camariñas, was opened on the initiative of the parish priest of Xaviña to bury the sailors who died on 10 November 1890, when the British warship HMS Serpent, on its way to Sierra Leone, ran aground against the cliffs after mistaking, in bad weather, the faint light of the Cabo Vilán lighthouse. Of the 175 crew members only three survived, washed up on do Trece beach; over the following days more than a hundred bodies reached the shore, which the people of Camariñas, mobilised by the priest of Xaviña, recovered and buried in a cemetery divided into a section for Catholics and another for Protestants. The Royal Navy and Queen Victoria thanked the gesture with gifts to the village. The cemetery is today part of the European Route of Singular Cemeteries.
Monument
A museum opened in 1996 which preserves examples of bobbin lace and documentation on a textile tradition that made the palilleiras of this town an international benchmark of the craft.
Monument
The legacy of the German Manfred Gnädinger, who over decades built on the Camelle breakwater a sculpture garden out of what the sea brought him; the Prestige spill covered it in November 2002 and he died on 28 December.
Curiosity
Corema album, a white-berried shrub typical of the Atlantic dunes that gave the town its name and is today in danger of extinction; it still survives in the protected sands of O Trece and Monte Branco.
Activity
A bobbin lace fair held every Holy Week since 1991, from Wednesday to Sunday, with an anthropological exhibition, a craft market and fashion shows; it is declared a Festival of Tourist Interest of Galicia.
Nature
Declared a site of national interest in 1933 and today a natural monument, this cape of vertical cliffs closes the ría of Camariñas to the north. On its heights protection coexists with a wind farm.
Nature
A wild beach between cliffs on the roughest stretch of the Camariñas coast, with no direct road access. It is reached on foot by the Camiño dos Faros and beneath it several of the ships that give the Costa da Morte its name have gone down.
Curiosity
The bobbin lace made by the palilleiras is the hallmark of the concello and a craft industry alive for centuries. Every spring the town comes to its show dressed in table linen and lace edging.
Monument
The German Manfred Gnädinger lived forty years as a hermit on the beach of Camelle, where he raised dozens of stone sculptures beside the sea. After his death his dwelling was turned into the Museo do Alemán.
Activity
The Camiño dos Faros is a long-distance hiking route that follows the edge of the Costa da Morte cliffs for about 200 kilometres between Malpica de Bergantiños and Fisterra, divided into eight stages that make use of paths previously opened by fishermen and percebeiros; the stage linking Camariñas with Muxía is the longest, at 32.6 kilometres. The sea is the main feature of the route, which crosses beaches, dunes, forests and estuaries. The name Costa da Morte was coined by the British press in the 1890s after several shipwrecks, and small crosses commemorate the drowned percebeiros. The Camariñas stretch links the harbour, Cabo Vilán, the enseada do Trece and the Cemiterio dos Ingleses, where British sailors shipwrecked in the late 19th century lie buried.
Historical milestone
Wreck of the British cruiser HMS Serpent, a third-class Royal Navy vessel built at Devonport and launched in 1887. Under the command of Commander Harry Leith Ross, she was sailing from Plymouth to Sierra Leone when, during the night of 10 November 1890, she ran aground on the shoals of Punta do Boi, near Cape Vilán, in the heart of the Costa da Morte. Three sailors managed to reach Camariñas, exhausted; of the rest of the crew, 172 died and were buried by local residents in the so-called Cemiterio dos Ingleses, very close to the wreck site. The official account attributes the disaster to a navigational error and the weather conditions that night.
Historical milestone
The tanker accident off the Costa da Morte covered the concello's beaches and cliffs with fuel oil in November 2002 and halted shellfishing and goose barnacle gathering for months, in the greatest environmental disaster this coast has known.
Historical milestone
The German sculptor died at the age of 66 on 28 December 2002, a few weeks after the Prestige's fuel oil covered his sculpture garden. His death, from natural causes, remained tied in popular memory to the outrage over the oil slick.
Food and drink
The percebeiros work the battered rocks between Cabo Vilán and the beach of O Trece, one of the most dangerous stretches of the Galician coast. The paths they opened are today part of the Camiño dos Faros.
Food and drink
The inner sands of the ría sustain beds of clam and razor clam worked on foot and afloat by the shellfisherwomen of the concello. Their production supplies the kitchens of the whole Costa da Morte.