Ferrol is a naval city of about 65,000 people at the head of a long, deep ría on the north Galician coast, roughly 60 kilometres up the coast from A Coruña. Spain founded its principal Atlantic shipyards here in the mid-eighteenth century, and the city was built — quite deliberately and almost from scratch — to serve them. The result is a place that looks unlike anywhere else in Galicia: a planned Enlightenment grid of straight streets and arcaded squares laid out around the Arsenal, with the older fishing town of Ferrol Vello tucked along the waterfront beside it.
The walkable part of town is the Barrio de la Magdalena, the eighteenth-century quarter of nine parallel streets and grand cross-axes — Real, Magdalena, María — that was conceived as a model of rational urban design and is now protected as a national heritage zone. It is small, easily covered on foot in an afternoon, with the Co-Cathedral of San Julián as the architectural set piece. The shipyards still dominate the western end of the city, fenced off and unvisitable in detail, but their cranes and dry-docks are visible from any high point and from the ría.
The military history continues outside the centre. The narrow mouth of the ría is guarded by the Castle of San Felipe on one bank and matching batteries on the other, and the headland north of the city carries the abandoned coast-defence emplacements of Cabo Prior. Across the water, the Monastery of Santa Catalina sits high on the Montefaro peninsula. Ferrol is also the starting point of the Camino Inglés, the shortest of the official routes to Santiago de Compostela — pilgrims set off from the Co-Cathedral.
Ferrol is not a beach city, but the best Atlantic beaches in the area — Praia de Doniños, San Jorge, Ponzos — are all within 15 minutes by car on the open coast west of town. Most visitors come for a day, often as a side trip from A Coruña. It rewards an overnight if you like working ports and serious naval architecture.