Sanxenxo is the busiest beach resort on the Galician coast — a small town on the Ría de Pontevedra whose population multiplies several times over each summer when the Madrid and Galician middle classes arrive for the season. There is almost no old town left; the planning regime in the 1960s and 70s favoured apartment blocks over the fishing village that used to stand here. What remains is a long, sheltered curve of sand at Silgar beach, a marina full of yachts, and a string of more characterful villages along the coast on either side.
The headline beach is A Lanzada, four kilometres of Atlantic sand on the open ocean side of the peninsula. It is one of the most photographed beaches in Galicia, with the small wayside chapel of A Lanzada standing alone above the dunes. Local legend has it that women who bathe in nine consecutive waves on Midsummer's night will conceive — a tradition that survives, in modified form, every June.
The town itself is a place to stay rather than a place to sightsee. Walk west along the coast path to Portonovo, an actual working fishing village, for the seafood lunches that are the real reason to come to this corner of Spain. Or use Sanxenxo as a base for the wider Rías Baixas — Pontevedra, the Cíes Islands, the wineries of the Albariño country.