Vigo

Vigo lands Europe's fish and Jules Verne's imagination. The Atlantic city on its magnificent ría runs the continent's greatest fresh-fish port — the dawn lonja moves the ocean's produce at industrial scale, and the canning and shipbuilding that grew around it made Vigo Galicia's economic capital — while literature anchored offshore: in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo funds the Nautilus from the sunken treasure galleons of Vigo Bay (the 1702 battle of Rande was real, the silver fleet too), and the city thanks Verne with a splendid bronze of the author seated on a giant squid's tentacles at the marina. The Cíes islands close the ría's mouth — their Rodas beach a fixture of world-best-beach lists, the archipelago a national park of gannets and white sand.

The town climbs from the old fishermen's quarter of O Berbés and the oyster street of A Pedra to the Castro hill's fortress views; its December has lately added a phenomenon — the Christmas lights spectacle that the city promotes with cheerful megalomania. The stage is documented in the concert record: the Centro Cultural Caixanova — the historic García Barbón theatre, the savings bank's palatial early-twentieth-century house — Vigo's principal hall for opera, concerts and drama. Fish at dawn, treasure below, a squid for a chair: Vigo reads its own adventure nightly.