Sorry, but I think the Guardian's travel writer is daft. Rodas is good but not that good. It's not the whitest beach in the world, I've seen whiter sand in Jervis Bay. The water is clear but I have seen clearer. And you wouldn't want to swim in it anyway, this is Atlantic temperature water, not Mediterranean.
What Rodas has going for it is that the Illas are a national park and there is no development on the islands. You can daytrip or overnight camp, but only from June to September. The rest of the year, the park is unmolested. To get there you have to take a ferry.
I had checked the weather forecast and yes it would be perfect today. Then I checked the website of the ferry company. It seems that the season ended yesterday, Sun 20 Sep. Oh no! Maybe I should have swapped Santiago and the Illas inspite of the dodgy weather on Sunday. Dang! Last night I asked at the ticket counter and whew, they were still running services. So I turned up at 10:30 and 50 minutes later, we (about 50 passengers on this run) were on the island. We had until 17:30 to take any of the marked walks (straying off the paths is no-no). I managed to fit in 3 short walks of about an hour each, plus a bocadillo (Spanish sub sandwich) lunch. I was glad of the gentle breezes that kept sunny weather cool.
The Illas Cies are part of the reason Vigo is a good port, they shield it from the Atlantic.
When the Prestige, a single-hulled oil tanker, broke and leaked oil off the Galician coast in November 2002, it hit their fishing industry hard. The disaster was rated as bad as the Exxon Vadez. Understandably the Galicians are angry that this happened, and also that the then Aznar government was slow to respond. The Cies escaped as the damage was further up north.
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