Moored on Coleraine Harbour, the ship welcomes the public from July 15th to 19th to come aboard, walk its decks, and discover what life was like on these fabulous ships that sailed the oceans for centuries. This visit marks one of the vessel’s port calls in Northern Ireland during its 2026 European tour.
The vessel is a unique replica of the Spanish galleons that, for three centuries, linked Andalusia and Spain with America and Asia. It stands as a symbol of the most universal Andalusia, reflecting an era when this region was the ideal launchpad for the maritime expeditions that explored the world and initiated globalization.
The Galeón Andalucía is an impressive 55-meter-long ship featuring six decks, meticulously built from iroko and pine wood. It boasts nearly 1,000 square meters of sail area spread across seven sails. Built by the Fundación Nao Victoria in Punta Umbría (Andalusia, Spain) with rigorous historical accuracy, it showcases the thousands-of-years-old maritime tradition of the Andalusian community.
I have a fondness for maritime history and love visiting preserved museum ships and replicas of original ships. (I’ll include a list of links to ships I’ve seen at the bottom of this post.) So when Facebook flagged up the Galeon Andalucia’s visit to relatively nearby Coleraine Harbour, I was definitely interested. (Wow the meta algorithm got something right!)
So, on a slightly overcast Sunday – with World Cup triumph still some hours away for galleon’s country of origin – I took the one hour drive to Coleraine accompanied by my wife Ash, her brother Tim and his wife Edna.
As with other replica ships, modern maritime safety standards require some compromises with historical authenticity. The Andalucia has diesel engines to ensure it can’t be caught (and wrecked) on a lee shore – as happened to so many of the 1588 Armada’s galleons on their tragic attempts to navigate their way home home along the coast of Ireland. It also has advanced navigation aids and power assisted steering so that it takes but a single light touch, rather than three hulking men to manage the ship’s wheel in a storm. Its hull is of wood-lined fibreglass hull to ward against rot or any failure of caulking.
However, aside from those necessary safety provisions, there is a striking level of fidelity to the design and operation of the original galleons of the 16th and 17th centuries. There is a lot of rope! Over 3 km of standing rigging (the stuff that holds the masts and yards in place) all with a steel core (again for safety) and nearly 5 km of running rigging (the flexible stuff used to manage the sails). It is salutary to realise how much constant maintenance these vessels needed – and that the modern replicas also need – in order to maintain seaworthiness (or – as the saying goes – to be ‘Ship shape and Bristol fashion’).
The last ship I visited before the Andalucia was another replica the Dunbrody famine ship in New Ross, county Wexford, the kind of ship on which President Kennedy’s antecedents would have sailed to America. Unlike the still-sailing Andalucia, the Dunbrody is now a static museum ship and bears witness to how the cost of maintaining these great recreations of the past is about so much more than just the build cost.
One of the crew told me that – with diesel being expensive – the Andalucia uses its sail power whenever it can. However, the nature of old square rigged ships means they are restricted to sailing pretty much just in the direction the wind blew them. With limited scope to turn the yards to catch the wind from abeam, they were very much at the mercy of the winds. Which might make you wonder how they could do round trips?
In both the Pacific and the Atlantic it was a matter of picking your prevailing winds. eg using the trade winds below latitude 30o when sailing West towards the Carribbean and then coming back via Cuba and Florida to pick up the westerly winds and gulf stream above 30o North which would take them back to Europe. An ingenious ‘weather system as conveyer belt’ approach that emphasises the skills and knowledge needed to prosper in the age of sail.
Along with the difficulties of navigation I am always struck by the cramped nature of ships of old – a constraint that so many fantasy novels seem to elide. The Andalucia – built to be seagoing in a modern age – offers unusually generous headroom below decks and broad metal companion ways (stairways). However, in the galleons’ heyday most passengers would make do with at most 1.5 m2 of living space – notwithstanding that a quartet of officers might enjoy the privacy of a cramped individual cabin and access to the impressive quarters of ‘the admiral’.
The original Spanish Galleons, besides their use in the Armada, were primarily treasure ships designed to bring home the plundered wealth of Spanish Colonies in the New World. To protect so valuable a cargo the annual treasure fleets would sail home in a single large group. They were also armed with cannon against the privations of (predominantly) English corsairs. By the standards of later centuries, the twenty cannon each firing an iron ball of 8 lbs weight, make quite a modest armament – but still a step up from medieval times when ships relied on ramming, boarding, or archers in high stern and fore-castles to defeat enemies.
The ship is in good shape for a fifteen year old replica and has already accrued an impressive 150,000 nautical miles travelling the world – nearly 7 times the distance around the equator. Ironically, given how some young visitors mistake it for the Black Pearl, on one of those trips past the gulf of Aden it was escorted by a Spanish Frigate to protect it against potential piracy.
All in all it made for a fun and informative trip, aided by the free audio guides which could be accessed on our smart phone using strategically placed QR codes and the helpful volunteer crew members. Although this being World Cup Final day, we were told that visitors would be ushered off very promptly at 8.00 pm that day!
You can find out more about the magnificent Galeon Andalucia here at the website of the Nao Victoria foundation, which maintains replicas of two other ships – the Nao Victoria, and Columbus’s Santa Maria. (I wonder if they’ll visit Northern Ireland any time soon!)
Other Ships I have visited
- SS Great Britain in Bristol
- The Matthew in Bristol
- HMS Warrior in Portsmouth
- HMS Victory in Portsmouth
- HMS M33 in Portsmouth
- The Mary Rose in Portsmouth
- HMS Caroline in Belfast
- HMS Trincomalee in Hartlepool
- The Dunbrody famine ship in New Ross
- HMS Belfast in London
- HMS Cavalier in Chatham
- HMS Gannet in Chatham
- HMS Ocelot in Chatham
- The Royal Yacht Britannia in Edinburgh
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