Maro–Cerro Gordo Cliffs Natural Park

One continuous stretch of cliffs, coves and sea caves has been deliberately split between two Spanish provinces — and protected specifically to keep a single, endangered species of coral alive in its underwater caves.

A landscape that ignores the provincial border

The Maro-Cerro Gordo cliffs run for twelve kilometres between Nerja in Málaga province and La Herradura in Granada — a single, continuous natural landscape that happens to straddle an administrative line without paying it any attention. Declared a Natural Landscape in the 1980s by the Andalusian regional government, the protected area covers both the cliffs themselves and a substantial stretch of seabed, together recognised internationally as a Specially Protected Area of Mediterranean Importance. Small coves, none longer than 500 metres, sit tucked between ravines and rock faces reaching up to 320 metres, most reachable only on foot — motor vehicles are banned outright from the beaches, coves and cliffs themselves.

Protecting a coral most visitors never see

The real reason for that strict protection lives underwater. The park’s seabed shelters orange coral, officially classified as Vulnerable to Extinction, alongside moray eels, grouper and an unusually rich variety of Mediterranean marine life drawn to the area’s sea caves — among them Cueva de los Genoveses and Cueva de la Cajilla, both carved by centuries of wave erosion into the limestone cliffs. Above the waterline, wild Iberian ibex move across the slopes, while lesser kestrels and peregrine falcons hunt from the cliff faces — a landscape genuinely as active above the surface as beneath it.

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