Quy Nhon: un día tranquilo junto al mar
City beach · Twin Towers · Ghenh Rang · Bai Xep
Foto de región o transporte, no una parada prometida. ©
Balance the town's Cham heritage with a southbound coastal outing. Stop often enough to feel the fishing villages rather than treating the beach road as a transfer.
A harbour with a Cham name
The lagoon behind the town still carries its old name: Thị Nại comes from Thi Lị Bi Nại, the Vietnamese rendering of Cri-Banoi, the harbour of Champa, which Chinese records called Tân Châu. Champa held this coast from the eleventh century, and its traces are scattered across the modern wards — at Tháp Đôi, at Ghềnh Ráng, at Thị Nại itself. The bay saw a Mongol fleet in 1283; the Ming treasure fleets under Zheng He made Quy Nhơn in Champa their first port of call after leaving China; Portuguese Jesuits lived here in the 1620s and called the place Pulo Cambi. Vietnamese settlement came in July 1471, when the Lê court set up the prefecture of Hoài Nhơn. In the eighteenth century the Tây Sơn brothers used this coast and its port. The province of Bình Định was created in 1832, a decree of the emperor Thành Thái made Quy Nhơn a town on 20 October 1898, and in 1930 the Governor-General raised it to a third-class city. Since 2025 it has been a ward again — the administrative centre of Gia Lai province, 21.78 km² and about 129,000 people, 170 km from Pleiku.
Two towers, not three
Tháp Đôi, the Twin Towers, also called Hưng Thạnh and known in J'rai as Sri Banoi, stand on flat ground at the foot of a hill in the middle of the modern town. They were built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Champa and the Khmer kingdom were in constant contact, and they are not the usual stepped Cham tower at all: a square body under a curved pyramidal roof, closer in outline to an Angkor temple. The northern tower is the taller and better preserved of the two; its base is a huge stone lotus with elephants, lions and dancing figures between the petals, and at the four corners of the cornice sit stone Garudas with their arms raised, carved in the Angkor Wat manner. The southern tower repeats it on a smaller scale, with its base badly broken. Both have lost their crowns. Cham groups usually had three towers; researchers think the third here was begun and never finished. The pair was badly damaged during the war and restored in 1991.
The poet on the hill
Hàn Mặc Tử — Nguyễn Trọng Trí, born 22 September 1912 — is the name this town is known by in Vietnamese literature. The first signs of leprosy appeared in 1935; he ignored them, then spent years being hidden and treated by quacks. On 20 September 1940 he finally entered the Quy Hòa leprosarium as patient number 1,134, and he died there at a quarter to six on the morning of 11 November 1940, of dysentery, at twenty-eight. He was buried in the grounds of the leprosarium, although he had asked to lie on the Son pass. In February 1959 his brother Nguyễn Bá Tín moved the grave to Đồi Thi Nhân, the Poet's Hill above Ghềnh Ráng, where it stands on a rise with the mountain behind it and the sea in front. In 1995 the hospital turned the room where he was treated into a memorial room with his belongings and papers. Both places are on this ride, ten minutes apart.
The valley of Quy Hòa
Quy Hòa is a bay behind a ridge, and it has been a leprosy hospital since about 1929, when a French priest, Paul Maheu, decided the valley suited the purpose and built the Laproserie de Quy Hoa. Maheu went home to France in 1932 and six Franciscan sisters were sent out; Charles Antoine and Ozithe rebuilt the hospital with housing for long-term patients, and by the Japanese coup it had taken in more than five hundred people. Between 1945 and 1954 it cared for nearly seven hundred, paid for by the Zone 5 resistance committee. The Franciscans handed it to the Ministry of Health on 25 June 1976, and it is now a national leprosy and dermatology hospital. Ride in quietly: it is a working hospital and a village of patients' houses, built in the styles of some eighty countries, and it is not a theme park. In the casuarina wood behind it stands a garden of about thirty busts of physicians — Hippocrates, Hải Thượng Lãn Ông, Yersin, Pasteur, Tôn Thất Tùng — and a monument to Armauer Hansen, who identified the leprosy bacillus in 1873.
What makes the day slow
Ghềnh Ráng begins three kilometres south-east of the centre and runs for a kilometre or more above clear water: the eastern end of the Xuân Vân range coming down to the sea in rounded boulders. The beach of egg-shaped stones below it is also called the Queen's beach, after Nam Phương, who bathed here; the three-storey lodge Bảo Đại built facing the water was destroyed in the war. Further south the road drops to Bãi Xép, a fishing hamlet where the bay is small enough to walk across. North of town the Thị Nại lagoon — four kilometres wide, ten long, over 5,060 hectares of water barely a metre deep, fed by the Côn and Hà Thanh rivers — is crossed by a bridge of 2,477 metres, opened on 12 December 2006, which is the best half-hour of riding here if you want one. Eat what the coast eats: bánh xèo with live-jumping shrimp, fish-cake noodles, bánh hỏi, bánh bèo, and whatever came off the boats at the wharf this morning.
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