Text written in Basque and translated automatically by Elia without any subsequent editing. SEE ORIGINAL

The Halong Bay

Halong Bay is located in the Gulf of Tonkin in northwestern Vietnam. It’s a natural setting of unparalleled beauty; a quiet place that seems to be drawn from a magical tale.

The bay stretches along 120 kilometres of coastline and, on its surface, 2,000 islets of various sizes are covered with vegetation. According to a legend, Halong Bay was created by a series of sacred dragons. The dragons came from heaven to protect the Vietnamese from an invasion. But they didn’t fire from their mouths, but gigantic pieces of jade. The jade fragments became islands, and then the enemy did not advance.

The geologist's version is very different. According to scientists, the process that gave birth to the bay began 240 million years ago, when this corner of the world was a warm sea of shallow depths. The skeletons of corals, molluscs and fish that inhabited this sea were generating deposits of calcite, which is the base of the limestone that forms the structure of the islets. The tectonic movements that followed began to fold these deposits, collecting them above the surface of the water and breaking them. As time went on, the sea and the rain shaped these pieces of land until they took on their current appearance. From the outside, the islets appear dense, but from the inside, they are completely perforated by the erosion of water.