Ganh Da Dia Rocks

The Phú Yên coast holds many wonders, but one spot makes visitors stop and stare. The rock there looks like a picture arranged by someone with great care, so perfect that it is hard to believe nature made it. This is Gành Đá Đĩa.

The stone shelf lies in Phú Hạnh hamlet, in the old Tuy An area. It is about 35 to 40 kilometers north of Tuy Hòa along the coastal road. After the administrative changes of 2025, the site belongs to Tuy An Đông commune, in Đắk Lắk province. Even though the name of the province has changed, the scenery here is as it always was. Columns of basalt still stand tightly joined along the edge of the sea.

The rock looks like thousands of stone plates stacked into columns. The columns press close together into a shelf of stone about 50 meters wide and more than 200 meters long. Cut across, each column shows five sides or six, strangely even. When waves strike, white water bursts up against the deep black stone. It is a scene that visitors stop to photograph.

Many people ask why the stone has such a shape. The answer comes from deep in the earth, a very long time ago. The rock is basalt, formed by volcanic eruption. When hot molten rock met cooler conditions and hardened, the whole mass shrank under strain, and it cracked apart in many directions. This shrinking process left cracks that run up and down, across and at a slant. So the stone broke into columns whose many-sided cross sections are very even. Parts of the columns lie under the water and parts rise above the shore. That gives a sight both strange and familiar, which the Phú Yên tourism portal compares to stacked plates.

Because of this geological and scenic value, Gành Đá Đĩa has been ranked a national scenic site since January 23, 1997. On December 31, 2020, the Prime Minister signed Decision 2280, ranking it a Special National Monument. That is the highest rank in Vietnam's system for classifying monuments, and it says a great deal about the value of this place.

Beyond the geology, the area around the rocks has a layer of fishing-village culture of its own. The site's own introduction mentions the Cầu Ngư festival at the Đá Đĩa shrine, a notable national intangible cultural heritage of the area. The Cầu Ngư festival is a ritual to honor the sea god. Fishing communities along the central coast hold it to pray for good weather and for boats to leave for open water and return safely. The area also has stone heritage, such as stone wells, stone animal pens, stone fences and stone tombs. They show how local people lived and built a community in a land full of stone.

The government required a conservation plan for Gành Đá Đĩa. Its study area covers more than 808 hectares. The aim is to protect the waters, the variety of living things and the cultural heritage of the community. So the place now sits inside a long-term plan to protect it, for this generation and for those to come.

A visitor leaving Gành Đá Đĩa may carry away more than photographs. What stays is the feeling of standing before a work of nature that no craftsman made, yet beautiful with a precision and order that is hard to believe. It is the most vivid geology lesson nature can teach. It needs no books, only standing still and looking.