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Day 25 – Vila do Conde to Rates: longer and hotter than planned

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Monday 21 September 2026 – In theory, our route today would be around 13km, switching us from the Litoral to the Central Caminho trails, so heading north-east rather than directly north. Given this relatively short distance, we thought we’d risk taking the hotel breakfast, served from 7am so that we’d start out not too long after 7.30. It was a decent breeakfast, and the hotel’s breakfast room was all the evidence one might need that the Caminho from Porto has vastly more traffic than from Lisbon.

Jane’s view of the route we should take was different from what I’d expected, and instead of heading directly north-eastwards out of Vila do Conde, she proposed that we go back down to the river and follow a route suggested by John Brierley that parallels the river for a while. The road we walked was a bit of a puzzle to me;

it was clearly a modern pavement and road development, and I wondered why the Powers That Be had decided to use small cobbles for both pavement and road, when surely the cost of laying and maintaining them is higher than conventional tarmac and paving stones?

There was another puzzle, too.  When we looked across the road surface, it seemed that one side was neatly laid out and the other was a muddle.

Then we looked back instead of forwards and realised that this is some kind of an optical illusion;

now the near side looks tidy and the far side a mess. There are clearly cobbling skills that we wot not of.

We passed a mystery construction

which, looking at the building it was outside

we inferred was water treatment facilities that are clearly no longer in use. Our road led under a motorway and it seemed that someone had used the area to store (or, possibly, dump) a load of construction material and detritus.

We speculated that maybe it all came from the creation of this nearby modern-looking building

which turned out to be the offices and warehouse facilities of the Vila do Conde municipal government. If that’s the case, given that to get rubbish cleared away one calls the local council, we wondered who these guys would call to clear the rubbish?

Also, outside this facility was this:

a Manueline armillary sphere symbol with the cross of either the Knights Templar or the Order of Christ. What’s the link between this and a council office?

So many questions….

I made a slightly snide comment in an earlier post about “Hispanic-style” electrical wiring, which looks somewhat insecure to our UK eyes. We passed a prime example along the way.

It’s probably perfectly robust, but it just looks vulnerable to sabotage and adverse weather, somehow. Anyway, it seems to be the standard across Portugal, Spain and any South American country we’ve visited.

Architectural observations: we saw another example of the Art Deco “Spirit” adornment to a building

and any number of wayside shrines, from small to big.

The 5km mark came up on our walk and – oh, look; a coffee stop!

This was actually the second one in the Sobreposta neighbourhood; the first one had a loud TV, a smell of cigarette smoke and a feral-looking proprietor, so we kept walking and found this one, the Padaria Nova. It was good to rest – it was only just after 9am, but the temperature had already started to climb steeply. There was one group of ladies of a certain age who were having a good ol’ gossip and larf,

which added nicely to the atmosphere of the place.

Coffee over, we carried on and walked over the River Este, where there is a medieval bridge

with, lurking in the background, a Roman Bridge.

This bridge features on the coat of arms of its area, Touguinho. Rather confusingly, we’d already walked through a place called Touguinha. A bus stop showed us the coat of arms of each place,

and collectively as a parish, the two are known as Touguinho. There’s a rather grand portal, known as the Porta da Touguinho

through which we could see an attractive use of vines to provide cover over the lane. Shortly after this we came across an illicit Caminho waymark!

I mentioned yesterday that, although we were walking on an accepted link between the Litoral and Central Caminhos, the Powers That Be had eradicated most of the waymarks.  Either they’d missed this one, or some guerilla artist had popped out with his spray can. In fact, we came across another one later, so it just looks like incomplete staffwork by the authorities.

What else did we pass? The company of Alves and Sons, who obviously make palettes (I’ve always wondered where they came from);

a couple of pairs of cute donkeys;

some actual cows – I think the first we’ve seen on our walks so far;

and a council’s efforts to make their bins look a litle nattier.

We left Touguinho and entered Junqueira, where there is a fine chapel, Nossa Senhora da Graça,

and a really unusual building, labelled on Google Maps as “Palacete – Junqueira”.

Junqueira also has a very fine parish church, to which is attached the monastery of San Simão da Junqueira.

Someone with a sense of humour had adorned a gateway outside the church.

We also discovered another illicit Caminho waymark, but don’t tell anyone. If The Powers That Be are reading this blog, they might send an operative out to eradicate it.

We had a choice at this point – carry on along the road until it naturally joined the Caminho Central, or cut across; we chose the latter, which meant turning right along a more minor road which led to one of those classic decision points where the correct way to go is always uphill.

Actually, it was then rather steeply downhill after this point

to join the official Central Caminho trail. Our target was Arcos, where we thought we might be able to get another rest stop, and the road took us over another Roman bridge, the Ponte de São Miguel dos Arcos,

which was interestingly adorned at each end.

The road into Arcos took us past a handsomely tiled church

to, importantly, Café Barbosa, where some serious refreshment was needed, as the temperature by this stage was well over 30°C. We rested a while and then pressed on, past an attractive rural scene

before the trail became the road that would lead the last couple of kilometres to Rates.

At the edge of the village is a statue of São Pedro de Rates

who lends his name to the local church which is regarded as one of the finest and oldest Romanesque churches in the country. Our accommodation the delightful B&B Casa Anabela, was just a couple of hundred yards on from the statue. We arrived there at around 1230, quite some time before the official check-in time of 2pm. Anabela was there and we were able to sit in the shade and rest, until our room became available – somewhat ahead of schedule, which was nice.

Visiting the church was obviously a Thing To Do, so we planned it as a post-prandial stroll. Rates is not a huge place but it has a couple of restaurants, one of which obligingly opened at 5pm, enabling us to have dinner well before the early night mandated by a planned early start on the morrow. The restaurant, “O Peregrino” has conflicting reviews on Google but we decided to risk it. It’s an idiosyncratic place, offering basically a pilgrim menu with a choice of wines or beer. We had soup, and chicken with spaghetti and it was delicious, and very good value. We were the only ones in the place, which constricted the atmosphere somewhat, but mine host was affable enough,

and we got a decent selo out of the experience.

It’s a short walk to the church, and doing it reveals that Rates has a surprisingly handsome old town centre.

The tower on the left above is the clock tower. But Rates is best known for the Romaneqsue Church of São Pedro.

According to local Catholic tradition, Pedro lived in the 1st century AD. He was converted to Christianity by none other than good ol’ Saint James, who was traveling the Iberian Peninsula to spread the Gospel. Saint James was so impressed by Pedro that he ordained him as the first Bishop of Braga around 45 AD, making him the foundational spiritual figure of northern Portugal. He ended up in Rates because he was fleeing an angry father who was trying to kill him for having converted his daughter to Christianity (and abstinence), thereby ruining her marriage value. The location of his body was discovered in mysterious circumstances after 800 years in obscurity. Modern historians view the tale with a healthy dose of skepticism. Many believe the story of São Pedro de Rates was heavily embellished – or entirely invented – around the 10th century.

The church is an impressive building

with a wonderful portal.

Built in the 12th and 13th centuries on the site of an older Benedictine monastery founded by Count Dom Henrique and Dona Teresa, it is classified as a National Monument and is the only preserved Cluniac church in Portugal still functioning as a place of worship.

Inside, there is quite a presence of Order of Christ symbols.

By the early 16th century the monastery of which the church formed part had fallen into disuse, and it was handed over to the Order of Christ, hence the presence of their symbols. Only the church and bell-tower survive from the Monastery.

The church and old town made for an interesting post-prandial stroll, and then we headed back to our accommodation to relax for the rest of the evening. Today’s walk was longer and hotter than I’d expected; longer because of the extra detour we took to the Central Caminho and hotter because this fucking heatwave won’t go away; every day, the day when things get cooler recedes by another day. Tomorrow was supposed to be 30°C, now it’s forecast to be 36. Wednesday was supposed to be 27°C, now it’s 33. Will we ever get to the point where we don’t have to take special measures to avoid extreme heat?

Anyhoo, this extended heatwave means that we plan to leave betimes tomorrow, as we have over 16km to go before we reach Barcelos and the temperature will hit 30°C sometime between 11am and midday. Another hot and sweaty day in prospect, then, but Barcelos has promise to be an interesting place.

 

Day 24 – Porto (well, Matosinhos) to Vila do Conde: hot, but good

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Sunday 20 September 2026 – The 11km of the Caminho from Porto to Matosinhos have two disadvantages: they’re very dull walking; and they would make for a 33km stage to Vila do Conde, today’s destination. It’s possible to get from Porto to Matosinhos by public transport, but it takes nearly an hour, and, with temperatures once again rising into the 30s, we wanted to get started early, so Uber it was, then, at 0630 from the hotel (having taken a foraged bread-roll-and-banana breakfast in our room), and we were walking before 7am, over the river by the docks at Matosinhos.

The day had a much more “Camino” feel about it. Immediately we got out of the Uber, a lady peregrina came by; she was German, but living in Sweden, and strode out ahead of us. The first corner shop we came to had this in the window

and we saw several peregrinos during the day.

As you can see from the gallery above, we spent virtually the whole day on a boardwalk which starts just outside Matosinhos and extends most of the way to Vila do Conde. At first, though, we walked along the prom, tiddly om pom pom,

past the lighthouse and an artwork that had some kind of pretentious title I couldn’t be bothered to note.

Then the boardwalk started

and stretched virtually unbroken to our destination. It was actually broken in a couple of places, but it’s fundamentally over 15km of planking and posts, which is a significant amount of wood and a vast number of screws to hold it down. These boardwalks (passadiços) along the Senda Litoral route were built by municipal governments during the late 2000s and 2010s. They were created primarily as a soft-engineering project to prevent human foot traffic from destroying fragile coastal sand dunes and native vegetation, while simultaneously establishing safe public seaside pathways. While the Senda Litoral is an unofficial variant of the Portuguese Coastal Way rather than a medieval religious path, local councils welcomed pilgrims onto these corridors as a scenic, flat, and car-free alternative to walking the dangerous tarmac national roads out of Porto.

As the sun came up, we passed a chapel

the Capella da Boa Nova (Chapel of the new snake?). Despite the sun, there was a delicious sea mist which kept things cool for quite some way.

The boardwalk leads past the vast great Petrogal oil refinery,

and the powers that be have put various diversions along it – infoboards, exercise stations,

resting places

and the odd occasional nugget about the Caminho.

The above nugget was starkly at odds with a pilgrim office we visited further along the boardwalk

which itself was at odds with the waymark outside the cathedral which made the distance (you remember, of course) 248km. So, who knows? Not us – until we get there, when you can rest assured that I will update you on the amount we did walk, as well as the amount we should have.

Our previous experience of walking in the wilds of Portugal on a Sunday was of cafés and restaurants that were closed because it was Sunday. I’d been hoping that today, since we were basically walking along the beach through holiday resort villages, there would be places open where we could stop and get refreshment. For once, my optimism was rewarded.

At just over 5km, our qualifying distance, this place appeared beside the boardwalk. It wasn’t immediately obvious whether it was open, but we peered in and it was. By this stage, my breakfast had worn off and I was quite peckish, and Jane had the bright idea that we should order torrada (toast and butter) with our coffee, which was a stroke of genius. We got mountains of toasted local bread, butter and quince jam, accompanied by decent, hot, coffee, and it made a wonderful second breakfast. The chap who served us had a permanently harrassed expression on his face, and by the time we left it was justified, as lots of people started drifting in for their Sunday breakfasts; once again our timing was very fortunate.

The boardwalk runs by the sea, past opportunities for people to fish

and some nice little beaches, where we found that people were already set up for the day.

There was also an item of a bit more pith and moment – the Memorial Monument.

The obelisk marks the spot where the Liberal Wars (you remember them, don’t you? Of course you do!) effectively began. On 8 July 1832, a fleet organised in the Azores and commanded by King Peter IV landed an army of about 7,500 men on this beach, aiming to replace the absolutist rule of Peter’s younger brother Miguel with a modern liberal regime. The landing caught the absolutist forces by surprise, since they had expected an attack from Lisbon, and the liberals then marched on Porto, where they withstood a siege from Miguel’s forces lasting about a year. Peter IV won the day with help from the British (go, us!).

There were a couple of breaks in the boardwalk; at one stage a barrier was up and we wondered how serious its prohibition was.

Quite serious, it turned out.

But there were roads nearby to navigate around this breakage.  There was another one later on, which was a bit more serious

and which involved walking through soft sand for a short while, which is not rewarding in sandals. Doing this, we passed a guy who, again, seemed to be setting himself up for a day there.

Was his guitar to entertain himself, other beach users, or to try to busk for money? We’ll never know.

The boardwalk gave way to a more conventional centre as we passed though the fishing village of Angeiras

where there was an entirely inexplicable construction:

the Crypto Content Creator Campus was just a shack with a couple of old ladies gossiping outside it – unless, of course, they were the Crypto Content Creators…

There were various opportunities for coffee/refreshment stops, and we took up on one about every 5km. The last one was in a rather shonky, but very friendly, bar on the outskirts of Vila do Conde

where the blokes were in a back room playing pool. The coffee there was pretty terrible, but we had a beer each, which was much needed, as by this time the temperature was getting on for 30°C and we were getting very hot. From this point, we left the boardwalk and used the roads in the hope that we could find some shade; there was some available, and it was very welcome.

Before reaching the town of Vila do Conde itself, we walked a couple of kilometres through a nature reserve,

and then re-emerged onto the roads into the edge of the municipality of Azurara, which edges Vila do Conde and is a handsome place.

The church of Santa Maria de Azurara, with the Manueline style Wayside Cross outside it…

…and its pillory

The road then took us towards the town of Vila do Conde itself, which we had to reach by crossing the river. It looked at first as though the town had its own small nuclear reactor

but it’s actually a chapel, more on which later.

The bridge gives a good view of the town

and the enormous monastery and church of Santa Clara, also more of which later.

First, we had to walk through the streets of the very attractive town

to find our hotel, the Hotel Brazão, which we did eventually. By this stage, the temperature was 33°C and we were very happy to have a glass of something cold in the hotel bar whilst we waited for our room to come available. Then we had to find some lunch; with several restaurants allegedly open until 3pm, this seemed an easy task, but the first two we tried turned us away. In the end, we came upon the Cafe Patarata

where a harrassed but very competent madame bade us sit whilst she dashed about getting food to all the other people in the place. We had a really delightful meal there, although she committed the cardinal sin of making a port-and-tonic with red port.

Back at the hotel, we rested for a while and then went for a walk. Obviously. We wanted to explore that really interesting nuclear reactor chapel

but sadly it was not really open to look inside; we learned from a notice in the town that there was a local dignitary’s lying-in-state after he’d died – funeral tomorrow, so we didn’t go in; but the walk around gave us a chance to see a few other things and appreciate the age and status of the town.

Vila do Conde sits at the mouth of the Ave river. Human settlement here goes back to the pre-Roman hillfort (castro) culture, and the Romans later used the area for its river and coast. The name, “Count’s Town”, is traditionally tied to Afonso Sanches, an illegitimate son of King Dinis. He and his wife Teresa Martins Telo founded the Monastery of Santa Clara here in 1318, and the town grew around it.

Its golden age was the 16th century, when it became a major shipbuilding centre during the Age of Discoveries. That legacy is visible in a full-size replica of a 16th-century nau (carrack) built at the old shipyard.

The Manueline portal of the Igreja Matriz (parish church) dates from this period,

(We looked into the church, but a service was about to start, so I just got a grab shot of the interior.)

Later landmarks and traditions include the Santa Clara aqueduct, an enormous structure of nearly 1,000 arches built in the 18th century to supply the monastery,

and a strong bobbin-lace (rendas de bilros) tradition. There’s a statue just outside where we had lunch to mark this tradition

There’s a very handsome town square – you can just see some more arches of the aqueduct in the background.

Near the replica ship is the King João II square, which hosts several items of interest, including a huge sculpture which is called a sun dial,

but, impressive as it is, it’s not usable as such. Other statues in the park celebrate various aspects of the town’s considerable history.

That, then, was our day – a long and eventually hot one, but enjoyable and interesting. Tomorrow we stray off the Litoral route that we’ve followed today and hack across country to join the Central route at Rates. Apparently the waymarks for this transition have been removed to try to focus people’s minds on sticking to one or other routes, but we’re sticking two fingers up to this mindset and finding our own way across. It’s not a long walk – maybe 13km or so – so despite high temperatures again being forecast for the day we probably won’t have to start out in the dark. With luck we’ll find our way OK, in which case I’ll be able to regale you with tales of our (i.e. Jane’s) navigational skills. Wish us luck!

Day 23 – Porto: Intermission 2 – playing tourist

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Saturday 19 September 2026 – A full day of leisure lay before us. So, a bit of a lie-in and a decent hotel breakfast over, we went for a walk. Obviously. Our main objective was to do one of the main tourist activities – take a short cruise up and down the Douro river and inspect the bridges that cross it. Fortunately, there is a company that offers such a cruise. Well, actually, there are probably dozens, but we just rocked up to the nearest one on our side of the river, operated by Manos do Douro. There was a 1030 departure, labelled the “6 bridges cruise”, which seemed just the thing, and we were there very conveniently at 1020, so we got on board

and off we went. On a sunny day like today, Porto is exceedingly photogenic,

so we got loads of pictures, including the bridges we went under.  We started off up-river and up-sun, so the best pictures started when we turned and headed back towards the city, when we had the sun behind us.

Ponte de São João, a 1991 railway bridge, replacing the Maria Pia Bridge (q.v.)

Maria Pia Bridge, from 1877. Designed by Gustave Eiffel, and the oldest bridge connecting Gaia and Porto

Infante Dom Henrique Bridge, designed by Adão da Fonseca, opened in 2003 to replace the upper deck traffic of the Luis I Bridge (q.v.)

“Our” bridge, the Luis I Bridge, from 1886, designed by the Belgian engineer Théophile Seyrig, a former business partner of Gustave Eiffel, and now a Unesco World Heritage Site

The Luis I bridge is photographically useful for framing important subjects on the mainland.

The final bridge was quite far downstream.

The Arrábida Bridge, which has a 270-metre span that for some time held the world record for reinforced concrete arch bridges. Designed by engineer Edgar Cardoso, and inaugurated in 1963

Those of you who have stayed awake long enough to have been counting will have noticed that there are only five bridges, and we were sold six. The sixth, the Freixo bridge, is sufficiently far upstream that neither Jane nor I noticed it in order to take a picture of it.

As well as the bridges, there were a few other things to see as well, because, as I say, Porto in the sunshine is a very attractive place.

As you can see, among the pretty pastel houses there’s evidence of what must have been some fairly chunky fortifications at one stage. The Parish Church of Massarelos prominently displays a cross of the Order of Christ (which, as you will remember, is what the Knights Templar morphed into).

There are several parking lots for the river cruise boats, but one seems to attract most of them.

At some time, t, in the future, there may well be a seventh bridge for the cruises to go under. On port and starboard side of the boat, this could be seen.

Interestingly, as we passed, we noticed that the two bridge ends don’t actually point at each other. I hope that Someone Hasn’t Blundered.

We passed a house that prominently featured the Sandeman port logo

which we’d originally thought indicated the location of their port house; but this is on the Porto side, so there must be some other connection. For the real Sandeman house, and why it matters (to us, at least), read on.

As the cruise boat neared its return to its start point, it passed an exhibition of old port boats, the ones that were used to bring the wine down the river in barrels.

There are several of them, bearing the labels of some of the port houses that line the banks near where these are moored. After we disembarked, it seemed a good idea to wander along the quay back towards the port houses in search of coffee. It was a more difficult quest than one might have imagined from the number of eateries and drinkeries along the quays. Most of them were restaurants and not open until midday; the few genuine cafés were, unsurprisingly, crowded and we couldn’t find a seat for a while.  However, because we kept on wandering we came across two golden examples of extreme tourist marketing. Normally these sorts of things are the sorts of things we would avoid, but actually they are both charmingly done, or rather overdone. The first is a sardine shop. You’ll remember that we saw such a thing in Lisbon, and this one was no different

Literally wall-to-wall canned fish – mainly, but by no means exclusively, sardines.

They even offered a tasting.

It was so inviting that I recorded a short walk-round video.

Next door to it is an even more idiosyncratic place, the Casa Portuguesa do Pastel de Bacalhau, dedicated to the codfish cake.

Again, this is not something that would normally interest me, but the building’s interior is very quirky.

According to their website, “The Codfish Cake with Serra da Estrela PDO Cheese was born from the desire to honour the work of the shepherds of Serra da Estrela. It is thanks to them that the sheep produce an extraordinary milk that gives rise to a unique cheese in the world.

“At Casa Portuguesa do Pastel de Bacalhau we celebrate the protagonists of this story by creating the conditions for them to have a dignified life, fairly remunerating their work.”

This was another place for which recording a video was an inviting prospect.

Both places, whilst being sharply commercial and aimed at tourists, managed to be very charming.

Further up the quay was the place where the big RIver Cruise boats were parked – indeed triple-parked. That’s why there were so many punters in the town!

We passed port houses with various familiar names, as we have enjoyed Fonseca, Quinta da Noval, Graham’s, Sandeman’s and so on. There are flags on the quayside bearing all the names,

but the one that interested us the most was Sandeman’s.

It must be 30 years since we went to a Sunday Times wine show. While we were there we passed the Sandeman Port stand, where Graham Sandeman was on duty. It was he who first alerted us to the possibilities of port and tonic made with a medium white port. Given that we were passing his family gaff in Vila Nova de Gaia, it seemed rude not to pop in and lift a glass to the memory, particularly since they had a nice terrace outside in the shade.

If you look carefully, in the distance you can see that house with the Sandeman logo on the side.

After a couple of glasses, for it was very good, we pottered back to the hotel, past where young lads were jumping off the Luis I bridge for pocket money

and spent the rest of the day relaxing and psyching ourselves up for restarting the walking thing tomorrow. The next two days are, you guessed it, official heat wave days, with forecast temperatures of over 30°C – not as ferocious as we’d seen earlier, but still not to be trifled with. So we plan to make a very early start tomorrow, to get 22km of walking out of the way before the worst of the heat.

The Caminho proper starts at the Cathedral, and there are three route options – Central, Littoral and Coastal. These are explained, if you can be bothered, in the Stingy Nomads pages. For the rest of our Caminho we’ll be dodging about a bit between them, but we are starting with the Littoral route; furthermore, we’re going to start outside Porto, at a place called Matosinhos, and walk thence to Vila do Conde. It’ll be a Sunday, so we’re not sure whether we’ll be able to get coffee on the way, but I’ll of course report back. It’ll be hot and sweaty by the end of the walk – wish us luck!