Tuesday 1 September 2026 – Today’s distance: 19.3km. Total so far: 78.57km

Of course, the total so far is no longer any kind of accurate assessment of the total distance of the Caminho we’re walking, since we rode some of yesterday’s route rather than walking it. So the total so far will simply reflect what walking we’ve actually done. It will drift further away from a total Caminho distance over the coming days, and possibly weeks, as the weather dictates whether (see what I did there?) we should walk on any given day.

This morning was a good example of weather dictating. We knew, or at least were persuaded by reading the Accuweather website, that the forecast temperature for our destination today, Santarém, would be 30°C. Bearing in mind that the last part of the route is an uphill pull – the first of this Caminho – we wanted to avoid having to face this in the heat. So we decided that we should start early, as soon after 7am as we could.

The lovely chef at the Quinta da Marchanta made sure we had some breakfast ready at 7. It was a touch rudimentary, but nonetheless we appreciated her efforts to make sure we had some food, unlock the reception so we could leave our bags and provide us with a selo – we wouldn’t want to have passed a lovely place such as this without marking it in our pilgrim’s passports.

Before 0730, then, we were on the road, on a trail which would basically run parallel with the River Tagus all the way to our destination. Before too long, the path led us up on to a levée

which we walked along for quite a way, whilst it was a good path. We guessed that the levée must be a bulwark against river floods, hence there being boats apparently high and dry on the river (right-hand in the photo) side.

I was a bit puzzled by the presence of some dwellings on the same side as the boats; if it’s going to flood, aren’t they at risk? Anyway, we carried on as long as the path on top of the levée would let us. We got a good view of the fields on the left-hand (non-river) side as we walked, and the crops there included grape vines

and (later) peppers

and squash.

After a while the path descended back to the road, but for practically the whole of our walk the levée was a feature on our right-hand side. At first, it provided some welcome shade, which gradually dimished as the sun rose

but actually the first two-thirds of our walk were often in some kind of shade and certainly in cool temperatures. Every so often, we went up on the bank to see what was on the other side; in one case it was horses, who clearly thought I’d gone there to feed them.

Another interesting feature on the bank was a pilgims’ swing.

It was lovely to see it there, although there was no clue as to who had provided it. Around about the same time, we caught our first glimpse in the distance of today’s destination, Santarém, a hilltop city.

The main thing that provided interest and distraction for us was the agriculture happening on the left-hand side as we walked. The main crop was tomatoes. This is hardly surprising, as Sentarém is the heart of the Ribatejo region and the historical epicenter of Portugal’s massive industrial processed tomato industry*. We’d seen some evidence of this in the massive Sugal plant we’d passed on the way into Azambuja and the fields we’d glimpsed from our ride to Quinta da Marchanta. But for the majority of the rest of our walk, it was impossible to ignore the vast scale of what was going on. We were lucky to get some insight, as we went, into how things work, as it was clearly Tomato Harvesting Season.

Many fields had already been stripped of their crop

leaving a few uncollected specimens at the edges of fields. Many fields were ripening, pending being harvested.

Anyone who is interested in growing tomatoes in the UK will immediately notice several critical differences between the typical UK crop that’s tenderly nurtured, often in greenhouses, as it climbs and ripens, delivering fruit progressively over several weeks – if the buggers ever ripen in our pathetic sunshine, that is – and what we see here. The crop growing here stays low to the ground, ripens all at the same time and is easy, nay designed to be easy, to harvest in bulk. The resulting fruit are sweeter, have thicker skins (so that they can survive being close to the ground) and are destined exclusively for mass exploitation for industrial processing to pastes and concentrates used in, again, principally industrial, cooking.

Over the course of our walk, we saw several different facets of what is a critical part of the economy of the area. In a way, it’s massively centralised, with major processors, such as Sugal, producing the final products, whilst also being distributed, in a highly choreographed way, among smaller concerns who are taking their own individual harvests to feed into the maw of the big companies.

We’d seen harvested fields as well as those yet to be cropped. And we saw a couple of harvests actually going on. There seems to be a tomato-specific version of the Combine Harvester, which hoiks up the plants (and any fruit lying loose), shakes them around and spits the tomatoes (only the red ones, though) into a trailer pulled by an accompanying tractor.

These guys were making slow progress, but slightly further on was an operation that seemed to be going much more smoothly.

One trailer was nearly full, and behind it was another, waiting to become part of the process.

In some fields, we could clearly see the irrigation pipes that had been laid when the plants were plugged into the fields, back between March and May (staggered, to ensure a steady flow of ripe fruit). The plants are laid as plugs (rather than seeds) and the (miles and miles of) piping laid at the same time.

Like Combine Havesters, the harvesting machines seem not to be able to reach right to the edge of the fields, so there’s a manual process of picking edge growth and slinging it into the path of the machines that will come.

The track we were on became busier and busier with lorries taking the filled trailers off to be processed.

There was one quiet moment when we passed one chap who had climbed on to his trailer and appeared to be jettisoning unripe tomatoes.

Presumably the optical sorting of the harvester, designed to select only red tomatoes, had let him down.

The track we’d walked through all of this was a single strada bianca, something that we’d found really dull when we had to trudge along them in Italy. Today’s 13km of walking along similar dirt roads was very interesting and engaging as we tried to work out what was going on, and what the story was with fields like this

or this.

These, it seems, are harvested fields which have been cleared and prepared for sowing of cover crops for the winter, typically rye or legumes, to maintain the soil quality ahead of the next year’s crop rotation (maybe to corn or rice). The photo above appeared to be some kind of brassica.

Eventually we emerged onto a tarmac road on the outskirts of Santarém. We found a Mystery Object there.

Closer examination

showed that it was a historical flood marker, which explains the importance of the levée whose shade we had enjoyed for so much of our walk. There were clues that we were close to a major river.

By this stage – 13km – we were theoretically just three or four kilometres from our hotel, which was this side of the centre of Santarém. Google suggested a route (from which we could actually see our hotel)

which we followed and which turned out to be the same sort of fantasy as the exit it had suggested from the Santa Iria boardwalk. We didn’t know this at the time, so started along it, only to find this.

Channelling my inner contrarian, I decided we should ignore that, as Google asserted that it was only a few hundred feet to a road that would take us to our hotel.

Hah!

It was a bit of a climb, and then….

That was a message from the developers for the land (who appear to be building a hospital) to say “We don’t give a bugger about your contrariness: You. Shall. Not. Pass.”

So we meekly went back down and joined a (longer) road route. We were passed by a couple of peregrinos

who were doing the Fatima route and appeared to be worried that they’d missed a turn; we were able to reassure them that they were on the right route. Photographs don’t easily show gradient, but we were walking up a reasonably stiff incline and the temperature had risen perceptibly, so when we passed a lavadoiro which offered a seat in the shade

we stopped for a bit of a rest. We’d done 17.5km without a break by this stage, quite a lot of which was in the cooler part of the day, but this seemed a satisfactory distance to have covered without so much as a coffee or a pastel de nata, particularly as Jane was still recovering (nicely, as she does these things) from her cough. (Fingers crossed, I might have escaped catching this cold.)

We completed the drag up the hill to the town, past a statue celebrating the local version of bulfighting, which appears to involve unarmed men trying to grab the bull, literally, by the horns as part of subduing it,

and arrived at our hotel

slightly before our bags did.

The walk, therefore, had involved the first uphill work of any pith or moment of our Caminho so far

(spot the little bump where we’d hiked up the Google Fantasy track) and we were glad to have been able to cope with it in temperatures approaching 30°C.

The nice chap on reception found us a vacant room, despite us being a couple of hours before their official check-in time and we settled in to a spacious room, albeit one without a kettle. Luckily, the hotel could spare one, and it and our bags were available simultaneously within minutes, so we were able to have a nice cup of tea and a rest. Because we’d set out early, we’d arrived while the hotel was still serving lunch, so we took advantage of this before relaxing for the rest of the day.

Under normal circumstances, we’d have (obviously) gone out for a walk round the town, particularly as Santarém has a few Things To See. But the weather has stepped in to change the way we’re going to approach the next few days. The earler forecasts of a brutal 41°C peak have given way to one of just 37°, but even so; one of our days would be a long walk – 27km – and that kind of heat for that kind of walk could pose serious problems. So we’re going to spend the morning tomorrow exploring the town, move on by train, Uber, hook or crook to our next destination, Azinhaga, and similarly thence to the one after that, and so on whilst this heat wave passes. So the “total distance” travelled will, as I said earlier, drift away from an official Caminho distance. Come back in due course to find out more about the joys of Santarém and the Portuguese public transport infrastructure.

* This is something that has happened in our lifetimes, and not by accident. In 1957, the Portuguese government, seeking ways to address its balance of payments problems, wanted to exploit Portugal’s natural answer to California’s Central Valley. A small conglomerate of entrepreneurs drove a pivot from piecemeal production of traditional tomato variants into the massive, mechanised industry we see today – Europe’s third largest and the world’s fourth largest producer of processed tomato products.