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Day 4 – Azambuja and Porto de Muge: From the ridiculous to the sublime

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Monday August 31 – The observant among you will note the lack of a running total of our distance travelled on this Caminho. This is because we didn’t walk today; Jane may be a trooper but she’s not stoopid, and was worried that her cough was developing into a chest infection. We both thought it was worth checking in at a local pharmacy rather than risking finding out during a walk – in 30°C heat and constant sunshine – that we’d taken on too much. So, much as we relished the prospect of leaving the fairly ghastly Hotel Ouro, we hung fire so that we could visit a pharmacy. (To be fair to the hotel, the old-fashioned bathroom did deliver a decent shower once one had stepped into the bath, and the towels were of a decent size and fluffiness.)

The breakfast arrangement was to pick up a voucher at the reception which gave us a meal at the snack bar next door. It was not a generous selection, but there was some fruit, some pastries and a coffee machine, which set us the poser: did we want milk with coffee (bottom left), or coffee with milk (top right)?

Milk with coffee appeared to deliver the nearest to a flat white; ChatGPT tells me that “garoto” is an understood Portuguese term for a small coffee with milk. The sooner this country gets to grips with the idea of a flat white, the better, I say. That and Earl Grey tea.

After the rudimentary breakfast, we went for a walk into town, and discovered that Azambuja is rather a nice place – by and large well-maintained and apparently interested in making a favourable impression on visitors. There are two pharmacies, and the first one – Da Silva, a large, modern and impressive place – dispensed something to help Jane with the cough she’s been struggling with.

To get to the main street, one passes the bull ring

which is still actively in use, having (according to ChatGPT) hosted a Corrida as recently as May this year. (They don’t kill the bull in the ring, but that doesn’t mean that the outcome is usually in the bull’s best interests, by the way.)

The main drag is handsome

and there are some attractive buildings,

as well as some clearly with both a history and charm.

but our interest (pharmacy aside) was principally the church, which rated not only an icon on our personalised online map, but also a mention in Brierley. The exterior is plain enough

and features a pillory outside. Inside, it’s quite sumptuous

with a very ornate altar piece built around a mulit-tiered Eucharistic throne which, as any fule kno, is an Iberian Baroque special – an elevated platform on which the monstrance is displayed for public adoration.

The walls are extravagantly and completely tiled

with panels featuring the Stations of the Cross.

There wasn’t however, anywhere we could see that offered us a selo – a stamp for our pilgrim passports. Outside the church was an azulejo

which is very much in line with the town’s pedigree, if that’s the word, in bull fighting and horse riding. Generally, efforts have been made to keep the place looking cheerful

although some pieces are beginning to suffer.

As midday approached, we checked out of the hotel, whose receptionist told us about the taxi rank outside the station, so we hied ourselves thither – to see the sole taxi drive away as we approached. We had arranged with today’s accommodation that we would get there between 12.30 and 1pm, so we needed transport. Desperate times called for desperate measures, so I whistled up my Uber app and found that there was a driver just six minutes away who was prepared to take us on to Porto de Muge. (You see, Guy – we can do the Uber thing, just choose not to almost all of the time 😉.)

I’m typically oblivious of anything in my surroundings not of immediate and practical concern to me, but Jane had noticed, over the preceding couple of days, that there were a lot of tomatoes strewn around the streets, like this, for example.

As we made our way to the station, we noticed several large lorries go by

presumably headed for the Sugal tomato paste factory down the road. And as we rode towards Porto de Muge in our Uber, we saw the extent of the tomato crops around here, which is huge – stretching to the horizon on both sides of the road in places, and (strangely to our eyes) being grown without supports. Apparently they are specific thicker-skinned varieties which grow to a certain size, ripen at roughly the same time, and can be mechanically harvested.

So, Marcio Emanuel delivered us to the door of the Quinta da Marchanta, whose staff had been very proactively in contact already during the day. A more extreme contrast between two places couldn’t easily be found – in the Ouro Hotel, the receptionist could hardly be bothered to put down her pastry to check us in, but here, we were greeted and shown round by the lovely Kim. Although the restaurant here is normally closed on a Monday, they had arranged for us to take a pilgrim’s lunch laid on specially for us, and provided us with a sandwich for supper; because we are planning to leave very early tomorrow to try to avoid the worst of the heat of the day they will provide an early breakfast for us; and, best of all, there’s a dedicated tea station, with kettle and

Twinings finest Earl Grey tea! There couldn’t be a better demonstration of the pedigree of this excellent place as far as I’m concerned (Ouro Hotel’s breakfast couldn’t even muster English Breakfast tea – pah!).

After our lunch, as we were walking round and admiring the place, who should turn up but the three Aussie (Tasmanian) peregrinos we’d seen en route to Azambuja. Jerry is the chap’s name; he’s there with his missus and friend.

The Quinta is well worth looking round; very attractively laid out, both outside

and in.

Our room has an extensive balcony overlooking the complex and we were able to completely relax for the rest of the day. This is the sort of place that makes us wish we had more than one night here. But, sadly, we don’t. We have to get to Santarém tomorrow, which is (we are told) about 16km away, and the forecast temperature is once again likely to climb to 30°C in the afternoon, hence our desire to leave betimes. We are hopeful that Jane’s cold and cough will have improved to the point where four or five hours walking (unrelieved, sad to say, by any coffee stops) can be contemplated; also that what I fear is a burgeoning cold that I’m now developing won’t pose a problem. We’ll see. Beyond tomorrow, the temperatures forecast are brutal, rising to 41°C (that’s 106°F in old money) and continuing in the thirties thereafter. When we walked the Camino Francés, we managed to cope with such temperatures by starting very early, and maybe we’ll be able to do so again. Or maybe we will continue with the Uber strategy. Stay tuned over the next days to find out.

Preparations

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Friday 21 August 2026 – It’s been over a year since Jane and I undertook a long walk, and so we have to reacquire some of the key habits concomitant with basically seven weeks on the move, staying at a new place (mostly) every night. We’re not hard core enough to carry everything, so our bags will be transferred daily. The organisation which will, erm, organise this is, as with all our Camino activities, Walk The Camino, who we hope will do the same splendid job for us as they have done before.

The emphasis will therefore be on travelling (fairly) light (the heavier stuff can go in the baggage to be transferred). Of course, therefore, I have been undergoing the usual pre-trip mild angst around what photo gear to take. On our previous Caminos I used my phone as the principal camera and took a drone in case a decent aerial shot was possible. Much as I would like to take the Nikon with me for capturing the delights of Lisbon, Sintra, Porto and Coimbra, I don’t think that I’m prepared to take the extra weight, since taking the Nikon implies also taking a laptop for photo processing which I feel I would have to include in my day pack. After much mental to and fro, I’ve decided that I will tolerate having to lug the drone with me; this won’t be every day, since there are quite large swathes of the route where drone flying is restricted.

So, for the donkey work of routine photography I’ll take my little Sony and also a new acquisition in case there’s video footage to be captured – a DJI Osmo Pocket 4P. On paper, this is a very impressive piece of technology – a (relatively) large 1″ sensor, and two lenses which offer a very decent zoom range, the lack of which was my main complaint with its predecessor. It should be easy to get professional-quality stabilised video footage, but let’s see if my usual ham-fistedness gets in the way of achieving that, shall we?

Since I won’t have the laptop with me, I’ll update these pages via a tablet, which will also be the backup device, saving me having to carry a backup disk drive with me. A fair bit of photo gear as usual, then, as well as power banks, cables, adapters and card readers. Just so you know how much I suffer in creating these pages, you understand.

Light though we wish to travel, there is one thing that is non-negotiable.

I realise that Portugal is sufficiently civilised and Anglophile that Twinings finest Earl Grey might be available in the shops; but d’you really believe we’re prepared to take that risk?

We will come across a major (for us) unknown on our journey, which is the change to the previously straightforward process of getting into a European country, which, since April this year, has in theory been governed by the new Entry Exit System.  The only experience we’ve had was the debacle of arrival at Pisa airport where the Italian authorities, in an excess of common sense, decided to abandon attempts to use the EES terminals in the face of the vast queue winding out of the airport building and onto the tarmac. EES is one of the passive-aggressive ways the EU has introduced to punish the UK for Brexit and it has the potential to give rise to major queues for non-EU travellers. The situation is sufficiently marked that there is even a website about the queues, which appears to crowdsource information about wait times.

Portugal is one of the two EU countries which has embraced EES (the other being Sweden) and it has put in place support for travellers to use the official app to register their visit. Since we have been good citizens and passed over our details, we might thus expect the queuing at arrival to be lessened. It’s disappointing, therefore, to read that Lisbon airport is one of the worst for queues for non-EU arrivals.

To be fair to Lisbon, the site appears to say that the arrival queue at time of writing (24 hours before we travel) is 20 minutes.

We’re not starting out on our Caminho immediately – we have a couple of days in Lisbon followed by a couple of days in Sintra (a place I’ve never visited before) to play tourist before we start playing pilgrim. Once we’re under way, though, I suspect the schedule of the days will fall into a familiar pattern: start walking as early as is reasonable and consistent with having some form of breakfast; late lunch shortly after arrival at the day’s destination; exploration of it after lunch; then writing the day up (me) and preparing for the morrow (Jane).  There will doubtless be Things To See as we go, and Jane does a great job of picking out the best ones so that we actually visit some places of interest rather than just peregrinating grimly past them. As well as Google, we have extra resources,

and so we’re expecting a good variety of places to visit and possibly get a selo – a stamp for our pilgrim passports – as we pass (we want to make sure we qualify for a Compostela for this Caminho to match the ones we have from the Francés and Finisterre Caminos).

Once we set out, in the main we’ll be staying one night at each destination. We’re not rushing, but will cover the 630km in 37 stages – average 17km per day. We will spend extra days in other places en route, notably Porto, as well as a couple of interim place where we get to do the laundry – these things are important, you know. I’m hoping there will be a good crop of photos and a selection of points of interest as we go, We head for Lisbon tomorrow – stay tuned if you’d like to follow the journey!

 

Homeward Bound – one final sight

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Saturday 20 June 2026 – As hinted at earlier, we had to get under way quite early in order to have any kind of chance of presenting ourselves for the 11.05 flight back to London in any kind of good order. An 0630 departure from Bonassola meant that we didn’t have the luxury of a hotel breakfast; we’d picked up their packed offering the evening before. I suppose their intentions were good, but I question the wisdom of including a hard-boiled egg. Trying to eat one of those without upsetting everyone within a 10-foot radius would be a non-starter, so we carefully took those out and left them behind.

As you might expect, Bonassola at 0620 was not busy.

It would have been dead quiet were it not for the bin men doing their thing. Our final ride in that dreadful bus got us to Pisa airport shortly before 9am, and we walked into a bustling terminal. In pre travel discussions among the group, given the possible, nay probable, disruption caused by the UK no longer being part of the EU, we had wondered whether this was leaving enough time to ensure we’d complete all the formalities. In the event, the timing worked out pretty well. We found the BA check-in area, which was closed but which opened pretty soon after we started queuing, so evidently BA thought that the standard 2-hour window was adequate.

Having checked in and been allocated seats that were almost hanging off the tailplane, we then set about getting through security. This looked like it could turn into the stumbling block we’d feared.

About half way along that mass of humanity were the gates that allowed one into the security area. However, it seemed that this was entirely normal for your average morning in Pisa airport; the staff seemed quite relaxed, and only had to call out one flight for urgent prioritisation. People took the queue in their stride, and we inched forward, eventually forming a line into security, and thence to the border. Those with EU passports could take the e-gates, and most of the Brits queued up for the old-fashioned “stamp your passport” desks. Jane and I actually tried the e-gates in case they were (a) quicker and/or (b) of the modern EES type, but they weren’t either of those things. Our passports let us through but were then stamped anyway. Our next trip is not for a couple of months and is to Portugal, which has adopted EES and thus will be a different travel experience; let’s hope they’ve sorted out any wrinkles before we get there.

I might have been in cramped seats in the penultimate row of the plane, but I had a window seat and accidentally looked out at just the right moment.

So I got a decent view of the famous Leaning Tower and the rest of the Piazza del Duomo, much better than the fleeting glimpse we caught as we travelled out to Bonassola the week before. Finally, an aerial view! We’d been to Pisa the previous year and I had got some early morning photos around the Piazza that I was pretty pleased with, but it’s a No-Fly area for drone photography (of course! grrrr!) so I missed out on an aerial shot then. This one is not ideal, but I was glad to have caught it.

The rest of the journey was uneventful and, to quote John Cleese, relatively crash-free, and we were home and lashing into a mug of Twinings finest Earl Grey by 2pm. Although our week had been hard work at times and I continued having difficulty with staircases for a few days after, it was a very fine trip – spectacular photography scenery and a lovely bunch of people, with whom I rather think we will keep in touch.

So: Cinque Terre, eh?

It was lovely to see the villages and to get such brilliant views, but it was hot, hard work.

Why is Day 1 always the bastard, eh? Eh?

The raw figures make the walking look easier than we found it. The temperatures didn’t help, and neither did the crowds on some walks. But particularly, the terrain was tricky in places – rough patches and quite large steps up and down among the rocks were commonplace. But it was absolutely worth going and I would recommend it as a short break for anyone.  As we toiled up and down the hills, I formulated some guidelines which might help others considering a visit.

Cinque Terre Rules

  1.  If you like walking, you’d better like quite tough walking – there are no easy routes. Walking poles recommended.
  2. If you are going to walk, then mid-April to mid-May, or last week in September/first week in October are good times to go.
  3. These are the best time to avoid the crowds in the villages as well.
  4. If you don’t want to walk, then an afternoon ferry ride along the villages is a great way to see them at their finest.

HF Holidays did a very fine job of presenting us with a well-organised, rewarding week and I would recommend it to anyone, particularly if walking is your thing.

Our next trip will involve rather a lot more walking, though I’m expecting it to be less arduous despite being much longer. Unless something spectacular happens, therefore, my next entry in these pages will be in late August and I’d be delighted if you were to join us on our next travels.