Category Archives: Walking

Day 27 – Barcelos to Balugães: Plan and reality coincide

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Wednesday 23 September 2026 – According to Garmin, the distance we had to cover today was 16.2km. According to Accuweather, the pattern of the day’s temperatures would be this:

Not as disastrously hot as previous days, but still worth Getting On With It. An estimated four hours of walking plus an hour of buggering about taking coffee and photos suggested that getting out at around 7.30am would get us to our destination, near Belugães, before the temperatures peaked. The hotel offered breakfast from 7am, and we were ready!

So, it seemed, were a load of others.

Everyone waited patiently outside the door to the breakfast room until Jane suggested seeing if it was open – which it was. This meant that we could set off at around 7.35am with a reasonably good breakfast fuelling us.

At the edge of Barcelos town centre is a statue of a Peregrina.

Frankly, it’s difficult to tell from her body language and facial expression what’s going on: celebrating arrival? hailing a taxi? being unable to understand where to go next? You decide.

The waymarking for the day was good, albeit varied. A formal waymark gave us useful information,

a less formal one at least told us we were on the right track,

as did an official one

and there were a couple of fancy ones later on, too.

We caught sight of our final cock as we exited Barcelos;

note the background here – I shall return to it later.

It was still reasonably early – before 8.30am – and there was a lot of mist around, which lent itself to a few attractive landscape creations,

but not all views were misty.

There were things we’ve seen on previous days, like the front porch and steps up to the bells at this church, the parish church of São João Baptista in Vila Boa;

a lavadouro, this one from, it would seem, as recently as 1964;

and some we hadn’t, such as this mural which was a Portuguese variant of the “Stars of Estrella” murals we saw when we walked the Camino Francés,

and this pair of boots

which probably have a story to tell, but which were silent as we passed.

The Camino vibe was strong again, with peregrinos behind and ahead of us as we walked a cobbled road and made an informal railway crossing,

and the first coffee stop after 5km was doing good business, not least because it was the last café for several more kilometres.

It, too, was strong on Camino vibes.

Beside the trail further along was this interesting noticeboard;

a list (not exhaustive, of course, but interesting) of some key albergues along the section of the Caminho Português north of Porto. I guess it would be possible to plan your entire route from it, although some of the stages would be rather long – and, these days, I’d suggest that there was a possibility that some of them were no longer active.

The route northwards was pleasant, mainly tarmac or cobbles, and wended through various villages, some small, some larger – but none with a coffee stop. Here are some things we passed.

A mobile fish shop (with a loud siren!)

A UK Government outpost?

Interestingly topiaried olive trees, which turned out to be an advert for a landscape gardening firm

Even at 10am, still some mist in the valleys

At around the 7 km mark, the road started on a gentle, but relentless, climb

which carried on for the next 2.5km; you can see the saddle between two hills that the road was heading for.

Looking to our left, we could see the scar and new planting resulting from eucalyptus logging activity;

this is actually the same scar we saw in the background to the Last Cock of Barcelos photo.

A couple of houses on the way up had decorated their walls

and one had made a fetching garden installation from the pedras de calçada that are elsewhere used to make pavements.

There were some nice rural views on the way up,

an attractive church

and an appropriately named cemetery.

Having reached the top, we then headed back down again, into a small town called Aborim which had a big (and Interestingly modern) church, Igreja Paroquial de Nossa Senhora de Fátima de Aborim. It wasn’t open, of course.

As we looked beyond its cross, we could see not mist, but smoke.

Consulting Google Maps told us that this was from a severe fire in the Viano do Castelo region. This was to our north west, and we got increasingly clear views of the scale of the fire as we walked along.

We also caught sight of Belugães, some 5km away

but first, having gone about 12km, we awarded ourselves a coffee stop in the intriguingly-named café Rosa Cintilante.

I immediately thought of this as “Scintillating Rosie’s Caff”, but it actually translates as “shimmering pink”. Anyway, it was a welcome break, and a chance to chat to three Texans who were passing through at the same time as us.

The rest of the day’s walk took us past a couple of interesting items: a bird posing for its portrait

(my telephone told me that it was quite probably a Northern Wheatear, because my telephone knows these things); and a modern construction that looked very much like an espiguero.

To get to our accommodation, Casas do Rio, we had to cross a couple of bridges, only one of which was easily visible, the Ponte das Tábuas, a medieval construction over the River Neiva, serving the old road from Öporto to Valença.

This bridge has been documented since 1135, originally called portum de thabulis which
suggests that the original building was made of wood and was remodeled to its current construction more recently. The other bridge was the Caridade Bridge, which crosses the Nevoinho stream, which in turn is the river near which our destination, the Casas do Rio, stand. It’s supposed to be elegant, but it’s small and overgrown, and it was hot

and we wanted to get to our accommodation and rest.

Jane tugged at the bell rope and the sound caused whoever was inside using the hoover to stop and come out to see what the noise was about. She in turn called for Lucia, the lady in charge, who was delightfully helpful, ushering us towards the honesty bar,

equipping us with beer and telling us how things worked here, which was useful, since the information we’d had thus far really didn’t tell us what to expect. How things worked was exceedingly flexible – Lucia showed us the menu of food available, which was simple but good, and we agreed what time we wanted to eat.

The distance we’d walked was just under 16.5km, almost exactly in line with our expectations; it took us five hours  in total, of which we spent four actually walking; and the temperature when we arrived was exactly what the forecast said it would be. We love it when a plan comes together.

It was just after 12.30 when we arrived and Lucia had our room ready for us in a jiffy, so we could relax until our early dinner, which suited us rather well, us being hot and tired and that. Our room was, indeed, a commodious chamber

with some lovely decorative touches, including a tiny model espigueiro

and this wonderfully retro sound system.

We had dinner on the lawn of this rather lovely place

 

and were able to retire early to relax and prepare for the morning.

We have 19km to go tomorrow, to reach Ponte do Lima. The murderous heat of the previous days is – at last! – forecast to give way to something that is merely sultry; about 27°C at most. However, it still seems a good idea to get away betimes, as walking in the relative cool of the early morning is very pleasant. So Lucia has provided a packed breakfast for us in our room so that we can depart when we like. I’m rather looking forward to Ponte do Lima – it should be an interesting place and I hope I’ll be able to fly the drone there, too. Stay tuned to see how things turn out.

 

 

 

 

Day 26 – Rates to Barcelos: Marketing Up Cock

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Tuesday 22 September 2026 – Long Post Alert! Fetch a drink before proceeding!

A forecast for another searingly hot day (36°C) duly materialised. This was how Accuweather reckoned the day would unfold.

A 16km walk would take us at least four hours, and that would be if we didn’t stop; but that’s not how we operate. The lovely Anabela at our accommodation had offered to put sandwiches and yoghurts in the fridge for us so that we could leave when we liked; not that we really cared for it much, but “when we liked” turned out to be 6.05am.

We had then a delightful walk in the cool for about three hours, at first with assistance from torchlight

and then as the dawn broke.

Before it did, though, we experienced the first signs of what would be a good “Camino vibe” about the whole day, as we passed the “Pilgrim’s Park” just outside Rates which had picnic tables

and a sort of informal exhibition of an amazing assortment of Camino-related items left by passing pilgrims

and also a very strong hint about our destination.

The Powers That Be were obviously taking the Caminho seriously, as for the first time we saw signposts that could genuinely help peregrinos plan their peregrination.

Even the waymarks were getting more informative.

We were overtaken by a couple of peregrinos – well, a peregrino and his peregrina daughter – and fell into conversation with them. They (Ernst and Nina) were the advance guard of a family of five South Africans, the other three of whom (Mum and two sons) were a short way behind us. So the Camino vibe notched up another click as we had the sort of “where are you from” conversations that are not uncommon among strangers walking in the same direction; and it was a very pleasant few kilometres spent in their company.

Today was like yesterday – a coffee stop materialised at just over the 5km qualifying distance, and we all stopped for coffee and torrada, which was a much-needed refuelling. We then bade them “bom caminho” and carried on our way, into the Barcelos municipal region

where the safety of peregrinos is at least mentioned to passing motorists.

I rather liked this church that we passed, the parish church of Pedra Furada,

which seemed to be designed so that maintenance of the bells didn’t require a ladder. We also passed a restaurant at a fuel station which carried a little cultural clue.

Its representation of an espigeiro shows it to be of the Galician kind – parallel-walled, rather than sloping – indicating that we’re gradually edging ever northwards in Portugal towards the Spanish border.

A few kilometres short of Barcelos is the town of Carvalhal,

where we’d planned another coffee stop. We also saw a magnificent Datura plant

(poisonous but gorgeous) and the fetching parish church.

The fact that we passed it is evidence, should you care even slightly, that we’d spurned a short detour on a winding Caminho trail for a straight road

which offered the possibility of walking at least partly shaded from the increasingly hot sun.

A pharmacy caught my attention because of its display board. All over Europe, pharmacies have flashy, flashing displays with all sorts of graphical tricks interspersing useful info such as time, temperature, opening times etc. In my experience, these have always been solely in green and black. This one, however….

Before too long we were passing through Barcelinhos.

We passed the local cemetery,

with its rather appropriate “dead end” sign, crossed under the main road past this rather fine azulejo (which at first I thought was just a mural),

and past a very slightly significant waymark;

less than 200km to go, so we are over two-thirds of our way along the Caminho! The general Camino vibe got stronger and stronger;

That’s a very untrustworthy distance assertion, less than a kilometre from a 198km waymark

Jane got chatting to a chap in a doorway who proudly showed off his calves

and then we were just by the river Cávado that separates Barcelinhos and Barcelos.

From the Barcelinhos side of the river, one gets a good view of the Palace ruins (now an archaeological museum) and the mother church. You’ll get a better view later, so stick with me. The road across the bridge passes a chapel,

the Chapel of Our Lady of the Bridge, built in 1328 to provide shelter for pilgrims; stone benches and basins for washing feet can still be seen.

Upon crossing the bridge, which was built between 1325 and 1330 (a five-minute job before taking lunch, ha ha), we found ourselves besieged by cocks. Wherever we looked, there were cocks.

Barcelos’s famous Cockerel (Galo de Barcelos) comes from a medieval legend in which a pilgrim passing through the town on his way to Santiago was wrongly accused of theft and sentenced to hang. He protested his innocence, saying that a roasted cockerel on the judge’s table would crow at the moment he was hanged. As he was dangling from the the gallows, St. James supported his weight and the cockerel miraculously crowed, proving his innocence and saving him. The story became associated with Barcelos*, and the now ubiquitous brightly decorated cockerels have become a symbol of the town and, more broadly, of Portugal.

The town has leaned heavily into the symbol – a massive up-cock on their part.

We had arrived very early, around 10.45, and the temperature was not unbearable, so, in the almost certain knowledge that our hotel room wouldn’t be ready, we passed some time looking around at Things To Look At, as you do. The town hall, for example, is an imposing edifice

and the portal to the Mother Church is very fine

as is its interior,

with some lovely stained glass and azulejos.

Between the church and the Palace ruins is a cross,

the Cruzeiro do Senhor do Galo (Cross of the Lord of the Rooster), generally dated to around the 16th–17th century. It’s decorated with figures relating to the, yup, cockerel legend: the pilgrim, the hanged man supported by St james, and the rooster. Tradition holds it was carved by the exonerated pilgrim himself, in gratitude to St. James (São Tiago) and the Virgin Mary, whom he credited with the miracle that saved him.

The parapet upon which the archaeological museum  stands offers a fine view back over the river to Barcelinhos

and also of a very imposing pillory.

Passing The Tower,

which is all that remains of the medieval entry gate to the town, we walked through the main shopping street, which is a handsome area,

pausing at the tourist office

for their selo, which – who’d a thunk it? – featured a cockerel.

Near our hotel is an unusually shaped church, the Igreja do Senhor Bom Jesus da Cruz de Barcelos.

(better photo coming later – possess your soul in patience, please). Inside (which we couldn’t really explore because we think there was an Adoration going on)

there is a very fine Eucharistic Throne. These things aren’t as furtive as we’d been led to believe, then. Around the curved interior are the Stations of the Cross in azulejo.

Next door to our hotel is the police station

which seems an entirely appropriate place to put another large pillory.

It was 1145 by this stage, and, as expected, our room wasn’t available at the hotel, so we passed time in an adjacent coffee bar until we were allowed in. The hotel is the intriguingly named Bagoeira. The name (astonishingly enough, nothing to do with the Jungle Book) was the name of a historic house and estate – the Casa e Quinta da Bagoeira – and the hotel’s restaurant occupies the old Quinta site. It did us a Nice Lunch, after which we relaxed a bit before going for a walk. Obviously. (We would have gone sooner, but wanted to wait for the temperature, which had reached 37°C, to drop a bit.)

For the first time in this trip, I was able legitimately to fly the drone. Frustratingly, restricted areas (military areas, airport surrounds, nature reserves) have extended all the way from Lisbon to Vila do Conde. But Barcelos is in the clear!

 

Here’s a photo of the Mother Church, as well as the Palace ruins/museum.

I also took a shot of Barcelinhos

and the rather lovely Bom Jesus church.

Whilst I was doing this, Jane went and explored more inside the Bom Jesus church, wanting specifically to take a photo of Our Lady of the (lady) Pilgrim.

She also went into The Tower, which hosts an exhibition of various items of art: Barcelos is part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network as a Crafts and Folk Art city and is specifically known for its Figurado style. Figurado developed from Barcelo’s centuries-old ceramics tradition, and features hand-made, brightly painted figures often with a satirical, fantastical edge.

From the tower roof, she got…

a nice picture of the Bom Jesus church. Oh, and a couple of the town as well.

It has been a very good day – strong Camino vibes, beating the heat, lots of interesting things to see en route and in Barcelos. Tomorrow is promised to be another warm one, though “only” 33°C at most – and hopefully after that the temperatures will stay in the 20s. We may grant ourselves another daylight start. Stay tuned to find out.

 

 

* I hardly need remind you, because you’ve been paying attention all this time of course, that this story also hails from Santo Domingo de Calzada in Spain, which we passed through when we walked the Camino Francés three years ago, and saw the chickens in the cathedral that celebrate their version of this story.

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.