Tag Archives: Camino Portugues

Day 39 – Caldas de Reis to Padrón: bloody bicyclists!

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Monday 5 October 2026 – Bringing down our bags for collection and going into breakfast coincided nicely; a decent hotel breakfast later, we were on our way. We walked out of the hotel to find that market stalls were being set up in the road outside.

It’s a big market, stretching along the whole length of the street, right up to the Roman bridge across the Bermaña.

So, let’s take a check on the state of the crowding….

Oh, well – could have been a lot worse. Actually the bugbear today was the almost ceaseless flow of bicycles through the stream of pilgrims.

Even with a wide path, pilgrims had to scatter when bicycles came through; and there were a couple of times later on in the day, when the basic slope was downhill, that those on foot had to shout at the cyclists to slow down, because of the risk of a collision.  I hope that The Powers That Be address this problem. On the Francés, there is actually a specific and often separate route for cyclists which is signposted so that, although the tracks are very close, there’s almost no overlap, and certainly none where the track is narrow.

We were continuing on the route of the Roman Via XIX

which led past a chapel dedicated to San Roque, the patron saint of Caldas de Rei,

portrayed, as ever, coyly lifting his robe.

Our natural pace seemed to be slightly faster than most people’s, so once we’d overtaken the initial group we were following, the trail was relatively uncrowded.

I certainly didn’t feel as claustrophobic as I had a couple of days ago. There was the usual array of entrepreneurial pop-ups along the way.

One of them was doing wax sellos, offering a wide variety of colours and finishes,

but our experience is that wax stamps are too fragile, so we didn’t take up on any.  These wax stamps seem to be a new thing within the last couple of years; we didn’t notice any on the Francés or Finisterre routes we did in 2023 and ’24.

Individual vignettes:

A tiny lady, incredibly well-laden with stuff

Free range cattle

Very free-range chickens having wonderful dustbaths

A significant plantation of the tree cabbages which are so popular in this part of the world

A very regularly-arranged cemetery

A Single, Laceless, Left-Hand, Leather-effect Boot, with its votive offerings

There were two pipers, neither very good: one with a guitar accompanist who was even worse;

and one who was worse, with a drummer accompanist who must have despaired at the piper’s appalling sense of rhythm.

The overall route was about 8km of uphill pull, mainly gentle, occasionally steeper but always relentlessly up, followed by some steeper downhill leading into the outskirts of Padrón. It was always pleasant walking, in sunshine and temperatures in the 20s. Of course, having got up the hills, we got to see some decent views.

Same view as the photo above, but showing the downhill

We saw a couple of mystery objects as we approached Padrón.

A wicker version of an horreo?

Not an obscure artwork, but a remnant of older electricity distribution infrastructure

and something that wasn’t at all a mystery object.

We didn’t stop at this beer stop, but we did have a couple of coffee stops. We had planned the second one at this place, which advertised itself from quite a distance away,

but were seduced by the sudden apearance on our right of this one,

where, delightfully, we bumped once again into Angus and Linda, the couple we’d spent a lot of time walking with yesterday.

Before reaching Padrón, we passed through Pontecesures, which seemed pretty pleased to have made it to 100.

Just outside it was an interesting garden: in one part, there were many gourds hanging in a line (presumably to dry out)

and in the part nearer the house, there were more gourds, obviously having gone through a paint job.

I’m surprised they didn’t have a stall selling gourds to any passers-by who happened to have a large stick about their person.

The Camino reaches Padrón via a bridge across the river Ulla, called the Pilgrim Bridge

from which one can see a large industrial complex

that we think is an alumnium production plant.

We parted company with Angus and Linda at this point and headed in to the town, past a good view of an impressive convent, the Carmelite Convento do Carmen,

and arrived at our hotel, the Hotel Corona Padron, where both a room and our bags were available. Our room had a kettle and a fridge, so making tea became top priority and a cup of Twinings finest Earl Grey started the process of re-energising us after 19.5km. It was good walking, but we were both a bit tired. However, there were some Things To See in the town, so, having established the opening time of a particular church of interest, we went for a walk. Obviously.

The church in question is the Santiago church, which is labelled “Iglesia de Santiago Apóstol de Padrón”, here seen on the other side of the old bridge over the river Sar.

Padrón plays a key role in the traditions surrounding St James. Legend has it that after the events of Christ’s death and resurrection, James the Apostle travelled to Hispania to preach, landing in Galicia at Padrón (then called Iria Flavia). He preached at a nearby chapel, Santiaguiño do Monte. Then after his eventual martyrdom in Jerusalem, his disciples took his body to Jaffa and set it in a stone boat, which, guided by angels, crossed the Mediterranean and reached Iria Flavia. They moored it to a pedrón, a stone, before burying his body inland at what became Santiago de Compostela.

That stone determined the location of the Santiago church in Padrón, which was built around it; the stone is now beneath the altar at the church and the town took its name from the stone pedrón.

The church has a splendid altar piece

with St. James at its head in his benevolent, saintly, pose.

At the back of the church is him in his Matamoros, Moor-slaying, persona.

San Roque gets a look in, too.

That stone is partially visible below the altar.

It’s inscribed in Latin, so actually is probably a Roman (pagan) altar stone that has been repurposed.

There are a couple of replicas of the stone, one of which can be found at the site of the chapel where the saint was held to have preached, the Chapel of Santiaguiño do Monte. We visited the site, and the word Monte is the operational one, here.

129 steps lead up to an area containing the chapel

with its sculpture of St. James baptising from a cockleshell.

The chapel iself was closed, but we peered in through various apertures to see the inside

with its statue of St. James on the right, with its faintly surprised expression.

Above the chapel is the Cross of Santiaguiño do Monte.

The replica pedrón bears a cockleshell,

though we’re not quite sure what for.

Back down in the town, we passed the monument to Rosalia de Castro,

the founding figure of modern Galician literature. Her Cantares gallegos (1863) launched the Rexurdimento, the revival of Galician as a literary language after centuries of neglect and belittlement as “a dialect only fit for the illiterate and the churlish”. The publication date, 17 May, is now Galicia’s Día das Letras Galegas. Born in Santiago, she spent her later years in Padrón, where she died in 1885, and where her house is now a museum.

We also saw the locals indulging in what I read is a very traditional Galcian game, Chave de Ferrolterra.

I don’t know the detail of the rules, but the basic objective is clear from the video.

We popped into a local supermarket to get some more milk so that we could indulge our tea habit. Out of curiosity, I visited the tea section, and – look what I found!

We were not, as it happens, in danger of running out (thanks again, Jessica), but it’s comforting to know that the Spanish haven’t the barbaric shortage that bedevils Portugal.

Tomorrow, most pilgrims leaving Padrón will walk to Santiago to finish their Caminho Português. We’re being a little lazy and splitting the final stage into two short walks, taking an overnight stay in Ribasar tomorrow night. We have only a short walk, therefore, which may well be a good thing, since there are two weather warnings out for the day – a storm warning and a rain warning. If we scuttle quickly along, we hope to avoid getting either drenched or blown to pieces. Fingers crossed!

 

 

 

Day 38 – Pontevedra to Caldas de Reis: Good walk in pleasant company

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Sunday 4 October 2026 – We proceeded with Plan A: leave a little later in the hope that the Keen Beans have buggered off early, meaning less crowding on the trail than yesterday. The alarm went off at 6am because we had to surrender our bags early on account of some streets being closed to accommodate a charity fun run during the day, but other than that we treated ourselves to a leisurely start.

We took breakfast in the hotel restaurant (which is also a public café, so somewhat chaotic) and headed out just before 9am with an estimated 22km to walk to Caldas de Reis. The streets looked wet,

not because of rain, but because the streets were being cleaned, by a large number of large machines,

which required some nimble footwork on our part occasionally to avoid being swept up. You remember the buzz I shared in yesterday’s post? It was clear from the state of the streets that people had been having a good time; bottles, paper cups, takeaway packaging and other detritus was being hoovered up wholesale, and the streets left gleaming and spotless.

Crossing the medieval bridge and the subsequent streets gave us a chance to see whether our Cunning Plan to avoid the crowds had worked.

Nope.

That said, it didn’t seem to matter to me as much as it had yesterday. There was a big group of (we think) Korean peregrinos, and once we’d passed them the trail seemed a bit less crowded.

The walk over the bridge afforded some lovely views in the morning sunshine.

After the bridge, the trail led uphill, mainly on the basis that leading downhill would not have worked well, and on that stretch of track we got chatting to a couple, Angus and Linda – both Australian residents, him originally from South Africa. It turned out that we spent the rest of the day’s walk in their very pleasant company, which is actually a first for us on any of the Caminos we’ve walked. The matter of whom one ignores, or nods and smiles at, or wishes “buen Camino” to, or exchanges a couple of remarks with, or continues to walk with and talk to remains one of the Camino’s great mysteries. But the combination of a couple of opening remarks, a compatibility in walking speed and a certain je ne sais quoi meant that we just carried on walking and chatting and walking and chatting.

In yesterday’s post, I wrote about the very young peregrina we saw walking with her mother. Jane spotted her today, walking with her father, which was nice to see.

I have to say that much of the walk was perfectly pleasant and completely unremarkable – just this 22km walk, you know? The weather was perfect, much of it was in shade, and chatting away with Angus and Linda meant that the time passed very agreeably. There were, of course, some things to note as we went: entrepreneurial pop-ups,

Angus and Linda inspecting a home-made “nyckelharpa”, a kind of keyed violin with resonating strings, very popular in Scandinavia

and some vignettes.

After about 8km, it was surely time to stop for coffee, so we looked in at a wayside cafeteria

but once again we were clearly at the tail end of a pulse of peregrinos – it was rammed, inside and out, and not just with pilgrims – as well as a number of bicycle pilgrims (bicigrinos) it was, of course, a Sunday and the local bike clubs were out in force, adding their particular brand of lycra-clad assertiveness to the mix: so we walked on. Jane hatched an excellent plan B, which involved us walking about half a kilometre off the trail, onto a major road that ran parallel, and we found

an excellent, blissfully pilgrim-free zone, which enabled the four of us to have coffee and other refreshments. Rather than simply retrace our footsteps back to where we’d left the Camino, we then walked a little way along this main road, which allowed us to have a view over the surroundings

and then cut back across to the Camino route and

once more into the stream of pilgrims. The trail took us back, actually, to the main road we’d left some 3km ago, and the first road sign we’d seen to our ultimate destination, which gave us an interesting comparison between the driving and walking distances to Santiago.

(If you’re reading this on a small screen, the Camino Waymark reads 51.070.) 

The Camino trail was following the course of an old Roman road,

which wasn’t straight and didn’t lead to Rome; but some of it was shaded by vine tunnels, which was welcome.

The temperature by this stage was probably around 27°C – not unbearable, but warm enough that patches of shade were welcome. At one stage we passed a shady spot with a handy wall, which a lot of punters were using as a rest stop

along with a bunch of bicigrinos.

In the short term, this acted as a sort of boom across the path, sweeping up pilgrims and leaving the route ahead clear

but soon enough we caught up with more pilgrims and then the stream of cyclists came through; there really was not quite room enough for them and walkers on the path and it was a bit of a nuisance having to dance across the path to get out of the way of cyclists on hearing  the rasp of tyres on gravel; very few of the cyclists bothered to use a bell, if, indeed, they were even equipped with such.

The walk carried on very pleasantly and we passed another coffee stop, called O Cumberto, which was busy but not unbearably so,

and allowed Jane to have one of her favourite refreshments – a freshly-prepared orange juice,

made to order and by hand; none of this machine-made nonsense.

By the time we reached the outskirts of Caldas de Reis, the crowds of pilgrims had died away considerably

and we just had to push through the lengthening kilometres that mark the end of a longish (22km) walk. We passed the attractive Iglesia de Santa Maria de Caldas de Reis

and a couple of buildings which gave away the USP of the place.

“Caldas de Reis” translates to “Royal Hot Springs”; the town has been a thermal spa centre since Roman times, when it was called Aquae Celenae. There are two hotel/spas in the town, and also a public fountain, As Burgas, which spouts water that is slightly too hot for one’s hands,

although It’s A Thing to bathe your feet in it.

Our target, though, was a specific church. To get there, we crossed the river

and turned left off the main road, to see the imposing Igrexa de San Tomé Becket

a church dedicated to Thomas Becket, murdered in 1170 by knights loyal to Henry II, who allegedly uttered the famous phrase, “who will rid me of this troublesome priest” after Becket gave him grief about the relative rights of royalty and Church. Local tradition has it that Becket passed through the town on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela a couple of years before his death, hence the church dedicated to him.

The church was, of course, closed. Werl, Sunday, innit?

We went, therefore, the short distance through the streets of the town

only narrowly avoiding being mown down by more bicigrinos, to our hotel, the Pousada Real and checked in. It’s a Pousada, therefore posh, and, to start with, a bit up itself. But the room was available, and they had already put our bags in it, which was a nice touch. 

The hotel receptionist thought that the Becket church might reopen at 5pm, so after a bit of a relax and a cup of tea, we headed back there, to find that that was the case.

The altar screen at the far end is elegantly carved,

and has a figure of Thomas Becket at its head.

Elsewhere in the church is a processional statue of Thomas

and also a statue of San Roque

(see the dog! see the wound!) who is the patron saint of the town. After that we headed back to the riverside, where there is a cafeteria/bar/restaurant called As Termas.

They didn’t start serving food until 7pm, and they don’t accept table reservations, so Jane hatched a cunning plan: we occupied a table and drank G&Ts until the kitchen opened. Once they’d started with the food service, it was quite the operation. We had an excellent meal, with rather too much food, so, to walk it off, we had something of a stroll afterwards. Obviously. Jane found us some pieces of street art

and then we headed back to the hotel to relax and prepare for the morrow.

We have another decent day in prospect; fine weather and under 20km to walk to Padrón – or that’s what it says on paper, anyway. It’s a Brierley stage, so we can expect further crowds, but I hope I’ve made the necessary mental adjustment that means it won’t be too tiresome. We’ll try the later departure again, in the faint hope that it makes any difference. In any case it means a reasonably relaxed day tomorrow and I shall report on it in due course.

 

 

Day 37 – Redondela to Pontevedra: My Sarría Moment

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Saturday 3 October 2026 – We made what was probably something of a tactical blunder in our timing of the day, and it’s all Accuweather’s fault! We had been expecting the possibility of thunderstorms and rain after 2pm, and had 21 or so kilometres to cover, so started out dead early; we took our voucher-paid breakfast at the nearby café at 7am and were on the road at just after 7.30.

Unfortunately, it seemed that so was the rest of the peregrino world.

I wrote yesterday about increased footfall; I write today about there being too many sodding pilgrims. I guess I had formed the opinion from yesterday that crowding would not be an issue. Today, it became clear that, for me at least, it was.  I had my Sarría moment today. To quote from that blog entry, “Yes, of course these people have a perfect right to be there; of course I’m being unreasonable. But I hated it. All day.” Today was like that, except not quite all day. It occurred to me, as the day wore on, that the actual number of people is not so much the issue. What triggers me is basically the noise; I like walking in almost complete silence and there was a lot of babble buggering my bubble. Yes, it’s their Camino; but their behaviour buggers up my Camino and I’m hoping that today has inoculated me for the five subsequent days that see us to Santiago.

I’m fairly sure that, had we left later, we would have experienced less crowding because we were on a “Brierley Stage” – a stage as documented by the sainted John Brierley in his extremely good and influential book on this Camino, which thus informs the accommodation and hiking strategies of a large number of the pilgrims. So a lot of people set out at about the same time on the same route; hence the crowds.

We had one exceedingly irritating peregrina today.

I very nearly plucked up the courage to say something to her, but my nerve failed me, so, for the half hour or so that she was in earshot, I simply fumed; it’s the British thing to do, after all.

A lot of photos I took today were about the crowds

A lot of others were about the myriad of pop-up/entrepreneurial sideshows along the way, offering sellos, shells, bracelets, food and other stuff that pilgrims might pay money for.

There was one musician by the wayside that I thought was worth paying; a piper, who was really quite good (if you like that kind of thing).

There were several bicigrinos – cyclists – who must have found the crowds even more aggravating than I did. There was also a very junior peregrina;

I wonder how far she will walk in total?

So, outside the crowds, how did the day go? The weather was fine – and this is where Accuweather had let us down, by providing the forecast that suggested we should start early. We had glorious sunshine all day, and temperatures around the mid-20s. There were a couple of hills to climb, steep in places

and with correspondingly steep descents.

Actually, the one above was at a point where we followed our online map rather than the waymarks. It led down to a major road a couple of hundred metres earlier than the “official” path

but there were still waymarks on it and, if you look carefully, you can see that the track is called “Camino dos Peregrinos”, so it seems that the Powers That Be are tinkering with the route for whatever reasons. Whatever, it gave us a short but well-appreciated dose of solitude as we walked.

We got some great views: as the sun came up, as we crossed the river Verdugo on the Puente Medieval de Pontesampaio, and as we reached the summit of the hills.

Naturally, at some of these lovely views, people were more interested in thrusting their gurning faces unnecessarily in them.

Quite often, though, people just slogged on past without registering them. Their choice, I suppose.

There were the usual sorts of wayside items that occur all along the major Camino routes.

There were coffee stops available, some at established cafés, some at more entreprenerial setups.

The best part of the day was towards the end, with about 7km to go:

another Complimentario. It added over a kilometre to the overall distance of the day, but for almost all of it was a delightful end to a walk that I’d found quite difficult to handle. Fewer people, lovely shady woodland and riparian scenes.

At the end, we passed under a couple of tunnels that had been well decorated

and arrived in the town of Pontevedra.

Sorry about the punter in the shot; life is too short to have waited for a gap where no-one was taking fucking selfies

There’s a memorable quote from the BBC’s Doctor Who on the nature of time: “People assume that Time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff.”

One can say the same about Distance, which is not constant, despite what the International Committee for Weights and Measures would have you believe. The last kilometres of a long walk are much longer than the first kilometres, particularly when walking through the outskirts of a town.

To its credit, Pontevedra did its best to leaven the mix a bit.

That thing in the middle of the road there

is the official mark that says there are 64.5km between it and Santiago.

Pontevedra is the capital of its province in Galicia, on the Lérez river at the head of the Ría de Pontevedra. It began as a Roman settlement, then grew into a major medieval fishing and trading port. That prosperity faded in the 16th century when the river silted up and Vigo took over as the main harbour. Today it is known for its well-preserved granite old town of small plazas, along with the scallop-shaped Capela da Peregrina, the Renaissance Basilica of Santa María a Maior and the ruined Gothic convent of Santo Domingo.

Quite some history, then. We used the bits of the day not dedicated to checking into our hotel (Hotel Rúas) and getting lunch (an engaging place called Taberna Felix, just round the corner), to explore it a bit. To do that, we went for a walk. Obviously.

The first thing that struck us is that the old town in Pontevedra has a heck of a buzz on Saturday lunchtimes.

There are many elegant buildings, and the place has an engaging quality to it.

The Capela da Peregrina is a very distinctive shape.

On the outside, one can see St. James

and on the inside,

the statue of the Virgin Mary as Peregrina

and a handsome cupola, shaped like a cockleshell.

The Basilica is an impressive chunk of masonry viewed from the side

or the front.

Inside

it has a very intricate altar screen,

a statue which we now know to be of San Roque

and a decorative rose window.

The ruined Gothic convent is another impressive edifice, which must have been awe-inspiring in its day.

There’s another thing, of course, which concerns how the town got its name.

It comes from Latin Pons Vetus, “old bridge”, after the original Roman bridge over the Lérez; Ponte Vedra is the Galego form. The arches of the current, medieval bridge are fetchingly decorated with cockleshells,

appropriately enough, as we shall be walking out of the town across the bridge tomorrow morning.

Ah, yes: tomorrow. We have to get to Caldas de Rei, some 22km away – another Brierley stage, so likely to be crowded again. The weather forecast is for another decent day, so we plan to start walking around 9am in the hope that hoi polloi peregrini will have buggered off early and so we might get a bit of peace and quiet. Wish us luck!