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Day 33 – Vila Nova de Cerveira to Valença: another flat day

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9Tuesday 29 September 2026 – Even before we went to bed last night, it was clear that the wind was getting stronger. As we went to breakfast, strong gusts were whistling through the trees and bushes in the garden at the Quinta. It wasn’t raining, though, so we decided to get out and get walking as soon as we could after finishing our breakfast; we were out on the Caminho before 9am. As – I’m prepared to bet money on this – you probably guessed, we decided we would take the riverside, less hilly, walk to our destination, Valença, which would be around 17km away. It was a grey, blustery day,

and we were keen to get to our destination before any rain came along. Our route to the riverside led us past some of the sights of the town: some more faces on murals;

inexplicable artwork;

(this reminds me of the old weather forecasting stone joke: “stone wet: raining; stone swinging: windy; stone gone: hurricane), as well as what is quite an attractive town centre.

There’s a handsome twin-spire church, the Mother Church of the town,

and, yes, it has a Eucharistic Throne.

We had been under something of a misapprehension about these thrones, thinking that they had been banned by the Papacy. In fact, they haven’t – just that the rules about what should be displayed on top and when have been tightened. Management apologises for misleading you on that. The church also had some lovely modern stained glass.

Outside the church was yet another reminder about what lies in front of us.

As we were walking, I noticed, on a hillside, an odd protrusion,

and wasn’t sure whether it was an illusion formed by trees, or actually some kind of installation. Closer view (thank you, Samsung 30x magnification)

showed that it was, indeed, an installation, a representation of a stag. This caused Jane to wonder whether there was a link between the name of the town – Cerveira – and the French for “stag”, which is “cerf”. And indeed there is. “Cerveira” is associated with the Portuguese word “cervo”, which may have referred to a large herd of deer in the area. There’s also a complicated local legend about a King Stag and his one-to-one duel with a nobleman during the reconquista. Thus there is a huge sculpture by José Rodrigues, called “O Cervo” on the nearby Monte Encarnação.

Image courtesy of visitportugal on Instagram

Once we’d seen that, the stag theme became ubiquitous

Our route didn’t give us a decent view of the 17th-century Castelo de Vila Nova de Cerveira (which I couldn’t fly a drone over, you’ll remember), but we did pass near another fortification just outside the town,

the Forte de São Francisco de Lovelhe. We couldn’t easily get any closer, so had to make do with this glimpse. Going past this fort led us back down to the ecopista that we’d been on yesterday, and so we yomped along that almost all the way to Valença. We thought we’d caught the authorities out in a logical impossibility with the signage

before we realised that the cyclist in on the signpost is wearing a motorbiking helmet. Still, it’s interesting that horse and cart were forbidden on the track. There wasn’t frankly, a lot of variety. We saw a bird-watching hide,

some gleaning going on in a harvested corn field by the track (there were a lot of these),

a stand of poplars and eucalyptus

and lots of acorns on the track.

It’s the acorn-falling time of year, I guess, and the blustery wind probably encouraged a few reluctant clingers-on to let go, as well. As we left Cerveira’s municipal area and entered Valença’s we passed a noticeboard which explained that EU money contributed a large amount to create the ecopista and its surroundings.

The Valença end of the ecopista was slightly less well-maintained

though to be fair, river bank erosion was clearly an issue in this area.

Eventually we came to the end of this section of the ecopista

and there was a section of boardwalk which repaid careful attention to footwork.

In the distance we could see Valença.

The path took us over the Ponte Medieval da Veiga de Mira

where we rejoined the formal Caminho track. The reeds beside this track demonstrated how blustery it was.

The Caminho track diverged from this ecopista-type surface

and we walked into the town past some bizarre votive offerings,

and encouragement

to the convergence point where the route we’ve been on, the Coastal, meets the Central. One would have expected some signage to mark this. One would be disappointed. This is all we found, by the roundabout where they meet.

However, there’s excitement on offer in the shape of the route through the “fortaleza”.

This is Valença’s USP – an entire and intact fortified city wall. The Fortaleza de Valença is one of Portugal’s great frontier fortifications, built and extensively strengthened in the 17th and 18th centuries to defend the northern frontier along the Minho river against Spain. It has a double enclosure surrounding the old town, with massive walls, bastions, gateways and deep defensive works. It remains remarkably intact and one of the things that I find really attractive is that it’s not in a restricted area for drone flying, so I might be able to get some lovely photos and/or videos of the place. My appetite has been whetted by the photo on that noticeboard.

The Caminho route into the Fortaleza is indicated by three stones

which are even older than Mick, Keef and Ronnie, but the paint job is from 2022, done by the Portuguese sculptor Dinis Ribeiro.

The Fortaleza is a really impressive piece of work.

and it leads through to the working town within,

with the inevitable tourist things to be seen,

as well as artworks such as this carnation – a symbol of the 1974 Portuguese “carnation revolution” which overthrew 48 years of the Estado Novo dictatorship and paved the way for modern democracy in Portugal.

The fortifications stretch across two fortified enclosures, so it was about a kilometre through this historic centre to our hotel, which is a Pousada,

the Pousada de São Teotónio. Many Pousadas across Portugal are in historic buildings; this one, though, dates from the 1960s. No matter, it is posh, the bar has both white port and gin, as we found out whilst waiting for our room to become available, and it is our home for the next couple of days as we have a rest day tomorrow! Yay!

Although our room wasn’t available when we arrived, other aspects of our timing were pretty good; The rain plainly decided not to stay in Spain, and headed over our way. It started raining soon after we arrived, and became torrential later on.

So we snuggled down for the rest of the day. Tomorrow, the forecast is much cheerier, so I suspect that the obvious thing for us to do is to go for a walk.

Day 32 – Carminha to Vila Nova de Cerveira: Flat out easier

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Monday 28 September 2026 – Accuweather was still mentioning the possibility of thunderstorms in the morning, so we didn’t rush to leave, although of course we still needed to get our bags ready to be collected by 8am. The first struggle of the day was having a shower. Our hotel is called Design&Wine, and it has fallen down on both of those things: no white port (wine); and the bloody shower in our bathrooom (design). The whole point of design, surely, is to make something easily usable, and whoever designed the shower fitment needs a good talking-to on that point.

It really shouldn’t be necessary to include instructions for something that needs to be used with  a good degree of precision first thing in the morning.

Ridiculous!

Anyway, we managed to get ourselves showered and dressed and down for breakfast, which was a good meal, and then we relaxed for a while before setting out at about 10.30. We actually discovered that we had a choice of route. Our destination, like our start, bordered the river Minho. The formal Caminho route, as shown on our online map, led steeply up away from the river at a place called Lanhelas and followed a very wiggly path to Vila Nova de Cerveira: total distance, 15km. Looking at the map that Garmin Connect uses to plot its routes, and cross-checking with the Brierley book, showed us that there was a newish path that had been created that led all the way along the river bank between the towns – 13km and no steep uphill! Unsurprisingly, we opted for the latter.

As we departed, the weather looked rather grey

and we hoped, as we went along, that the weather that would be arriving 

would be more from the right hand side of the picture than the left. Spoiler alert: it was. 

We were part of a small knot of pilgrims making a start, and one of them had arranged her stuff in a way that  would have driven me mad if I’d had to carry it.

Look, I know it’s none of my business, but muttering about fellow pilgrims is part of the Camino experience. I mean, another thing: performative use of walking poles, like we saw in Vila Praia de Âncora:

four people, all able-bodied, on perfectly flat level ground, using walking poles. Apart from poncily announcing to the world, “Look! I am a Pilgrim!”, I can’t see any reason why those people were clicking their way along the prom.

Anyhoo…

We passed a chapel, Nossa Senhora da Ajuda

and crossed the railway at a level crossing, literally as the alarm sounded and the barriers came down, separating us from the group of pilgrims just behind us.

The train that came by was one of just two trains that passed in the four hours we were walking today; it’s not a busy line.

To start with, our route was simply along the road

which was not too bad, as the margin for pedestrians was quite wide. It took us to and through a neighbouring town, Seixas, which had several things to recommend it, not least of which was an interesting pastelaria called Dona Rabanada.

This turned out to be rather lovely; rabanada is basically the Portuguese name for French toast, and this pastelaria did a huge variety.

There were many points of interest in the town: a church dedicated to São Bento

with lovely painted ceilings above nave and altar;

something that looked a bit castley,

up on a terrace that gave us a decent view over the area;

a naked espigueiro;

a wind rose;

an extraordinary building, a palacete from 1911 and now a hotel, the Villa Idalina;

an unusually pointy parish church;

our very own tunnel under the railway to get back towards the river;

some attractive corners;

and the first of many pleasant riparian scenes.

In front of us was a pilgrim who obligingly gave me something more to mutter about.

Again, none of my bloody business, but I’m of the generation who think of tattoos as being the hallmarks of sailors and thugs.

Seixas gave way to Lanhelas and the Diverging Of The Ways:

off to the right – the formal Coastal route of the Caminho Português (and a steep uphill section); straight on, along the river, the “ecopista”. This is a smooth, well-constructed path, which leads past various facilities that have been set up, such as bicycle stands and picnic areas

exercise parks and fishermen’s storage cabins,

and more scenes of riparian delight.

There was a section which took us temporarily back along the road, but basically the path wound alongside the river all the way to our destination.

We got flagged down by one owner of a cabin who flattered Jane into accepting a selo from him, and who was then mightily impressed by the fact that we had started in Lisbon and had the stamps to prove it,

and we saw a farmer harvesting corn,

which gave us a bit of an insight into how it’s done.

Just outside Vila Nova de Cerveira is the rather aspirationally-named Mota Beach.

We spent a bit of time blundering about the outskirts of the town exploring whether a bar there was open (it wasn’t: closed Mondays) and then made our way past a couple of bizarre artworks,

a mural which likely has some local significance but is a closed book for visitors,

and the remains of a 17th-century fortress.

(Parenthetical note: I thought it might be interesting to fly the drone over the fortess to see what it looked like from the air. I consulted my Portuguese drone map and, guess what?

the Castela is just inside a restricted area which our accommodation is just outside. Rats!)

Anyhoo: we found the way to our accommodation, the Quinta de São Roque.

We have plenty of experience of turning up at overnight accommodation places to find them locked and deserted. This one, however, was different: it was open – and deserted. We could see our bags had arrived, which is always a comfort, so we dropped off our backpacks and found the nearest place that could offer us sustenance, a pastelaria just down the road. The variety of snacks on offer was fairly scant, but they had coffee, beer and friendly service, so we settled down to wait. We fell to chatting with a couple of Californian ladies also at the pastelaria, and it turned out that they were also waiting to check in at the same place. We went back some time after the official check-in time to find it still deserted, but eventually a lass called Ana turned up and checked us – and the two other couples waiting – in and showed us our room. The Quinta is a large place, full of charisma and traditional furnishings (but a bit short of plug-in points, you know how these things go).

Our room is lovely, old-fashioned and has the most wonderful mosaic in the bathroom floor.

There’s a sizeable garden with an espigueiro to match

and, as Jane found out, some persimmon trees with ripe fruit waiting to be picked and eaten.

If we want to take advantage of the breakfast here, we will have another relatively late departure. The temperature of the day is not a matter of concern, but there are impending wind and rain warnings which are; we hope we’ll be able to get to our destination before things get too blustery. We will head to Valença, where we have a rest day. Again, we could walk the formal Caminho route, with hills, or walk by the river – slightly longer, but a lot flatter. Guess which one we’ll take…..