Tuesday 15 September 2026 – As mentioned yesterday, the relatively short distance (17km) to Malaposta and the relatively low (27°C) temperature forecast meant that we felt we could risk a relatively late start. The alarm still went off at 0600, which is relatively late, but still absolutely early in my book. The hotel provided a substantial breakfast and gave me a chance to take a photo of the magnificent azulejo on the wall.

We departed at around 0745, which gave us an insight into how come the main streets are so nice and clean,

but also reminded us that it’s difficult at times to distinguish between street art and general decay, although, in this case, I think we saw both.

It being around 8am, the roads were busy with both cars and people as the working day started. We passed one place where folk in blue overalls were exiting as well as apparently waiting to be be let in – a change of shift, I infer.

Our track led us downhill and across an unmarked level crossing, which we treated with our usual insouciance, only to hear, seconds after we’d crossed, a train go through;

so the line isn’t as deserted as I’d thought. Emerging onto the main street of the next village, Santiago de Riba-Ul, I was able to showcase another entry in my occasional catalogue of “times when marketing has failed to get the international consequences of a name right”.

The village features a Santiago Church

so we looked in,

noted the romanticised visualisation of the saint on the wall by the altar

but got a selo anyway. Almost next door to the church is the Santiago pastelaria,

so we looked in there as well, for a swift coffee.

It was quite noisy and busy with what looked like grandmothers looking after grandkids, presumably while mum went out to work; a nice cheerful atmosphere, albeit a high decibel count.

The Caminho trail took us off the tarmac onto a cobbled track

leading under an arch through which we could see an espigueiro.

Shortly after, we walked past a house with interesting architecture in the roof;

It almost looked as if, at the press of a button, the top level would quietly fold down into the lower level, leaving just a faint outline in the tiles.

The path led past an unusual plantation.

Jane identified this as Paulownia, or foxglove tree, which has attractive blue/lilac flowers. It would appear that this is being grown systematically, though on the other side of the path the eucalyptus seemed to be growing wild.

We crossed the railway again, at another informal crossing near Salgueiro.

At first blush, I identified the sign as being the body count of pelegrinos on the crossing; it is, rather, advice to cross in small groups rather than a single mass of people.

We were, at this point, on the Rua Ponte Medieval, so guess what happened next?

It’s more than just a restored medieval bridge, though. There’s a cockleshell shrine on the wall leading to the bridge,

and other small shrines built on or in the wall.

Our pilgrim, he of the authentic experience a few days ago, called them alminhas, which means “little souls”. These small monuments, found on roads, rural paths and in villages throughout Portugal, serve as places for prayers to the souls in purgatory and for the protection of pilgrims. Some alminhas feature images of saints, religious paintings, or crosses, while others are empty, with space to light candles and leave alms.

Nearby the river was a strange installation.

At first, I thought it was some kind of water pumping station, but all it appeared to be doing was to use an Archimedes Screw to lift water which then promptly fell back down again. In the end, by scrutinising the notices on it, we think that it was part of a sewage processing plant – of a design I’d never come across before.

On a hillside, we saw a large monastery, which is linked to the Igreja de São Martinho de Cucujães, and which overlooks the valley of the river we’d just crossed.

Quite soon, we came to realise that we ourselves would be climbing out of the valley;

another of the myriad occasions where, at a fork in the road, the Caminho always leads uphill. And it really was pretty steep: in the interests of keeping you accurately informed, dear reader, I used my phone’s protractor app to measure the road,

doing which I think came as a bit of a surprise to the lady walking her dog up the hill behind me. When we got to the top, we could then see directly across to the monastery church,

and could see the emblem on the side marking 2025 as a Holy Year (when St. James’s Day falls on a Sunday).

Almost all of the rest of the walk was through successive conurbations – we’re getting close to the big city of Porto, and it’s no surprise that population density rises as one approaches.

We were approaching the town of São João da Madeira, and passed some fancy houses, often adorned with some kind of art.

The pavements were not easy to walk on; they were rough and every so often there was a small pile of the tiles used in the mosaic footpaths here.

Since many of these little piles were by a rough patch where a new pipe was emerging, I guess that they’re awaiting replacement now that the pipe has been fitted; and it gave us to wonder: what’s the story with these Portuguese paths? Where do the pieces come from? How are they made? And how are the pavements laid?

Paging Google Gemini….

“Portugal’s iconic pavements with their designs using black and white stones (calçada portuguesa artistica) are a national, artisanal product sourced primarily from the limestone-rich Serras de Aire e Candeeiros region (the white ones) and volcanic basalt quarries in the islands (the black ones). The production is a hybrid process: while heavy machinery extracts and slices the raw rock, the individual 5-to-7 cm cubes are historically split by hand, and the intricate geometric mosaics are strictly laid by hand by master artisans called calceteiros. Because it takes 200 to 400 individual cubes to pave just one square meter, Portugal produces an estimated 150 million to 200 million stones annually from hundreds of thousands of tons of limestone. However, production is heavily bottlenecked by a critical shortage of labour. Due to the grueling nature of the trade, the number of active master pavers has plummeted, forcing cities to reserve this handcrafted tradition mostly for historic restoration and high-profile public squares.

“The ubiquitous, plain white sidewalks (calçada simples as opposed to artistica) found throughout every Portuguese town are made of the same domestic limestone and laid using the same manual methods as the artistic versions. The main difference lies in the sourcing of the stones: because they are strictly functional, these monochrome cubes are mass-produced and split using mechanical hydraulic presses at the quarries rather than split by hand. The installation, though, remains entirely manual. Today, this everyday white paving faces a major national backlash. Municipalities are struggling to maintain them due to the severe shortage of skilled labour. Consequently, many towns are replacing these basic white sidewalks with modern concrete or flat stone slabs, preserving hand-laid calçada exclusively for historic centres.”

So there.

São João da Madeira is a city and we spent the next several kilometres walking through it. It has an English School

and a handsome Mother Church

which we looked inside for a few seconds

but left quickly, as we thought there might be an Adoration going on. Opposite is a striking building

which I think is just a residence; but it’s nicely appointed.

We stopped in the town centre for a coffee and to watch the fountain, which is one of these which has various patterns playing across it.

It was amusing to watch the pigeons using it as a jacuzzi.

São João is also noted for having a most unusual thing: a Hat Museum.

In the 19th century, São João da Madeira grew very strongly, due in major part to the development of the hat industry there. J. Gomes de Pinho was the first empressario to establish a hat factory in 1802, but it was António José de Oliveira Júnior who would drive the local industry with his establishment in 1892 of the first fur hat factory. It would eventually become one of the major symbols of São João da Madeira’s new economy, the Empresa Industrial de Chapelaria Lda. Totally mechanized by the early 19th century, it would become the largest factory in the Iberian Peninsula by the end of the 19th century.

In the early years of the 20th century the felt industry grew in Portugal, and during the 1940s the production of fur and felt production was centralized in the factories of the area, with the establishment of the Cortadoria Nacional do Pêlo, which was nationalized in 1945. In 1946, 1775 people worked in the hat-making industry in Portugal, with 1212 located in São João da Madeira.

Since we were not in a rush to beat the heat, we looked in to what we thought might be quite an intriguing place.

The receptionist, a charming lady, charged us the princely sum of €1.50 each for entry, and gave us a quick introduction to the museum. It spreads across three floors and goes through all the machinery and processes used in the creation of hats. It’s a surprisingly violent processes, requiring steam, acids, other poisonous substances and a load of pummeling to get from fur or wool to something robust that you can wear on your head. At first, the processes were manual but it became hugely mechanised and there’s a display of the many sorts of machinery that was used for the various hat-making processes.

Colouring the hats was akin to an art

and finishing them – shaping the crown and the rim – was an act of master craftmanship.

The industry had significant political clout, too. Between the late 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century, workers in the hat-making industry were at the heart of a vast movement of collective organisation. They set up trade associations, workers’ newspapers,
cooperatives and mutual support networks. They took part in strikes, demonstrations and other forms of struggle, seeking better wages, fairer working hours and more dignified living conditions. Their history thus intersects with the very formation of the Portuguese labour movement.

In the main part of the building, there was a lovely display of hundreds of hats.

Seeing it made me feel like I’d walked into a painting by Magritte or similar. Across the way is a section of the museum dedicated to modern craftmanship; it was displaying work by a Dutch artist, Saar Snoek, who (a) would only work with fibre that had been sheared (rather than from an animal which was killed and skinned) and (b) treated the making of hats as art rather than couture, as you can see from the sort of remarkable creations she’d made.

Walking on from São João da Madeira took us through Arrifana (the destination for the longer stage than we were prepared to do from Albergaria, you’ll no doubt remember). It has a Mother Church (Igreja Matriz),

several handsome buildings and decorative flourishes,

(some of which had a courageous architect)

some decidedly unfancy buildings

and someone setting up in business who I believe must have come from England;

surely a local couldn’t have perpetrated this?

After Arrifana, the conurbations continued to run together into a seamless whole.

The area lacks, one might say, rural charm; but that’s what you get in the vicinity of cities, and it didn’t detract from the pleasure of walking in the knowledge that we’re making progress. Indeed, that progress was underlined as we reached Godinha and got a distance update for the remainder of our Caminho.

There’s an Interesting Church here, too.

We had toiled up a couple of reasonably substantial hills by this stage, and all we had to do was to rejoin the N1 for the last couple of kilometres to Malaposta. If you remember, I’d wondered if Malaposta was the opposite of Bemposta, through which we’d walked yesterday. On researching this, I find the answer is “no”. Bemposta translates as “Well-placed” and is not uncommon as a place name across Portugal, apparently; and Malaposta was to do with the mail service – it was the name associated with the old postal coaching system and comes from the French malle-poste.

Walking the N1 is not the most romantic part of the Caminho, I must say, although the road leads past some very abundant patches of pampas grass.

But it also runs by sights such as this burnt-out building

and something that I feel is in some ways symptomatic of what one sees in Portugal;

lots of new building going on, but things are not maintained properly and end up looking very scruffy.

Before too long, we reached our hotel,

the Pedra Bela, which is OK as a staging post on our way into Porto. The receptionist was extremely not Anglophone, and the restaurant is closed on Tuesdays, but the room seems comfortable enough and our bags had arrived OK. We drank tea and ate some of our snacks until the time that the nearest restaurant, A Roda da Lage, opened and then walked the seven minutes or so to it.

 

It was a good meal in slightly bizarre circumstances. It wasn’t quite clear which was the entrance; we were the only customers and so there was a lot of hovering by the nice lass who was looking after us; and a lot of food was being put on plates and taken somewhere else. But it was a good value meal and they had both G&T and Port & Tonic, which is Jane’s fave at the moment. So, inner persons fed, we tottered back to the hotel and rested up for the remainder of the day.

We have an even shorter walk tomorrow – less than 15km, to get to Grijo, our final overnight before reaching Porto, where we have a couple of rest days. The day should be warm but not unbearably so, and thus we expect to take a hotel breakfast and get under way once again in daylight rather than stumbling around in the dark. I’ll let you know how we got on in due course.