Tag Archives: Hiking

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!

Day 36 – O Porriño to Redondela: we had to work for the views

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Friday 2 October 2026 – Having got our bags out ready for collection by 8am, we partook of the generous breakfast provided at the apartment and then took our leave at around 9.20. The apartments are clearly set up for peregrinos; in ours, I found this in the bathroom,

and the neighbouring apartment’s name

is also a word closely associated with the various Caminos. I thought that the word was a modern invention, but apparently it’s a medieval expression, taken from the Codex Calixtinus, a 12th-century manuscript attributed to Pope Calixtus II and widely understood to be his journal of his own pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.

We found our way back to the Camino route, past a statue that pays strong tribute to the granite processing that is O Porriños main industry,

and a sculpture of Antonio Palacios,

a very well-known Spaniard among architectural cognoscenti, who was born in the city and helped define the architectural identity of Madrid in the first half of the 20th century. Just outside the city, there’s a strongly Camino-branded tunnel under the motorway

(nice that the mural hasn’t had graffiti sprayed all over it), and just beyond the tunnel is “Stamp Man”

who will do you a lovely sello for your credencial. Jane has actually created a bit of a problem for herself by taking lots of stamps all along our Camino (excuse me? I think you mean exactly the right number to fill our credenciales – Ed) and so we hadn’t got (a) room for his stamp or (b) patience to wait in the queue, so we kept going.

The number of pilgrims there is an indicator that this section – the qualifying section for one’s compostela – has got a good footfall. It’s nowhere near as crowded as we found the final 100km of the Francés, but there are clearly enough peregrinos to sustain the entrepreneurial pop-ups we found along the route.  There were plenty of people walking, but we found ourselves alone in our own company quite a lot of the time. However, if we stopped to take a photo, or to take a detailed look at something along the way, it was often only seconds before pilgrims came up behind us.

Soon after Stamp Man is the 100km mark, meaning that it would theoretically be possible to get one’s compostela with a start in O Porriño. On the stage of the Francés which passes the 100km mark, there is an official waymark to note the point. On the Português, it’s a bit less formal.

One can derive the actual point only by inference from two successive waymarks.

There were a couple of miniature vignettes by the wayside: this tiny book exchange;

and this equally tiny horreo.

I’m not quite sure whether the model horreo has any purpose other than decoration; it’s not in a position, were it a letter box, for example, that the postman would be at all impressed with. But it’s dead cute.

By this stage of the day, we were approaching the halfway point, and a village called Mos, which has a pedestrian-only centre

and a cafeteria, which is part of an albergue at the heart of the pedestrian area. This, again, showed that the footfall was quite heavy.

I guess we got our timing wrong and were behind a “pulse” of peregrinos. I had to queue for 20 minutes to get our coffees. There was one lady behind the counter, being astonishingly active, serving people with coffee, heating snacks, filling the dishwasher, all in a blur of speed. It actually quietened down just after we got our drinks, and this meant that she could pop outside for a quick fag; but she still kept on being busy

picking up detritus, cleaning tables and, presumably, awaiting the next pulse of peregrinos to come through. It was frustrating to have to wait that long (particularly since we discovered a little – uncrowded – café across the way as we left) but I admired her work rate and efficiency. The albergue is in a pleasant setting

which offers views over the surounding countryside, if you don’t mind squinting into the sun. It is somewhat elevated, but is also the start of The Climb Of The Day; this is looking back down towards the village having walked up a little way.

The climb carries on up, and passed something that made me pause and take a photo:

“Lavadoiro do Cabaleiro” seemed to translate to me as “men’s laundry”, and I was puzzled by this. Is the idea that chaps should come wash their smalls here? Seems unlikely in a country which is still a little chauvinist in regard to household tasks. ChatGPT “thinks” that it may be related to a nearby Fonte de Cabaleiro, which relates to the name of the spring feeding the fountain.

There were plenty of people toiling up this section

and the road passed a couple of interesting scenes. It is difficult to know what went on here, but it looks like someone was a bit pissed off with someone else.

Also, there was this, outside a factory.

The factory didn’t seem to have any connection with soft drinks, so I have no idea why Coca-Cola are wishing us a good Camino, presumably in Galego (the language of Galicia).

The route changes from road to track, but still climbs ever upwards.

It was never hideously steep, but enough to give one a decent workout on the way. At the top, there is a chapel, the Capela de Santiaguiño.

It’s clearly modern. As the Camino de Santiago grew in popularity during the Middle Ages, a primitive stone shrine was erected here to offer spiritual refuge to pilgrims at the peak of the climb. That original structure eventually fell into ruin over the centuries; the local neighborhood forestry guild completely rebuilt the modern stone chapel in 2003. The name Santiaguiño is the Galego diminutive for “Little Saint James,” which reflects a humble, approachable image of the saint as a fellow traveler rather than a distant warrior.

During the Roman Empire, this exact spot served as a bustling highway known as Vía XIX, and a surviving 2nd-century Roman milestone still stands just 300m away.

We passed another pop-up offering posh wax sellos in a variety of colours

but our experience of these is that they look lovely for a while, but very easily degrade as the credencial is opened, closed, stamped on and generally mishandled. So we gave the opportunity a miss. We did not miss, though, a later chance for a sello, which Jane decided she did, after all, have room for – a stamp featuring the Roman milestone. I dropped a bit of Euro shrapnel into their piggy bank money box by way of a donativo, and we were both astonished when it burst into song….

 

And then, another opportunity presented itself….

and we stopped for more refreshment. Again, it was a popular place,

crowded when we arrived, but pretty quiet when we left – again, we were at the tail end of a pulse of peregrinos. As we carried on, all the work we put in to get to the top of the hill was rewarded with some great views towards Redondela.

(If you look closely, you can see an enormous viaduct crossing the city – more on this later.) Just past further encouragement

the road heads downhill, so steeply that Jane dealt with the gradient by traversing across it rather than heading straight down.

As a service to you, my beloved readers, I measured the gradient.

This makes it not quite as steep as Dunedin’s Baldwin Street, thought by many to be the world’s steepest street, which I measured at just over 20°. But pretty steep, nevertheless; and

a lot longer. Really, a lot.

The total descent is 140m vertical, and I am glad for two things about it: (a) that I didn’t have to walk up it; and (b) that my knees let me get all the way down without raising any objection.

Once down, there’s a longish stretch of road into Redondela.

If you look carefuly, you can see that viaduct running across the middle of the picture. The Camino diverts towards the historic centre of the town, past the 16th-century Justinian Convento de Vilavella,

a handsome albergue

with Pelegrin outside it

and along quiet streets.

We arrived at our accommodation, Apartamentos Alvear, too early to check in, so passed the time by going for a walk. Obviously. This took us towards the Santiago Church, which we caught sight of from a distance

before arriving at the church itself. That figure of St. James

shows him in his Matamoros persona, aiding the fight against the invading moorish hordes, and is on the top of the church roof.

Inside

there’s an imposing altar screen

with St. James in his pilgrim persona.

The rose window has some lovely stained glass

showing both cockleshells and the cross of St. James.

Having visited the church, we wanted to explore that viaduct – or, as it turns out, those viaducts; there are two of them, and Redondela is probably most famous as “the town of two viaducts”. They are both 19th century constructions carrying the railway lines across the city. If you look back at the photo of the town I took from the hills you can, in fact, just make out the second viaduct somewhat behind the first, rather more obvious, one. Walking towards them took us past the town hall, which is quite the edifice,

and a nicely-executed mural which sadly hides largely behind a tree,

but the two viaducts really dominate the skyline: northern;

and southern.

The weather today was lovely and it made for a great walk, which turned out to be nearly 18km. Tomorrow’s weather leaves a bit more to be desired – a non-trivial possibility of rain in the morning as we leave Redondela and thunderstorms as we approach Pontevedra, some 21km away. The breakfast arrangement for the apartments here involves a voucher for a nearby café, which opens early, so our current plan is to get under way betimes in the hope of minimising any weather damage. Stay tuned to see if we succeed!