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.