Tag Archives: Pilgrimage

Day 13 – From Zambujal to Condeixa: Roman in the gloamin’

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Wednesday 9 September 2026 – Despite the weather forecasts, I was in for a bit of a surprise as we opened our door to go round to the house for breakfast. It was drizzling! The Met Office had opined that any drizzle should have stopped by then, and Accuweather stoutly maintained that there was 0% chance of precipitation. Anyway, the reality was low cloud and a light drizzle to greet us. Lara had laid out breakfast for us, with the usual fodder – yoghurt, granola, bread – and also some blueberry jam that had been made by her father, who apparently spends a lot of time making jam and sends a lot of it over to her from his home in northern Portugal. In general conversation, the subject of Marmite came up and, to my delight, she actually had some! She confessed that she didn’t know how to use it, so we were able to do a bit of cross-cultural information exchange, and got Marmite on toast out of it, which was a good start to the day.

We only had a dozen or so kilometres to cover today, so were able to start out relatively late, meaning in daylight, albeit in the remnants of the drizzle and low cloud.

The Caminho led us along the Rua de Santiago

past the church which had been the souce of the carillon we’d been regaled with the previous day.

Was that an image of Sant Iago himself to the left of the cross?

Nope. To our delight, it “struck” 8 as we passed by (despite the clock showing seven minutes past twelve), so we could listen once more, spellbound, to the tune that was belted out of the loudspeaker you can see in the photo above.

The road soon became track, leading past olive groves

and other crops, which in some cases appear to have been abandoned.

After about half an hour, we came to an arresting sight by the path,

which led not to an “authentic pilgrim experience” (to quote James Nesbitt’s character in the Camino film “The Way”), but to an experience with an authentic pilgrim. It turned out to be part of a pilgrim garden, Refúgio das Cabaças, the site where three pilgrims had made their permanent home and opened up the site for passing souls,

offering refreshments for a donativo.

On the site they had built a chapel, dedicated to Saint Jacinta,

and many other diverting pieces of decor

and an idea of what we still had to cover.

We treated ourselves to a coffee and a look round, and, when we went to say thank you and goodbye, one of the site’s pilgrims came out of his hut and read us some blessing text, which was sweet of him – and then said he would accompany us some way along the Caminho, as he needed to stretch his legs!

We had his company (and that of his dog) for the next half hour, as he pointed out various things beside the road as we walked: a shrine to Sant Iago

which he said was Spanish and inauthentic, as hats hadn’t been invented when the saint was around; the spiritual power of reversed numbers above lintels

to protect the inhabitants against evil spirits; an azulejo

bearing a reproduction of a picture painted by Pier Maria Baldi in 1669, marking the time members of the famous Medici family from Italy walked the Caminho.

He had been living at the site since 2019, having decided that he needed to step away from the snares and delusions of his previous life (we never found out exactly what that was – might he have been a corporate man?).

He greeted people as we went by, so was clearly a well-known presence. After a while it began to get a bit weird, as he started becoming more and more philosophical – and really in a calm way – about the errors of humanity and particularly Muslims. Jane, who has some knowledge of the Christian canon, did a marvellous job of engaging with him and indulging him in his more trenchant comments.

The trail left the road for a track which was quite narrow at times,

passed a litter of terminally cute puppies

and eventually led past a tiny hamlet, where he took his leave of us with another blessing.

A remarkable interlude.

By this stage we were only an hour or so away from Condeixa and so we carried on, along a forestry trail where it was clear that Eucalyptus were making a takeover bid.

It didn’t look like a planned planting, but there were plenty of the trees around, including some quite mature ones. Some of them had done that appealingly colourful peeling of the bark that we’d seen in Australia.

At one point we could see Condeixa

before plunging down a path that meant, of course, that we would have to, erm, plunge back up again.

This took us to the day’s main Thing To Do: explore the Roman ruins of Conimbriga, one of Portugal’s largest and most spectacularly preserved Roman settlements. Originally a Celtic hill-fort dating back to the 9th century BC, it was occupied by Roman troops in 139 BC and flourished under Emperor Augustus into a wealthy urban center complete with a forum, baths, an amphitheatre, and opulent aristocratic villas famous for their vibrant, intact mosaics. As the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the city built massive defensive walls, but it was ultimately ransacked by Germanic Suevi invaders in 468 AD, forcing its citizens to flee to nearby Aeminium (modern-day Coimbra). Archaeological interest began in 1873, and the site was declared a National Monument in 1910. Large-scale, systematic excavations launched in 1929, leading to the preservation of its world-class mosaics and the establishment of the on-site National Museum. Remarkably, despite over a century of study, only about 10 percent of Conímbriga has been excavated, leaving the vast majority of the ancient city still buried. Surrounding private land continues to be acquired by the state to broaden the search and launch new exploratory excavations.

We bought tickets – a bargain at €5 each for old people – and (after taking coffee at the handy site café, of course) walked around the site, which is quite extensive.

As you go in, at first blush it looks just like yer average Roman ruins,

but then you see your first mosaic and (if you have any soul) are captivated. The mosaics are phenomenal!

I don’t know the extent to which these have survived or been restored, but, whatever, the sight is amazing.

The buildings themselves are mere remnants of what there once was, like the forum

an aqueduct,

and the private houses. There are two striking examples. One is the house of Cantaber, an important aristocrat of Conímbriga in the 5th century, which is the biggest private residence in the city, with an area of 35090 square feet – 3260 square metres, about three-quarters of an acre, which is a substantial size for a house. It was built in the last quarter of the first century;

above is about the middle third of this huge house.

Another remarkable house is under cover, and is called the House of Fountains.

Again, the mosaics in this house are wonderful to see.

There is also a museum on site, which has a vast array of implements and accoutrements that have come to light in the excavation. It also has a model which shows how astonishing the Forum and its associated Basilica would have been.

I’ve attempted to put together a video which gives an idea of the sweep of the place and the extent of the mosaics.

We spent well over an hour on the site, and it was time well spent. When we left, we discovered that the grey skies and low cloud had cleared, the sun was shining – and it was beginning to get quite warm. All we then had to do was to get ourselves the relatively short distance to our hotel, which we managed with only one minor Map-Reality disconnect. We walked into Condeixa past the town hall

with its Manueline pillory.

Next door is a church, the Igreja de Santa Cristina

which has some decorative tiling on its spire

and in its calm interior

a low-key Eucharistic Throne?

We soon arrived at our hotel, the very posh Conimbriga Hotel do Paço,

where our room wasn’t yet available, but a Nice Lunch in the restaurant was. After lunch we ensconced ourselves in our room for the rest of the day to relax, gather ourselves and plan for the morrow.

Tomorrow’s destination is Coimbra, “the Oxford of Portugal”, which has an impressive University presence among its other attractions. It’s going to be a busy day, and a hot one, so we will probably set out early to cover as much of the ground as we can as early as we can. We also have An Assignation, but you’ll have to read the next entry to find out about that.

 

 

Preparations

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Friday 21 August 2026 – It’s been over a year since Jane and I undertook a long walk, and so we have to reacquire some of the key habits concomitant with basically seven weeks on the move, staying at a new place (mostly) every night. We’re not hard core enough to carry everything, so our bags will be transferred daily. The organisation which will, erm, organise this is, as with all our Camino activities, Walk The Camino, who we hope will do the same splendid job for us as they have done before.

The emphasis will therefore be on travelling (fairly) light (the heavier stuff can go in the baggage to be transferred). Of course, therefore, I have been undergoing the usual pre-trip mild angst around what photo gear to take. On our previous Caminos I used my phone as the principal camera and took a drone in case a decent aerial shot was possible. Much as I would like to take the Nikon with me for capturing the delights of Lisbon, Sintra, Porto and Coimbra, I don’t think that I’m prepared to take the extra weight, since taking the Nikon implies also taking a laptop for photo processing which I feel I would have to include in my day pack. After much mental to and fro, I’ve decided that I will tolerate having to lug the drone with me; this won’t be every day, since there are quite large swathes of the route where drone flying is restricted.

So, for the donkey work of routine photography I’ll take my little Sony and also a new acquisition in case there’s video footage to be captured – a DJI Osmo Pocket 4P. On paper, this is a very impressive piece of technology – a (relatively) large 1″ sensor, and two lenses which offer a very decent zoom range, the lack of which was my main complaint with its predecessor. It should be easy to get professional-quality stabilised video footage, but let’s see if my usual ham-fistedness gets in the way of achieving that, shall we?

Since I won’t have the laptop with me, I’ll update these pages via a tablet, which will also be the backup device, saving me having to carry a backup disk drive with me. A fair bit of photo gear as usual, then, as well as power banks, cables, adapters and card readers. Just so you know how much I suffer in creating these pages, you understand.

Light though we wish to travel, there is one thing that is non-negotiable.

I realise that Portugal is sufficiently civilised and Anglophile that Twinings finest Earl Grey might be available in the shops; but d’you really believe we’re prepared to take that risk?

We will come across a major (for us) unknown on our journey, which is the change to the previously straightforward process of getting into a European country, which, since April this year, has in theory been governed by the new Entry Exit System.  The only experience we’ve had was the debacle of arrival at Pisa airport where the Italian authorities, in an excess of common sense, decided to abandon attempts to use the EES terminals in the face of the vast queue winding out of the airport building and onto the tarmac. EES is one of the passive-aggressive ways the EU has introduced to punish the UK for Brexit and it has the potential to give rise to major queues for non-EU travellers. The situation is sufficiently marked that there is even a website about the queues, which appears to crowdsource information about wait times.

Portugal is one of the two EU countries which has embraced EES (the other being Sweden) and it has put in place support for travellers to use the official app to register their visit. Since we have been good citizens and passed over our details, we might thus expect the queuing at arrival to be lessened. It’s disappointing, therefore, to read that Lisbon airport is one of the worst for queues for non-EU arrivals.

To be fair to Lisbon, the site appears to say that the arrival queue at time of writing (24 hours before we travel) is 20 minutes.

We’re not starting out on our Caminho immediately – we have a couple of days in Lisbon followed by a couple of days in Sintra (a place I’ve never visited before) to play tourist before we start playing pilgrim. Once we’re under way, though, I suspect the schedule of the days will fall into a familiar pattern: start walking as early as is reasonable and consistent with having some form of breakfast; late lunch shortly after arrival at the day’s destination; exploration of it after lunch; then writing the day up (me) and preparing for the morrow (Jane).  There will doubtless be Things To See as we go, and Jane does a great job of picking out the best ones so that we actually visit some places of interest rather than just peregrinating grimly past them. As well as Google, we have extra resources,

and so we’re expecting a good variety of places to visit and possibly get a selo – a stamp for our pilgrim passports – as we pass (we want to make sure we qualify for a Compostela for this Caminho to match the ones we have from the Francés and Finisterre Caminos).

Once we set out, in the main we’ll be staying one night at each destination. We’re not rushing, but will cover the 630km in 37 stages – average 17km per day. We will spend extra days in other places en route, notably Porto, as well as a couple of interim place where we get to do the laundry – these things are important, you know. I’m hoping there will be a good crop of photos and a selection of points of interest as we go, We head for Lisbon tomorrow – stay tuned if you’d like to follow the journey!

 

Camino Day 40 – Arca to Santiago: end of the road

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Thursday 28 September 2023 – I suppose it’s no surprise that we woke earlier than the alarm today, so, rather than try to enact our previous plan of a slightly later start, we got up a little early and Got On With It. You can see the Relive route summary and photos here.

This turned out to be a good plan, in small but telling ways. For example, it got us to breakfast earlier than we would otherwise have arrived. Breakfast was served in the café/pizzeria next door and was administered by one very busy lady, who had to provide some form of breakfast for each person in the queue. We were second in line, so had a relatively short wait before we got our toast and jam. By the time we had finished it

the queue was out the door. As we left our hotel, at a few minutes past 8am

it was no better, so it was worth getting there a little bit early.

Much to my surprise, the crowds of pilgrims I had expected to encounter from the word “go” today failed to materialise, at least immediately.

That was a welcome surprise; less welcome was rain, which hadn’t been forecast, and which varied between a fine drizzle and something a little wetter. We never needed our rain jackets, but a hat was useful to keep my specs dry.

“Red sky in the morning” proved to be a reasonably accurate warning, and the day was dull and cloudy and occasionally damp.

It wasn’t long before the path filled with people

and it stayed that way pretty much all day, with one very notable exception, which I’ll cover later. As well as regular peregrinos, there were also large groups of teenagers giving every indication of being on school trips. The crowds, the rain and the routine nature of the trail we were on meant that there were only a few photo opportunities which engaged my attention as we went along.

We passed the border of Santiago parish council,

the airport,

a place called A Lavacolla,

a location where the pilgrims of old washed and purified themselves in preparation for arriving at the cathedral; and a mad piper, the “Piper at the Gates of Santiago” (about 10km away).

A few kilometres after that we reached a tiny woodland chapel, the Capela de San Marcos,

where there is a significant diversion possible from the main Camino, which simply carries on towards Santiago. The diversion takes one to the “Monte do Gozo”, which logic says should be marked with a Maltese cross*, but which translates as the “Hill of Joy”, reportedly where pilgrims could catch their first sight of the cathedral in Santiago. It’s marked by the statues of a pair of enraptured pilgrims

who are carried away with joy at seeing the cathedral.

Yes, really. It is there, under the right-hand pilgrim’s right armpit.

Sadly, the weather was disappointing; “it would have been better if it were clearer” applied therefore to the first and last days of our Camino.

Apart from its not-insignificant cultural value, the interesting thing about this installation is that, despite all the crowds of people trudging along the Camino, we saw fewer than half a dozen people who seemed to have bothered to read around the Camino enough to know that the pilgrim statues were there and to take a look at them. Jane had, of course, done this, which is why we were there. We were accompanied by a nice American couple from California, Susan and Bob, with whom we’d fallen into conversation a while back. With them we looked at the various other items on display in the (really quite extensive) park that surrounds the Monte do Gozo; four large displays, in an offset-diamond formation;

a largish amphitheatre and swimming pool and, just outside it, a bonkers sculpture garden, the Skulpturenpark von Jose Cao Lata, which, though closed, had some weird and wonderful pieces on display that one could see

as well as some interesting and amusing items carved into its walls.

All those pilgrims trudging by on the main Camino missed out on these things, which is their loss.

It was rather nice to have Susan and Bob to chat to, to distract from what became a fairly dull walk through the outskirts of Santiago.

This is not to detract from the place – every city has its industrial and residential outskirts.

There were a couple of things to note: a sculpture of a Templar Pilgrim;

the Porta Itineris Sancti Iacobi, a modern and decorative gate

and, eventually, the more attractive buildings of the old town.

We wended our way through these handsome streets, which offered the occasional tantalising glimpse of what might be the cathedral, and then

arrived at the Cathedral, along with hordes of other people, which made for great atmosphere but poor photography opportunities, so we took our leave of Susan and Bob and headed off to our hotel, the very nicely-organised Moure hotel, where we were cordially welcomed by Manuel. Initially, it seemed that our room wouldn’t be available for a while, but as it turned out we didn’t have long to wait for our room or our bags, delivered by the ever-reliable Jacotrans.

It’s worth extolling the virtues of Jacotrans; it organises the transport of pilgrims’ effects from pretty much any A to any B along the Camino in a very flexible, cost-effective and, importantly, utterly reliable way. On each of 40 occasions ever since St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, our bags were collected, transferred and deposited exactly according to the schedule that had been laid out. It’s also possible for people simply to arrange transport day by day if their plans are not as baked-in as ours were. It’s a terrific service which removes a lot of the worry from a long-term expedition such as ours.

We couldn’t just relax for the rest of the day, as we had a Very Nice Lunch to go to. Asador Gonzaba was recommended by a friend, and we had booked a table for lunch. We did have time, as it turned out, to visit the Pilgrim’s Office to see if we could pick up our Certificate. When we arrived, the queue seemed rather daunting

but it’s very well-organised and, thanks to Jane, so were we, with our Credenciales fully filled in and stamped as needed. Within 15 minutes we had our Certificates of Distance and, much to our surprise, Compostelas; we hadn’t expected the latter as we’d stated right from the off that this wasn’t a spiritual exercise for us. Anyway, we got our awards and they got their €6, so everyone was happy. We then had a really properly Nice Lunch, too, so we were delighted. (We have another recommendation from the same friend for tomorrow, so we’re looking forward to that, I might say.)

We did a certain amount of wandering about and gawping at the number and size of ornamental and religious buildings in Santiago. The cathedral is utterly vast, much bigger than those of Burgos or León, and there are all sorts of other buildings to admire as well. We have a guided tour of the city arranged for tomorrow, so I’ll save today’s pictures for an entry about the city which I hope to be able to publish tomorrow.

For now, here are our stats (for the last time): we covered 21.4km today (including the diversion to Monte do Gozo) and so our total has risen to 810.km – 503.6 miles. The official figure for our mileage, as given on the Certificate of Distance, is 779km, which is 484 miles; but we have done a couple of route variations and diversions, so I’m going to assert our figures as the distance I shall be bragging about for quite some time to come, I suspect.

So now our Camino is over, and I really don’t know how I feel about this yet. Will we miss the relentless get-up-pack-breakfast-walk-lunch-write-sleep routine? We still have some time in Spain to enjoy ourselves, so be assured that I will include any philosophical musings on this in future updates about our time here; stay with me if you’d like to find out what else we do whilst we’re around Santiago, eh?

* go check Google Maps for Malta if you don’t understand this joke.