Tag Archives: Tourism

Camino Finisterre Day 1: It Begins: Santiago to Negreira

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Thursday May 2 2024 – From the relatively relaxed schedules of the previous days, we suddenly snapped into Camino Time: alarm call at 0630, breakfast around 0730, bags ready to be collected for transfer at 0800, on the road as soon as may be after breakfast. It wasn’t too brutal and we seemed to swing quite smoothly into what will likely be the daily rhythm that governs the next fortnight or so.

The breakfast room at the monastery was pretty much as you might imagine a monastic refectory to look.

Breakfast was served from 0730. We got there shortly after that time to find that it was very crowded and borderline chaotic, and we thought: “why?”  Surely these were people who had largely arrived in Santiago; why were they up and doing so early when one would think there was no need?  Surely they can’t all be continuing a Camino hike somewhere? Who knows?

Anyway, we had what is likely to be a typical breakfast for our time here, based around fruit and yoghurt with whatever extras that we fancied from the buffet, and then departed starting our Day 1 trek at around 0830 under clear skies.

We had sunshine for about the first 90 minutes, and passed some nice scenes, such as this old mill by, unsurprisingly, a stream

on sun-dappled pathways.

At the top of a gentle climb, we caught our last glimpse of Santiago

(until, that is, we catch sight of it on our way back from the coast in a couple of weeks). The sun continued to shine on the attractive Galician countryside

but it was becoming clear that clouds were gathering and before long

it started raining, occasionally quite hard.  What we really needed at this point was, of course, a café, and we’d actually formulated a plan for a coffee stop around this point. This meant that we only had to withstand about half an hour of the rain before we could take shelter and sustenance. (Actually, we were quite fortunate for the whole of the day, in that our planned coffee stops matched quite well with periods of rain, so we managed to avoid getting too badly soaked.)

This first stop involved, as it turned out, a couple of coffees as we waited a while for the rain to pass. But pass it did, and we carried on past some more attractive countryside.

Horreos – originally grain stores – are a common feature of the Galician scenery, and thus normally unremarkable. This one, though, was unusual,

in that it was a double-decker, something we’d not seen before.  Close examination of that photo will reveal that the sunshine had been replaced by dark clouds and, inevitably, the rains came again.  We were pleased, therefore, to be near our next planned café stop to wait out the rain, in Augapesado.  Emerging eventually from there took us past an ancient Roman bridge,

which was interesting to look at, as you could see the details of its construction clearly; but it had somewhat the look of a bridge to nowhere about it.

There was another imperative at work in our visit to the café; we wanted to rest before The Steep Bit which seems to be an unavoidable part of day one of your standard multi-day hike.  This, as far as we could glean from maps and other data sources, wasn’t anything like the brutal day one of the Camino Francés, whose first 8km were up a really stiff gradient; but it was a couple of kilometres up a reasonable incline.

I had got my walking poles out by this stage, and was very glad to have the use of them; Jane was more macho (macha?) about the whole thing and took the slope on unaided; and I’m glad to be able to report that neither of us found it to be that tough. Indeed, my Garmin activity monitor only allowed me three minutes of “vigorous” activity during the half-hour it took us to walk a couple of kilometres and climb the 230m vertical.  It’s nice to know that the bout of flu which had laid us low for about a month before we set out on this trip hadn’t dented our overall fitness too badly.

Because we’d waited for the rains to pass before we started the climb, we completed it in decent weather, which while great, didn’t last much beyond the top of it.

and once again we took refuge in our next planned stop, a café in Trasmonte, whilst the next pulse of rains came through. The stop wasn’t just about the rain, though; there was also an element of celebration of completion of the climb.

Just before we did so, though, we passed the very quaint parish church of Santa María.

It is entirely surrounded by a cemetery

and has a distinctive baroque tower.

From Trasmonte it was only a couple of kilometres, in gathering sunshine, to what was the high point of the day, emotionally if not topologically: having sunshine as we walked through Ponte Maceira.

I’m sure the name will be familiar to you, the dedicated reader of these pages. But just in case you were distracted at the time, let me refresh your memory.  We had visited Ponte Maceira once before, as part of the coach trip we took from Santiago to Finisterre after we completed our previous Camino; and while the weather generally that day was lovely, for our visit to Ponte Maceira it was not.

Today, though, our visit coincided wonderfully with sunshine.

(You’ll notice that the rapids were much more rapid today than last September; then I was even able to walk across part of the waterfall, something I would not have tried today!)

It looked lovely today.

and it was excellent being able to wander round this most photogenic hamlet and get some great scenes.

To the left in the picture above are a couple of mill buildings, and it’s possible to look inside them,

and doing so gives a good idea of the power of the river rushing through below.

The (reconstructed) bridge has an unusual feature on its arches.

I’ve not seen that style of construction anywhere else that I remember.

As we left Ponte Maceira the rain started again (hah!) but its heart wasn’t really in it, and we completed the remaining four kilometres or so to Negreira, our destination for the day, without further incident.

We fell a little foul of the Spanish dietary circadian rhythms, as we arrived just as all the restaurants were closing after lunch.  We had to make do with cheese and ham baguettes in the bar of our hotel, the hostal La Mezquita. But the room is comfortable  and the bar serves gin, so we’ll be OK.

Today, we’ve been astonishingly lucky in that our planned coffee stops largely coincided with rain showers. Tomorrow, however, may be a different story.  The Accuweather forecast for today was alternating cloudy intervals and showers, and it was about right.  Tomorrow, as we depart from Negreira, the forecast simply says “rain”.  As we approach our destination, Mazaricos, there’s a Yellow Warning for rain. So the day looks set to start out wet and turn torrential, which is not an alluring prospect.  It’ll maybe give me an opportunity for me to grumble about it and you to laugh at our discomfiture, so tune in soon and find out how bad it was.

Day 4 – Santiago de Compostela

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Wednesday 1 May 2024 – The target for the day was to retrieve the panzer from its car park spot, use it to get us to Santiago Airport (via A Thing To See that Jane had identified as a diversion for us) and thence be wafted to our hotel in downtown Santiago on a pre-booked taxi.  We achieved much of this, though not entirely without incident.

Our first concern was that someone or something might have damaged the tank in the car park, but all seemed fine when we got to it. The two days’ parking charge was a princely €12, which I’d say is remarkably cheap for parking inside the walls of an ancient Roman city.

The first incident concerned getting out of Lugo.  Whilst we were wandering around, we noticed that there was a huge amount of road maintenance/repair/upgrade work going on.  While I suppose it’s good that crappy old roads are being upgraded, the result looks a bit like this.

It’s a lovely smooth surface, but it seems a bit sterile in the context of the traditional buildings that surround it. The combination of frequent roadworks and such surfaces also means, as we found out, that such a surface gives the tank driver no clue as to where the nearest route might be that would enable him to squeeze out through the walls. Satnavs were of no use, as the brand new roadworks perpetually conflcted with the on-screen directions given.  All in all, it was reminiscent of an episode in the Canary islands when we drove round a town called Arucas for what seemed like several hours trying to find an exit which wasn’t blocked by roadworks.

We made it, eventually, and without any damage to the beemer, thankfully.

So, the Thing To See was next: an ancient temple in the tiny village of Santa Eulalia de Bóveda, a few kilometres off the main drag between Lugo and Santiago. Exactly how ancient seems to be a matter of debate; many sources claim it was Roman, but at least one other I’ve seen talks about it as a Visigoth site. Who knows?  Maybe visiting it might help clarify?

Nope.

The satnav took us along successively narrower roads until it swore we were in the village of Santa Eulalia. We drove very slowly through it on a very narrow road, trying not to run down a beagle which was intent on being friendly. The building which Jane thought might be the temple seemed a bit covered in scaffolding, but there was nowhere to park and no way of turning round to go back and look again to see if that was the temple. Eventually some people, not unconnected with the beagle, came along and Jane had a chat with them, as a result of which we discovered the place was closed today.

Bugger.

Jane had checked that it was open on Wednesdays, but this Wednesday was May 1st, a holiday – International Workers’ Day; or International Non-workers’ Day as it should more properly be called. Anyway, the practical upshot was that our best move would be simply to carry on to Santiago, which we did, along beautifully-surfaced but alarmingly narrow roads and with short but lively debates at each intersection between country lanes as to whether we should believe TomTom or Google Maps’ advice about which was the better route to Satiago airport.

The route we ended up driving along was the road that led through many of the towns that the Camino Francés winds through. So we drove through Medlide and Arzua in some 15 minutes, as opposed to the several hours it took us on foot last Autumn.

From there on, our journey to our hotel in Santiago proceeded smoothly.  Enterprise car rentals agreed that we hadn’t damaged their precious beemer, and Jane persuaded our pre-arranged transport driver to turn up early to take us from the airport into town.  (The driver did a good job of actually coming to find us rather than skulking outside whilst we searched for him).  The taxi was one of these vast van-sized Mercedes people movers, and I have to say I’m glad it was he who was driving – getting through the streets of Santiago old town is not a job for the faint of heart. But he managed it without any crashing, swearing or gesticulation and deposited us outside our hotel.

This is the very fine Mosteiro de San Martiño Pinario, an absolutely vast establishment which was once a monastery and which dwarfs the very substantial cathedral opposite which it stands.

The red blob above is the entrance; the blue blob is where our room is. Ignore the “temporarily closed” – I can vouch it’s open, because I’m currently sitting in the bar, drinking gin served by a very courteous and generous barman. Because it was originally a monastery, the rooms are agreeably monkish; this is the sight that greeted us as we opened the door to our room.

and the room is comfortable enough, but luxurious? Nope.

That’s why I’m writing this in the bar, altogether a more appealing environment for content creation. And I am indeed content.

As one would expect, there are many monasterical touches: stone-floored and wooden-beamed corridors

rows of monkish cells;

cloisters;

(note the Camino sign in the middle);

and agreeable spots for sitting and contemplating.

So we’re well set up for an overnight stay before embarking on the meat of this sojourn in Galicia – the Camino Finisterre. For nostalgic reasons, we did take a stroll through Santiago, to reacquaint ourselves with the cathedral

and opposite it the Pazo de Raxoi, a French neoclassical palace which now serves as the town hall, now free of the scaffolding which disfigured it when we were last here.

We also took a bite of lunch at the Taberna de Fuego Lento, a lively downtown eatery. All this wandering around had to be done paying due respect to the Galician weather which was being very, well, Galician; sunshine one minute and the next…

…one is glad for nearby shelter.

I seem to have found quite a lot to write about in what I had actually expected to be an unremarkable day. It may be a case of displacement activity to stop me thinking too much about tomorrow; as usual, day one of any extended walk always seem to be the tough one, and tomorrow will have its challenges. I will of course write about them so that you can sympathise with my pain, as I’m sure you’re only too certain to do. So be sure to keep an eye on these pages so you can have a good laugh about our exploits.

 

 

 

Day 3 – Lugo again: Victor Lugorum

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Tuesday 30 April 2024 – We got a lot more touristing done today than I had expected given the dire (or at least rainy) weather forecast by Accuweather. And, in truth, the prospects at the start of the day weren’t particularly appealing.

It seemed that seeking indoor touristing would be the way to go for the day, so we set out for the cathedral, through the rain.

En route, we stopped in at the central pharmacy, which was well-decorated in an art nouveau kind of way,

You can only really see the stained glass in this door from inside the shop, where it appears reversed. So I have flipped it left-to-right

and were reminded that Lugo is actually on various of the Camino de Santiago routes – the Primitivo and XIX.

I’m grumpy about visiting the cathedral. They charge €7.50 for entry and then won’t let you take photos. My feeling is that you can do one or the other. So I sneaked a couple of illicit photos anyway, yah boo, in both cathedral and cloisters.

There’s some lovely detail in the cloisters and some fine stained glass in the cathedral itself.

After this peremptory visit to the cathedral, we walked around in dampness that was gradually escalating from slight drizzle to proper rain, taking in some other nice corners of the city.

but the dampness became too oppressive, so we scurried off to the Café del Centro, where we’d noticed hot chocolate and churros advertised. And very nice they were too; we were amused to note that the café seemed to regard this as a normal breakfast.

The rain appeared to be easing as we left the café, so, rather than go back and skulk in our hotel room, we decided to take a walk out of the old city to a Roman bridge across the river, passing a couple of installations in the main square that we hadn’t really taken note of before

and passing some nice scenes as we went.

Delightfully, as we got to the river, the sun came out,

and showed the 7-arch Roman bridge off to its best advantage.

The walk to the river is quite steeply downhill, which meant that we got some practice for our forthcoming hiking as we worked our way back up to the city, up to and through the Parque Rosalía de Castro. This is named after a Galician poet and novelist, considered one of the most important figures of 19th-century Spanish literature and modern lyricism. Widely regarded as the greatest Galician cultural icon, she was a leading figure in the emergence of the literary Galician language. The route also involved climbing some 180 steps and 100 metres vertical, so constituted a nice preparatory workout for the day after tomorrow, which is when we take our first steps on the Camino Finisterre.

By this stage we felt we’d earned some lunch, so once again visited the Terrazza restaurant at our hotel. Although we weren’t much later than yesterday, the restaurant was very quiet, with only a couple of other tables occupied; a great contrast with yesterday’s buzz.  The food was just as good, though.

Having (slightly over-) indulged ourselves, we noted that the rain which had come on just as we arrived at the hotel had now eased, and so we went off for a post-prandial constitution in search of some final sights to take in. There were still a couple of churches to be visited, after all.

Having passed the “Monumento do Bimilenario”, the city’s nod to Y2K

(dubbed “The Millennium Falcon”, by Jane), our first stop was the church of the Convento de San Domingos, a very tranquil place.

I noticed that it featured an organ with horizontal pipes,

which appears to be A Thing in these parts – we’d noticed similar setups in the cathedrals of Burgos and León.

The other was the church of San Pedro,

which has some fine stained glass.

There remained but one other Thing To See, which is something we’d completely missed in our walks around because the last thing it looks like is a site of significant historic interest.

It is actually the Museo Universitario A Domus do Mitreo. “Domus”, as anyone old enough to have studied Latin at school knows, means “house”*, and this unlikely-looking building houses (sorry) a really interesting site – the remains of what must have once been a palatial residence that was also a Mithraeum, a temple dedicated to the cult of Mithras, a Roman mystery religion. It’s a very extensive site


with great archeological significance for the city. The site of the domus is important to the city, since it has allowed the documentation of archaeological remains from the entire history of Lugo, starting at the moment of its foundation, around 27BC, until the 20th century. The site is very well laid out with lots of detailed information on info boards and in videos and enabling one to get really very close to the original Roman stonework. Interestingly, when The Powers That Be of the time decided that the city needed a wall, they just went ahead and built it straight through one end of the place.

And that was about it for our wandering around Lugo – a very pleasant city with a significant Roman history. The morrow involves departing for Santiago de Compostela and (after an overnight stop to draw breath) the start in earnest of our proper peregrination to the coast. It will be interesting for us to find out how we get on with some serious walking; I hope it might also be interesting for you to come back to these pages to see how things went.

 

* Domus was also the name of a now-defunct chain of (originally co-operative-run) department stores in Sweden. This fact may be of use in some bizarre set of circumstances, such as when writing a blog about a Roman city in Spain.