Tag Archives: Tourism

Camino Finisterre Day 4: Olveiroa to Corcubión – and the first sunshine!

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Sunday 5 May 2024 – As we awoke, the rain was still lashing down; however, the forecast was for a gradual improvement in the weather over the course of the day – from “Rain” to “Showers”. This meant that we had a day in prospect during which we could actually walk a stage of the Camino Finisterre without getting drenched! The only uncertainty revolved around how long to wait before we left; we had some 19 km to complete, which translates to around four hours’ actual walking, if we get on with it, so we had some latitude in selecting a departure time. Or so we thought; actually, we have discovered that neither of us feels at all comfortable in just sitting around waiting for the weather to improve. So we set off after breakfast, just before 9am, into light rain, which didn’t stop me from taking lots of photos as we went, so this is a long, rambling post. If you’re pressed for time but want to know how it all went, you can watch the Relive video of the day.

Light the rain today might have been; but on turning the first corner, we came face to face with a demonstration of just how much rainwater had fallen from the sky over the preceding days.

The alert among you will have noted the Camino signpost to the right, suggesting that the route was through that torrent. I had taken the trouble to put waterproof socks on for the day, but I’m sure you’ll agree that there are limits – I wasn’t going to wade through that.  It was actually easy to work our way around it, but wherever we went, pretty much for the whole of the walk, we were accompanied by the sound of rushing water as the excess rainwater gushed off the hillsides.

Often, the storm gullies built into the path did their job well

but sometimes the amount of water had simply been too much.

You’ll have deduced by this stage that it was still raining, and there was a heavy mist at times

but the rain, thankfully, stayed generally light as we walked along. We passed the village of Hospital

at about 5km into the walk, which is the sort of minimum distance we consider it acceptable to stop for coffee, and passed a café which made it quite easy to decide to stop and fuel up.

Actually, we knew that this was serious and correct intelligence, and so were emotionally prepared for the shock of having to walk nearly ten miles between coffee stops, something I don’t believe we’ve ever done on our Camino adventures heretofore. So, coffee and a banana it was, and we got on our way.

We passed this rather odd poster.

Vákner?

With just 30km to go until we reach Finisterre, we passed a rather charming piece of entrepreneurial initiative.

An 11-year-old girl called (I think) Xioana, which would be promouned “Joanna” – or someone pretending to be one – was offering hand-painted shells for €2 on an honesty basis. Had I any coins, I might have been tempted; but I didn’t, so we moved on, albeit somewhat taken with the proposition.  Very soon after, we reached The Parting Of The Ways.

Left turn for Finisterre, right for Muxia.  As you’ll remember, having paid attention all along, we are headed to Finisterre, then along the coast to Muxia, before walking back to Santiago; so We Will Be Back on 12th May on our return journey.

We passed this facility at this point.

The steaming lake outside it was what interested me most.  It’s a facility run by Xallas Electricidad y Aleaciones (XEAL) and it contains two furnaces, one of which is among the largest in Europe, for the making of Ferrosilicon.

Oh.

Onwards, then…

We joined a path that would take us across country (i.e. not passing by any bars or cafés) all the way to Cee,

fundamentally a great surface to walk on, and one we think may be the result of resurfacing work. So, by and large, the going was good (not totally – see later) and –

was that the possibility of nice weather coming our way?  It had certainly stopped raining, which in itself was something to be cheerful about.

We passed the Petroglifos Pedra Ancha – petroglyphs. Among the reviews on Google for this rock was this gem: “you reach the stone and then you have to have skill and luck to identify the figures. We didn’t have it.”

Neither did we. Anyway, we were distracted by

SUNSHINE!

To counter our joy, we entered The Dark Woods Of The Vákner!

(Had I the necessary html skills, you would hear spine-chilling music at this point. However, it’s easy to infer from the very basic layout of these pages that I don’t.)

There is a mythical tale about the appearance of Vákner. The Armenian bishop of Arzendian
Mártir or Mártiros, who walked to Santiago de Compostela between 1491 and 1493 as a pilgrim, wrote about a “terrible, anthropoid lycanthropic beast” which would terrify pilgrims in this area. Rather than being terrified, we were somewhat dumbfounded to be overtaken by a Toyota Land Cruiser which clearly had punters in it who were looking for Vákner.

And find it, they did!

This monstrously frightening statue looms at you beside the track. Actually, it’s not frightening; it reminds me more of the body language of the conductor of my orchestra when he’s trying to get the French horns to play louder.

Also at this point is another crossroads, one which is even marked by a cross.

It is another point at which one can decide to make for either Finisterre or Muxia,

or just sit down and rest, I suppose. We pressed on towards Finisterre, and soon enough caught our first sight of our eventual destination for the day, Corcubión, with its neighbouring town, Cee. No, I don’t know how to pronounce the latter.

We had wonderful bursts of sunshine, some of them lasting for seconds on end and allowing for nice views of the surrounding countryside.

The path took us past the Chapel of Our Lady of the Snows

and into a section where plantations of the dreaded Eucalyptus trees seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon.

I say “dreaded” because the species was introduced at a time when the country needed wood; Eucalyptus grows straight and fast, and is ideal for logging.  It’s also hugely invasive, and the Spanish government no longer encourages its planting; but still there are huge areas of Eucalyptus, some formal plantations like we saw today and some where it’s self-seeded and very, very densely packed, hence displacing native species.

The other downside is the ravages perpetrated on the land by the logging process

and, more selfishly in this case, the damage done to the nice footpath surface by the logging lorries and machinery. For what seemed like several kilometres, the surface was broken, rocky and uncomfortable to walk on.  Still, I suppose people have got to make a living…..

We passed another chapel, that of St. Peter the Martyr

which had an eponymous spring nearby,

and, shortly after, the Cross of the Armada,

whose significance is, I’m afraid, not something I am an expert on.

Generally, the path and the countryside looked almost as if we were on Chobham Common at home, with broom, gorse and heather in abundance.

It was all very pleasant, even if the clouds had temporarily closed in again.

The final part of the path as it leads to Cee is potentially daunting, if one looks at its elevation profile.

The two-kilometre stretch from 16km drops 280 metres quite steeply.

We’d both been concerned about how we’d get on, as this stretch has a bad rep for being steep and rocky, and walking downhill can be more challenging than uphill.  We need not really have worried; it was certainly steep, but the surface was excellent, which is what gave us the thought that perhaps the path had recently been resurfaced. The walk down also gave us a nice view over towards Corcubión.

We made our way steadily down into Cee, and, although the quads were burning a little as we reached the bottom, on balance I think it would have been pretty tough had we been going in the other direction.

Having reached the bottom, we’d covered over 13km and it had been over two and a half hours since our last coffee, which made a coffee’n’beer stop at the first available café a matter of high priority.  After refreshing ourselves, we pressed on into Cee

with its beach (that, frankly, looks better from a distance) and its view over neighbouring Corcubión

with the intriguing artwork in the foreground. Cee is a strange place; it has an attractive jumble of houses

and a terrible beach.  However, there is a huge amount of construction work going on, so one trusts It Will Be Lovely Once They’ve Finished.

The Camino track into Corcubión offers a great view over the place

and its waterside artwork which sort of corresponds with with the one we saw in Cee

We soon found our pension, the Casa da Balea,

which is charmingly whale-themed, as one might expect from the name, even down to the welcome mat.

It’s a very lovely place, but doesn’t offer a restaurant, so we headed out only to find that, once again, we’d fallen foul of the Spanish dining circadian rhythms.  We could easily have had a drink, but there was no food on offer.

We went back to Casa Balea, consoled ourselves with tea and possessed our souls in patience until about 7.30pm, when we went out to a tavern called O Ribeiro which we knew (because Jane had asked) would serve food from 8pm.  It’s an engaging place, decorated with massive numbers of ornithological origami

and other interesting decor, such as the beer pumps.

After a reasonably hearty meal, we pottered about this attractive town taking the sort of pictures that one does after a couple of substantial G&Ts. One or two are worth sharing…

Tomorrow sees us embark on a short hike to Finisterre, and we may even be bathed in sunshine as we walk! It’s worth emphasising that our target is the town of Finisterre; the real end of the Camino – kilometre zero – is at the lighthouse, a few kilometres beyond, where we’ll be the day after. But for now, even the simple prospect of a day without rain is something to be looked forward to with anticipation.

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.