Tag Archives: Travel

Camino Day 15 – Burgos to Hornillos del Camino. Back on the road.

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Friday 1 September 2023 – Nice as it might have been to stay on in Burgos, it was nice to get on the road this morning in the knowledge that it would be almost impossible for our next accommodation to feature a more uncomfortable bed. So it was that at 0740 we started our journey westward through the outskirts of the city. More street art of various sorts entertained us as we passed. Take note of the first one. There Will Be A Quiz later.

The pilgrim statues were annotated “Anno Jacobeo 2021”.  This refers to Holy Years, when St. James’ Day falls on a Sunday, and the last time this happened was, you guessed it, 2021.

We passed some handsome buildings which were part of the (practically ubiquitous hereabouts) University of Burgos,

the Ermita de San Amaro,

and another Rollo

before we reached the edge of the city and headed out into open country.

After a few kilometres along this path, we came to our first village, Tardajos, which has another Rollo,

several attractive buildings

and, more importantly, a coffee stop

which, being the first since Burgos, was very popular. After a quick coffee we moved on in order to let others on to our seats, only to come within the next couple of kiometres to the next vilage, Rabe, also an attractive place

featuring a nice line in murals

and another coffee stop, where I also treated myself to a beer, even though it was only just after 11am.  I don’t know whether it’s placebo, alcohol or the well-known electrolyte richness of beer, but even though the day quite quickly got quite hot, I found myself really relishing walking along. I shall have to experiment more.

At the Rabe coffee stop we got chatting to a German couple whom we had seen several times over the previous days, and are therefore, I suppose, part of our new “Camino family”. They are walking through to Santiago, but their end date is 23rd September, over a week sooner than ours, so I suppose they will soon be taking on longer stages and we will lose even this ephemeral contact.

From Rabe, thus for the last half of the walk, we followed a path through pleasant, but largely unvarying countryside (something that I expect will be a feature of the coming days).

We did have the pleasure of passing some fields of sunflowers that were actually in bloom,

a wind farm

and, at the top of a long but gentle climb, the high point of the day, at least geographically.

“Matamulos” means “Mule Slayer”, by the way. I assume that’s for the poor mules who had to navigate this the opposite way to us – much steeper

If you look carefully at the top of the cairn, you can see a single, laceless, left-hand leather boot (clearly imported from a British river bank somewhere)*

From that mirador we could see our destination, Hornillos del Camino.

The gentle climb led to quite a sharp descent, which obviously provided a test for at least one person’s knees, or quads or something.

They say that walking backwards is good for balance and co-ordination, but I am yet to be convinced about its suitability here. We were also passed by someone who was clearly A Bit Of A Character, with his dog, Pepper

and then we reached Hornillos,

where we saw this possibly encouraging sign.

Mind you, we’d passed an official waymark post some four hours earlier which told us that we had 501 km to go.  For people of our relatively advanced years, we don’t hang about, but we couldn’t walk 32km in four hours.

Our accommodation is at one end of the village, which is small, but, compared to San Juan de Ortega, is positively a metropolis, having several albergues, two bars, a restaurant and a shop, all contained within the 500 metres that it spans from end to end.

The manager of the De Sol a Sol, Samuel, made us welcome and explained the setup there. It’s simple but we found extra pillows so it’s pretty certain to be more comfortable than the Nortes y Londres in Burgos.  There are some great portraits on the walls.

Here’s the quiz I mentioned earlier…

Recognise the middle one?  It turns out that Samuel’s brother, a professional photographer, lives above that Burgos garage.

It was around 1pm when we arrived, which gave us time to explore the village and work out that we could lunch at the restaurant at around 3pm, which suited us nicely. Getting back to the hotel and being able to make ourselves a nice cup of Twining’s Finest Earl Grey also suited us very well.  Eventually, refreshed, changed and ready for lunch, we made our way to Origen, that restaurant at the far end of the village, where we had a slightly eccentric but charmingly served lunch.

Note the gear at the far end. Those eating there this evening will have live music, the lucky people!

We walked back through what is a nicely-kept village

to the hotel, where we could relax for the rest of the day, with more tea.

The stats, then.  The 21.5km we covered today brings the total to 301.8 – just over 187 miles.  If the total length of the Camino is 780km, then the inference is that we have about 480 to go, which rather lends credence to that official distance rather than what the shop sign said.

We had lovely weather today, but the outlook for tomorrow is a lot less certain.  It will be cooler (nice) but with rain currently forecast for the afternoon (not so nice).   We’re hoping a prompt start will get us to our destination, Castrojeriz, some 21km away, before the rains come. Tune in soon to find out if we avoided a soaking, won’t you?

” This is a reference to a song called “The Bedstead Men” by Flanders and Swann

 

Camino Rest Day 2 – Burgos. Blimey!

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Thursday 31 August 2023 – We’ve had a day to decompress after the long walk yesterday and so despite yesterday’s exertions we went for a walk. Obviously.

Jane had mapped out a few Things To See and so after a very ordinary hotel breakfast (after probably the least comfortable bed of our time on this particular junket) we headed out into the streets of Burgos, which is a very handsome city.

The first stop was the cathedral, Santa Maria, which is brain-bogglingly big, and inside so extraordinarily sumptuous that I actually felt a bit offended on behalf of all of the people to whose benefit the money involved in creating this edifice did not go. But it may be that my jaundiced view was as a result of a poor night’s sleep.

Catholic cathedrals are intended, designed, to inspire awe. I found that the completely over-the-top Sagrada Familia in Barcelona did inspire that in me to some extent. Santa Maria, not. But it was still interesting to look round – and the infrastructure to guide tourists (signage, app for audio guide, etc) is very well designed and implemented.

The thing has over 12 chapels, for God’s sake! (see what I did there?), amazing stone working and other fascinating aspects.  Rather than bore you with the many, many photographs I took, I have put some of them in a Flickr album; click the image below if you would like to look through them.

Santa Maria Cathedral, Burgos

Here are a couple of photos to give you a taster.

Wandering around outside gives a few views of the place and surrounding items of interest.

The Santa Maria Cathedral is on Santa Maria Plaza, and access to that is through Santa Maria Gate.  Looking at it from the square, you see something substantial.

Walk through it and look back, though…

From there, one can walk along the Paseo, a pleasantly shaded green space

with a bandstand

and lots of statuary,

including that of four kings, who can also be seen on a bridge at the far end of the Paseo.

For the record, these are (in alphabetical order) Alfonsos VIII (1155-1214)  and X (1221-1284), Fernando III (1199-1252) and Enrique II (1334-1379). Just so you know for the quiz later.

There’s another significant figure enstatuated round the corner – El Cid, the honorific for Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, a Castilian knight and warlord in 11th-century Spain.

There’s a huge amount to see wandering around Burgos, as befits somewhere that was once the capital of the Kingdom of Castile. Much statuary both modern and ancient

varied street art,

imposing gateways and churches,

St. Stephen’s Gate

St. Stephen’s Church

a tourist train,

and ancient city walls.

There is also a castle; we tried to get in, but it was closed. That exercised me sufficiently that I walked the 200 steps back down to the hotel to get my drone to walk back up the 200 steps to take a photo of it,

so you can now understand why it was closed. On the way, though, one passes a fantastic viewpoint over the city.

which I think is the best way to leave it – too much to see to do a splendid city justice.

We’re back to the walking thing tomorrow – 21km to Hornillos del Camino, on the first trek across the second third of the Camino – the Meseta.  The forecast is for a chilly start but a warm finish and it will be interesting to see the how different the landscape is.  To find out, check back in at some stage, won’t you?

Camino Day 13 – Belorado to San Juan de Ortega: Preparing for boredom?

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Tuesday 29 August 2023 – The destination today was San Juan de Ortega, about 25km away, with an uphill section that looked non-trivial, though, of course, minor compared to the demands of Day 1.

The ascent would be one third that of day 1, but still 300 metres to be climbed within about 2 km. The forecast according to Accuweather was at least encouraging in that we wouldn’t have to do this in punishing heat – the predicted temperatures of the day varied from 13°C to 20°C. Chance of rain was medium.

The hotel served breakfast from 0700, and so we were there promptly, and eventually joined by some locals, including the police.

It was a rudimentary breakfast, frankly, but at least it included a cup of Twining’s finest Earl Grey.

We left at 0730, and were grateful for our rain jackets, not for dryness but for warmth.  At least the wind wasn’t as strong or as cold as yesterday.  On the way out, Belorado showed off some more of its murals, starting with intriguing instructions.

Doing that revealed this

and on the way out there were several more on display.

The threat of rain seemed a long way off and the early morning light gave us some nice views.

Before too long we had reached another village, Tosantos, and we were sufficiently chilled to call an early coffee break at a bar next to the rather pretty church.

En route there we met an Australian lady who professed to be practically unable to continue because she’d had nothing to eat so far that day. So we carefully helped her along to the cafe, and I hope it was the lack of blood sugar that made her a right moaning Minnie, because she did nothing but complain about anything and everything. Fortunately there were others at the cafe who she knew and on whom she inflicted herself, so we could make a break for it fairly quickly without seeming to be rude.

Our original plan had been to call in at the next village, Villambistia,

but we pressed on instead, to the final village before the climb, Villafranca Montes de Oca, where we stopped for a refuelling coffee and snack. En route we passed a great lump of something

that turned out to be all that remains of Ermita de San Felices; and a stream that was simply chocker with water cress,

not a sight that I expected to see in Spain, somehow. How parochial I am!

The coffee stop in Villafranca was strictly functional

and the way out led past an attractive church

on to the Steep Bit.

I reckon that’s somewhere around one in five; it may not look all that steep, but I was certainly glad to have my poles to help. There was the occasional decent view

but basically the track wound up through woodland

and up

and up

to a section that was lined with both heather and broom, which made it look like something that would be unremarkable in Swinley Forest, Berkshire, near where we live.

Along this path is (yet) another reminder of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.

Monumento La Pedraja commemorates the place and time in 1936 when the forces of General Francisco Franco arrested, shot and buried young men and women who supported the Socialist Republic that Franco had set out to destroy. The Franco forces buried 104 corpses in a mass grave nearby. In a neighboring site, they buried 31 more. The dead were from nearby villages – Briviesca, Miranda de Ebro and Santo Domingo de la Calzada.

The monument is at one of two high points on this part of the Camino.  The track goes down

and then up again. very sharply, but not for too long.

Once up to the second high point, the track is then really rather dull, being a wide forest track that goes on

and on

and on

until finally you catch sight of San Juan de Ortega.

Only a couple of features provide any kind of variety to the track. We came across a mad artist, who was running a food truck as part of drawing people’s attention to his “exhibition”.

He was very engaging and we bought a juice off him as we chatted. One of his offerings was to paint one’s country’s flag on a shell, which is enterprising of him.  We didn’t take him up on that, but it was fun to exchange banter with him.

Later on the track is where our online map had given us to expect him to be; a place called “The Oasis”.

It bears the fingerprints of his style and we weren’t sure why he was set up somewhere else; but again it leavened the basic dullness of walking this woodland trail.  Boredom had obviously driven people to be creative with the raw materials to hand, i.e. stones.

I think this woodland trail section of the Camino is quite good preparation for what comes after Burgos, which we reach tomorrow. The section roughly between Burgos and Astorga, over 200km, is called the Meseta, the flat plains on the plateau of central Spain. Burgos is the transition point between the “physical” third of the Camino and the “mental” third.  The Meseta has reportedly very little variety, very little shade and few villages to visit as one walks through, so it has a reputation as being a mental challenge. It wll be interesting to find out what it’s like to walk across it and see how our minds react to the challenge.

Anyway, arrival in San Juan de Ortega shows one how small it is.  There is an albergue, a hotel (our accommodation for the night), a bar and a monastery and, apart from a handful of dwellings, that’s it.

Albergue

Hotel Rural La Henera (where we stayed)

Monasterio de San Juan de Ortega

We had a bite of pizza in the albergue’s bar

(where there’s a photo of Marcelino on the wall, in his bonkers pilgrim outfit, by the way), and a simple but good dinner in the Marcela Bar, which is run by the people who also run the hotel. In a place this small you can’t really go for a walk. Obviously. So, we contented ourselves with a quick look inside the monastery.

San Juan de Ortega was a disciple of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, and, like him, Built Things to help pilgrims along the way to Santiago, including the monastery.  There’s a church section, with his alabaster tomb prominent in it.

His actual bones are entombed a separate chapel.

One striking design point is that there is a carving of the virgin mary which is precisely illuminated by sunshine at 5pm on the two equinoxes

(she’s the one with her hands up).

Today’s stats, by the way. 24.2km, with a total ascent of 482m (and 245m descent). So our running walking total is 263.2km, just over 163 miles.

Tomorrow we have the longest walk yet since the last rest day, to Burgos, and it’s the prelude to a rest day spent there. So we have 26km to cover, with a very cool start (11°C and windy) forecast. The hotel has provided us with a picnic breakfast, so we can choose our start time. There are plenty of places to rest along the way, so we’ll see how the day evolves. Once we get to Burgos, we have a few imperatives to address, not the least of which is laundry, so I expect our rest day will turn out to be quite a busy affair. I’m not sure when I’ll next be able to report, but report I shall in due course, and I hope you will be around to catch up with our progress then.