Tag Archives: Walking

Day 25 – Vila do Conde to Rates: longer and hotter than planned

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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.

 

Day 24 – Porto (well, Matosinhos) to Vila do Conde: hot, but good

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Sunday 20 September 2026 – The 11km of the Caminho from Porto to Matosinhos have two disadvantages: they’re very dull walking; and they would make for a 33km stage to Vila do Conde, today’s destination. It’s possible to get from Porto to Matosinhos by public transport, but it takes nearly an hour, and, with temperatures once again rising into the 30s, we wanted to get started early, so Uber it was, then, at 0630 from the hotel (having taken a foraged bread-roll-and-banana breakfast in our room), and we were walking before 7am, over the river by the docks at Matosinhos.

The day had a much more “Camino” feel about it. Immediately we got out of the Uber, a lady peregrina came by; she was German, but living in Sweden, and strode out ahead of us. The first corner shop we came to had this in the window

and we saw several peregrinos during the day.

As you can see from the gallery above, we spent virtually the whole day on a boardwalk which starts just outside Matosinhos and extends most of the way to Vila do Conde. At first, though, we walked along the prom, tiddly om pom pom,

past the lighthouse and an artwork that had some kind of pretentious title I couldn’t be bothered to note.

Then the boardwalk started

and stretched virtually unbroken to our destination. It was actually broken in a couple of places, but it’s fundamentally over 15km of planking and posts, which is a significant amount of wood and a vast number of screws to hold it down. These boardwalks (passadiços) along the Senda Litoral route were built by municipal governments during the late 2000s and 2010s. They were created primarily as a soft-engineering project to prevent human foot traffic from destroying fragile coastal sand dunes and native vegetation, while simultaneously establishing safe public seaside pathways. While the Senda Litoral is an unofficial variant of the Portuguese Coastal Way rather than a medieval religious path, local councils welcomed pilgrims onto these corridors as a scenic, flat, and car-free alternative to walking the dangerous tarmac national roads out of Porto.

As the sun came up, we passed a chapel

the Capella da Boa Nova (Chapel of the new snake?). Despite the sun, there was a delicious sea mist which kept things cool for quite some way.

The boardwalk leads past the vast great Petrogal oil refinery,

and the powers that be have put various diversions along it – infoboards, exercise stations,

resting places

and the odd occasional nugget about the Caminho.

The above nugget was starkly at odds with a pilgrim office we visited further along the boardwalk

which itself was at odds with the waymark outside the cathedral which made the distance (you remember, of course) 248km. So, who knows? Not us – until we get there, when you can rest assured that I will update you on the amount we did walk, as well as the amount we should have.

Our previous experience of walking in the wilds of Portugal on a Sunday was of cafés and restaurants that were closed because it was Sunday. I’d been hoping that today, since we were basically walking along the beach through holiday resort villages, there would be places open where we could stop and get refreshment. For once, my optimism was rewarded.

At just over 5km, our qualifying distance, this place appeared beside the boardwalk. It wasn’t immediately obvious whether it was open, but we peered in and it was. By this stage, my breakfast had worn off and I was quite peckish, and Jane had the bright idea that we should order torrada (toast and butter) with our coffee, which was a stroke of genius. We got mountains of toasted local bread, butter and quince jam, accompanied by decent, hot, coffee, and it made a wonderful second breakfast. The chap who served us had a permanently harrassed expression on his face, and by the time we left it was justified, as lots of people started drifting in for their Sunday breakfasts; once again our timing was very fortunate.

The boardwalk runs by the sea, past opportunities for people to fish

and some nice little beaches, where we found that people were already set up for the day.

There was also an item of a bit more pith and moment – the Memorial Monument.

The obelisk marks the spot where the Liberal Wars (you remember them, don’t you? Of course you do!) effectively began. On 8 July 1832, a fleet organised in the Azores and commanded by King Peter IV landed an army of about 7,500 men on this beach, aiming to replace the absolutist rule of Peter’s younger brother Miguel with a modern liberal regime. The landing caught the absolutist forces by surprise, since they had expected an attack from Lisbon, and the liberals then marched on Porto, where they withstood a siege from Miguel’s forces lasting about a year. Peter IV won the day with help from the British (go, us!).

There were a couple of breaks in the boardwalk; at one stage a barrier was up and we wondered how serious its prohibition was.

Quite serious, it turned out.

But there were roads nearby to navigate around this breakage.  There was another one later on, which was a bit more serious

and which involved walking through soft sand for a short while, which is not rewarding in sandals. Doing this, we passed a guy who, again, seemed to be setting himself up for a day there.

Was his guitar to entertain himself, other beach users, or to try to busk for money? We’ll never know.

The boardwalk gave way to a more conventional centre as we passed though the fishing village of Angeiras

where there was an entirely inexplicable construction:

the Crypto Content Creator Campus was just a shack with a couple of old ladies gossiping outside it – unless, of course, they were the Crypto Content Creators…

There were various opportunities for coffee/refreshment stops, and we took up on one about every 5km. The last one was in a rather shonky, but very friendly, bar on the outskirts of Vila do Conde

where the blokes were in a back room playing pool. The coffee there was pretty terrible, but we had a beer each, which was much needed, as by this time the temperature was getting on for 30°C and we were getting very hot. From this point, we left the boardwalk and used the roads in the hope that we could find some shade; there was some available, and it was very welcome.

Before reaching the town of Vila do Conde itself, we walked a couple of kilometres through a nature reserve,

and then re-emerged onto the roads into the edge of the municipality of Azurara, which edges Vila do Conde and is a handsome place.

The church of Santa Maria de Azurara, with the Manueline style Wayside Cross outside it…

…and its pillory

The road then took us towards the town of Vila do Conde itself, which we had to reach by crossing the river. It looked at first as though the town had its own small nuclear reactor

but it’s actually a chapel, more on which later.

The bridge gives a good view of the town

and the enormous monastery and church of Santa Clara, also more of which later.

First, we had to walk through the streets of the very attractive town

to find our hotel, the Hotel Brazão, which we did eventually. By this stage, the temperature was 33°C and we were very happy to have a glass of something cold in the hotel bar whilst we waited for our room to come available. Then we had to find some lunch; with several restaurants allegedly open until 3pm, this seemed an easy task, but the first two we tried turned us away. In the end, we came upon the Cafe Patarata

where a harrassed but very competent madame bade us sit whilst she dashed about getting food to all the other people in the place. We had a really delightful meal there, although she committed the cardinal sin of making a port-and-tonic with red port.

Back at the hotel, we rested for a while and then went for a walk. Obviously. We wanted to explore that really interesting nuclear reactor chapel

but sadly it was not really open to look inside; we learned from a notice in the town that there was a local dignitary’s lying-in-state after he’d died – funeral tomorrow, so we didn’t go in; but the walk around gave us a chance to see a few other things and appreciate the age and status of the town.

Vila do Conde sits at the mouth of the Ave river. Human settlement here goes back to the pre-Roman hillfort (castro) culture, and the Romans later used the area for its river and coast. The name, “Count’s Town”, is traditionally tied to Afonso Sanches, an illegitimate son of King Dinis. He and his wife Teresa Martins Telo founded the Monastery of Santa Clara here in 1318, and the town grew around it.

Its golden age was the 16th century, when it became a major shipbuilding centre during the Age of Discoveries. That legacy is visible in a full-size replica of a 16th-century nau (carrack) built at the old shipyard.

The Manueline portal of the Igreja Matriz (parish church) dates from this period,

(We looked into the church, but a service was about to start, so I just got a grab shot of the interior.)

Later landmarks and traditions include the Santa Clara aqueduct, an enormous structure of nearly 1,000 arches built in the 18th century to supply the monastery,

and a strong bobbin-lace (rendas de bilros) tradition. There’s a statue just outside where we had lunch to mark this tradition

There’s a very handsome town square – you can just see some more arches of the aqueduct in the background.

Near the replica ship is the King João II square, which hosts several items of interest, including a huge sculpture which is called a sun dial,

but, impressive as it is, it’s not usable as such. Other statues in the park celebrate various aspects of the town’s considerable history.

That, then, was our day – a long and eventually hot one, but enjoyable and interesting. Tomorrow we stray off the Litoral route that we’ve followed today and hack across country to join the Central route at Rates. Apparently the waymarks for this transition have been removed to try to focus people’s minds on sticking to one or other routes, but we’re sticking two fingers up to this mindset and finding our own way across. It’s not a long walk – maybe 13km or so – so despite high temperatures again being forecast for the day we probably won’t have to start out in the dark. With luck we’ll find our way OK, in which case I’ll be able to regale you with tales of our (i.e. Jane’s) navigational skills. Wish us luck!

Day 20 – From Malaposta to Grijó: Espigueiro Special

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Wednesday 16 September 2026 – Breakfast was officially served from 0730, so we were up, packed and dropped our bags at reception such that we could get there promptly. A suspiciously large number of people appeared to be very well through their breakfasts, so perhaps they started early. No matter – we weren’t in a rush. It was a workmanlike breakfast rather than anything fancy, but it fuelled us up and allowed us to be on our way shortly after 8am, headed for Grijó, some 15km away.

We started along the (very) busy N1, but very soon branched off on Roman Road Road.

It passed a few houses, one of which looked un-nervingly like Darth Vader,

but soon gave way to a rougher track.

This was nice and straight, as one would expect with a Roman road, but its surface hadn’t weathered as well as the spectacularly smooth Via Cassia that we experienced in Italy when we walked the Via Francigena; I could have roller skated on that, but I would hesitate even to ride a mountain bike over this surface.

Barely one kilometre after leaving the N1 we were passing a very rural scene

and also a very typically Portuguese one – a once-handsome but now entirely abandoned building.

This is even marked on Google maps – the ruins of Quinta da Fonte Nova.

To our UK eyes, all these abandoned buildings seem like something of an eyesore, perhaps because if you are in an area in the UK with a lot of abandoned buildings you may well be in quite a bit of danger. Here in rural (or even semi-rural) Portugal, where there is no pressure on living space, if for some reason a building stops being used, it is just left there, and new building might carry on around it. It makes no logical sense to knock it down; one might as well wait for someone else to buy the site and do with it what they will. But to us it makes the place look scruffy, which is not a fair judgement on our part.

The walk itself was perfectly pleasant, but unremarkable except perhaps in the number of potential coffee stops on offer. We’re nearing Porto and making our way through connected conurbations, so an increase in the number of cafés, pastelarias and padarias (bakeries) is only to be expected. I shall be interested to see how the coffee stop landscape works out once we get into more popular Caminho territory north of Porto. Anyway, there’s little point in my telling you a litany of the places we passed through; here are some items we noted in various places as we walked.

There were several alminhas, such as these

Santiago – St. James

although the last one is a bit large to be an alminha; perhaps it’s an alma? As well as these, there were a couple of chapels, one of which was open, so we looked in briefly.

There’s old Santiago himself on the left

A couple of churches were noteworthy. This one, the Capela de Santa Rita, was marvellously tiled.

This one, the Parish Church of Vergada, was a very modern construction,

and this one, the Capela de Nossa Senhora da Divina Providência

is local to our accommodation here in Grijó. Like many others, it has the loudspeakers on stalks for broadcasting chimes. But something has gone badly wrong with the sound system. We could hear it from our accommodation:

Why it has one “bell” out of tune and one (occasionally) missing, I can’t understand, since this is being played through speakers and is not a real carillon. It’s amusing nonetheless.

(The chime, which we heard played by automated church bells in several places as we walked, is fundamentally a simplified, abbreviated sequence of the “Avé de Fátima” (“A 13 de Maio”), a hymn written about the miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary to three children in Fatima on May 13th, 1917. Instead of playing the entire verse, electronic parish bell systems isolate only the most recognizable refrain. The Fatima Basilica, a popular pilgrimage destination in Portugal, has a carillon of 64 bells specifically cast to be able to play this tune.)

As well as the ghastly Darth Vader house, there were other, more handsome, places to be seen.

The house above had an art-deco touch that we saw in other places – bas-relief figures on the walls.

According to AI, these are not uncommon in the area and are supposed to represent spirits, or some such.

Another nice art deco work was this water tower.

I’m not sure whether it was just to supply the town at large or just the (largely abandoned) factory where it stood.

There were some abandoned buildings which would once have been handsome places

The white house calls itself “Casa Grande”; I wonder how it feels about its rather larger pink neighbour?

Simply wonderful Morning Glory climbing all over this one

A particularly sad case was this lovely tiling

which is now part of a mere façade.

One town seemed to specialise in selling religious (and other) statuary.

Inside one of the shops

A walk on the Caminho wouldn’t be complete without a Santiago statue, of course.

The recognition of pilgrims seems to be increasing as we head north. Many people now wish us “bom viaje” as we go rather than just “bom dia”; and in one case the driver of a thundering great – articulated trailer! – lorry

stopped (ignoring the fact that by doing so he caused a traffic jam) when he noticed we’d left the official Caminho and wanted to put us right; we were able to reassure him that we were just heading to our accommodation, but it was a lovely gesture on his part.

A lot of places had espigueros and I was interested to see the variety of shapes, sizes and methods of access.

Some had a door at the side, some at the end. All the ones we saw seemed in good condition, albeit not necessarily in use, reflecting their status. Like horreos in Spain, they are protected as a cultural asset and can’t be removed or significantly changed; any repairs must be with traditional materials.

This top-heavy, wooden contruction is typical of the area south of Porto, because granite is in short supply; these are coastal-variant espigueiros, commonly known as canastros or caniços. Being wider at the top boosts upward airflow to dry corn quickly in the humid coastal climate; and the angled wooden walls and overhanging tiled roofs shed heavy coastal rain away from the grain. The inverted angle makes it difficult for rodents to climb up the sides, though some of them were also sited on top of toadstool shapes to make the rodents’ job more difficult still.

There was a lavadouro – a public laundry space

which, since a nearby plaque asserted that it had been recertified in 2022, one could infer was still in use.

At one stage there was a loud siren kind of noise. It seemed to come from a car, which stopped and its owners got out and started rummaging around in the back.

There was a lot of polystyrene packaging in the van, and so I guess this must be some kind of mobile shop.

One chap was making his way by horse and cart, something we hadn’t seen before in Portugal.

We had taken coffee (OK, two coffees. And pastries.) in Vergada, which was about halfway along our route, and we had no particular plans to stop again, despite the (relative) profusion of opportunities. However, we came across this series of signs.

and decided that it would be rude not to look in.

It was the Forninho do Mosteiro, a nice place, but desperately warm in direct sunshine.

Jane got her selo, and I got my beer.

The Mosteiro it refers to is the Monastery of San Salvador at Grijó. The Caminho runs between it and a very large and posh-looking cemetery.

We took a look at the monastery buildings

and their rather nicely done modern take on the Madonna and Child

but the monastery itself was closed so we could look no further. By this stage we were close to our accommodation, which lies about a kilometre off the Caminho. We arrived at the Couto Rural and at first I feared that we would have the quite usual situation of somewhere being locked and deserted and wondering what to do next,

but Jane rang the bell and our luck was in, as was the owner, a lovely lady called Lourdes, who invited us in and plied us with beer whilst we sorted out the details of our booking and breakfast needs. Our bags had arrived and Lourdes showed us to our accommodation, which had a nice kitchen area

which suited us well. The nearest restaurant that Lourdes considered suitable was about 20 minutes walk away; but there’s a supermarket closer, so we walked to that and got ourselves healthy stuff like yoghurt, fruit and salady bits.

Couto Rural is a splendid little conglomeration of different rooms and accommodation options,

and it even has its own – very imposing – espigueiro.

We are well ensconced and readying ourselves for the final walk into Porto tomorrow. It’s a short walk – the shortest so far – and the temperature isn’t forecast to rise above 25°C, so we can be leisurely about our start. I’m not sure whether there’s much to report about the walk into Porto (the 20th stage of our 37-stage Caminho), except that it goes up quite a long way before it goes down again. Anyway, stay tuned and you’ll see how we get on.