Diana and I began the camino on Saturday morning, leaving Portugal around 8:00 Portugal time (9:00 in Spain).
Once across the river in Spain, this marker confirmed we were on the right track!
We were in Tui, which is a pretty much the "last chance" spot for starting the camino if pilgrims are to achieve their compostela, the document attesting to their pilgrimage, because at minimum pilgrims must walk the last 100 kilometres. Although Tui is more than 100 kilometres from Santiago, you cannot start later because there is nowhere else to get a credential stamp.
We had been stamped at our hotel last tonight, and today our first stamp came at the Tui cathedral.
It was raining a little bit here and despite a lot of adrenaline, we took a coffee break in a bar across from the cathedral--the first of many coffee breaks in bars we would have over the next six days!
We were also beginning to get used to hearing, reading, and saying "buen camino," or, in this case, "bom caminho," which is Portuguese; we would also see it in Galician: "bon camiño."
All of our time in Spain has been in Galicia, the semi-autonomous region which certainly has a distinctive character, as well as their own language, which is closer to Portuguese than to Spanish (although pretty much everyone also speaks Spanish).
We left Tui, sometimes along the road . . .
. . . and sometimes through forest.
Something else we began seeing frequently were these raised, stone granaries. At first we did not know what they were (I wondered if they were graves!), but we learned that they are granaries and a distinctive Galician structure that many of the houses in the rural areas had. At this point I think they are as much a cultural/decorative feature as anything functional, although they still seem to be used for storage of various types.
About halfway to Porrino, where we were ending stage one, the way split with these markers.
The original route passes through an industrial area, so I persuaded Diana to take the "complementary" route, which proved beautiful.
At the outskirts of Porrino Diana and I split up intentionally and walked solo for a few kilometres for the first time.
2021 is a holy year and so it seems many of the municipalities have made an effort to celebrate and promote the camino, such as with papier-mâché shells like this!
The scallop shell has become a ubiquitous symbol of the camino, and many of us pilgrims wear them on our backpacks and they are on signs and tiles and painted on the sidewalk, etc., everywhere.
I met back up with Diana at our hotel, where our bags were waiting for us. We opted to have our bags transported each day rather than carry them, so we are just wearing day bags on our walks. The service is quite affordable and impressively efficient.
After laundry, some grocery shopping, and a rest, we went out for drinks and then dinner. We had a great server who was excited to talk about Galician food and so here we have some classic dishes: Padron peppers on top (delicious!); zorza on the right, which is pork loin with a nice spice mix; and eggs with spinach on the left.
After the rain of day one, we had great weather from day two onward, which was wonderful. I was excited at our day two lunch stop to be able to try pulpo, or octopus.
We had a beautiful approach into Redondela, which is a bit of a suburb of the major Galician city of Vigo.
Rendondela is largely in a valley, but our hotel was up the hill, which meant a bit of a steep detour off the camino. We were glad to have a room reserved though, because we saw that at least some of the albergues were indicating that they were full.
Day three took us from Redondela around the Ria de Vigo, which is an estuary coming in from the Atlantic Ocean. On one small climb we had a view of the water.
Despite the climb, this sign gives you a sense of how flat our route was: 100 metres above sea level was worth noting!
We passed a couple of spots on this stretch I felt were worth photographing.
A lovely place called Arcade is at the tip of the estuary.
Even in the middle of this old village there was a stone granary!
We left Arcade and were inland again.
Typically we have come across bars or cafes frequently enough to get lunch and coffees and water, etc. as we need it, but on this stretch we were getting hungry. We were almost eight kilometres out of Arcade before we finally reached Casa Fermin, a lovely spot where we were able to get some sandwiches and snacks and beers.
From here it was about another five kilometres or so to Pontevedra.
Before checking in at our hotel, we visited the Santuario da Virxe da Peregrina, which translates as something like the chapel of the pilgrimage virgin.
Pontevedra is a lovely place, although somehow I managed to take no photos of it other than the one above. We were not eager to walk around too much, but saw a little bit of the old town and then shared a bottle of wine and a seafood paella for dinner.
Day four began a bit cloudy and damp. We passed this above-ground graveyard early on.
We passed shrines like this regularly; I find them interesting because they have Jesus on one side of the cross and virgin on the other. I do not remember seeing that before.
For some reason, we found much of this day quite crowded. This photo gives a sense for how many people were walking in our vicinity at one point.
Diana was struggling with blisters (five on one foot!) but a beer (Galicia's iconic Estrella) seemed to get her the final couple of kilometres, and we had a lovely hotel in Caldas de Reis (across from a shoe store, where Diana actually ended up purchasing a new pair of shoes!).
Caldas de Reis means hot springs in Galician, and indeed there are hot springs. I did not photograph the spot where the bath like this was actually full, because people were soaking their feet in it and I felt a photograph would be intrusive; this is the style, however, of the springs. I think this is actually designed to make laundry easy more so than foot bathing, but pilgrims seem to appreciate the foot bathing aspect!
Anyway, it is another nice little town, probably the smallest of the places we stayed on the pilgrimage.
Day five was a sunny and hot one, with temperatures reaching the high twenties. But it was a beautiful walk nonetheless and incredibly Diana's new shoes idea was actually working. Meanwhile, somehow I was managing to avoid blisters altogether!
Padron, our stop for the night, is a significant place in terms of the history of the camino, because it is where St. James's body was brought ashore and actually rested for sometime before it was brought to Sanitago. This cathedral . . .
. . . preserves the post to which the boat carrying St. James's body was moored.
The other exciting thing about Padron was our hotel, the Chef Rivera.
The hotel is named after the chef of the restaurant, who is evidently a famous chef in Spain. He has served the King and Queen and been awarded Michelin stars, etc.!
Of course we had to dine here, especially since they offered a pilgrim's menu for just 15 euros! The chef's wife was our server. We ordered a bottle of a local white.
And we both had the cod as our main dish. Cod is as popular in Galicia, I think, as it was in Porto.
Actually the hotel itself is nothing special, but the dining was a great experience.
Thursday was our sixth and final day of walking, and also our longest at about 25 kilometres. We reached Santiago around 18:00 and ended at the cathedral. We had walk 124 kilometers total since Valença.
Here are our feet at kilometre 0!
We were lucky, because were able to walk right inside the cathedral, although later we would see significant line-ups to get in.
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