 Previous Day |
Sarria → Gonzar 28.1 km (17.5 mi) |
 Next Day |
¡Ola, meus amigos!
Today promises to be a much more relaxed day! I’m so excited about that! I left the albergue at 8:00, just as the sun was peeking over the horizon. Keeping with my usual pace, I decided to head through Portomarín to Gonzar and not once break into a run!
 |
Straightaway, I could identify every peregrino who had just started in Sarria. They wore small backpacks and stopped to take pictures of every distance marker! While the province of Lugo does a great job of marking the remaining distance, down to three decimal places, as someone who was running out of memory card space, I thought this was overkill. Today, though, I was free to enjoy the scenery to the tunes of a local cuckoo band, Los Cantuclillos. Then, on crossing a lovely, stone bridge, I met a groovy Italian pellegrino named Andrea.
 |
Andrea could best be described as a hippie—on his way to southern Spain to see how his brother was getting by in a drug commune—but I saw him as more of a fighter. He picked up some serious food poisoning back in Burgos (and can’t look at another tortilla again), but he still kept walking! I think he only took one day off! We talked a bit about farmers’ markets, which brought up the topic of how horrible it smelled along this stretch.
True, most of the roads we’ve encountered in Galicia have been paved with cow poop! However, that is when he gave me a great lesson: The more time you spend avoiding the poop in the path, the more you miss of the rest of the world! That’s very true, and you know what else? Even if you step in poo, you can wash it off later!
We had lunch in Ferreiros, agreeing to not have tortilla but to definitely have ice cream, so long as it wasn’t Nestlé. That powered us up to reach the 100K mark, which was even more vandalized than the Galicia marker!
 |
Andrea stayed behind to meditate in a field, while I continued on to Portomarín, a town submerged! The approach to Portomarín passes over a high bridge, below which, the town’s 12th century walls are still visible underwater! It’s beautiful and eerie! I walked down a long flight of stairs (dreading the hike back up) to take a closer look. The ruins stretch up onto the hillside, overshadowed by a whole new town on top. All the guide said was that the town was flooded, but it didn’t say how.
 |
It turns out that, in the 1950s, a representative of Franco’s government, interested in sustainable, hydroelectric energy, approached the town with the news that they’d been selected to move. Their 800-year old, wine-growing town was sitting in the middle of his planned reservoir between Chantada and O Saviñao! That meant they had to bring in a renowned historical architect, named Pons Sorolla, to dismantle the Church of San Nicolás and move it and several other important buildings, brick by brick, onto the hillside! From there, the new town of Portomarín came into existence, and the old town mostly washed away under the new Belesar Reservoir!
I walked around town just long enough to grab a zumo de piña, since most everything was closed for the siesta. The arrow out of town was pretty vague, though, and I ended up wandering in circles for a good hour until I returned to where I started. While I’d gone into town on instinct, the arrows had actually pointed the other way!
 |
Galicia’s daytime trend so far is to have a nice, crisp morning in the shade, followed by a hot, mostly shade-free afternoon. Luckily, there were a few patches of thin trees along this route, but the heat was still pretty strong! Also, this last 8K of the day couldn’t figure out which side of the freeway it wanted to follow, directing me back and forth to the point that I finally just picked a side and stuck to it. That brought me into Gonzar, a true cow town! It smelled like cows, it sounded like cows, there was cow poop everywhere, and yes, there were live cows too!
 |
That being said, the albergue was very clean and not terribly crowded. I got settled and headed over to Casa Garcia, where they fed me much better than in Sarria and even set an entire bottle of wine on the table in front of me, as if they thought I could drink a fraction of it! Well, this is Spain anyway, and I have already seen a wine fountain…
Buen Camino!
Previous Day |
Total Distance Walked: 676.3 km (414.0 mi) |
Next Day |