Day 36 - Ribadeo to Lourenzá
Date: Saturday July 20
Start: Ribadeo, Galicia
End: Lourenzà, Galicia
Daily Mileage: 16.8mi (~27km)
Total Mileage: ~424mi (~682.4km)
Today we began our last stretch of the Camino del Norte! Heading inland through Galicia, we are on the homestretch!
As with every day following a rest day (which also means a laundromat visit), it’s nice to hike out of town in clean clothes, even knowing they will be sweaty and dirty again very soon. Part of my clean wardrobe is actually Shawn’s old wardrobe. I forgot to mention this when it happened, but after the melting, which now seems so long ago, I inherited Shawn’s hike shirt. Both of our hiking shirts had shrunk in the laundry fiasco. While this was a total loss for Shawn, it was only a partial loss for me since I could fit in his shrunken top. I’ll have to get a picture in it at some point so I can post a ‘who wore it best?’. (Let’s be honest, it’s going to be me).
Anyway, hiking out in freshies, we grabbed our standard tortilla y cafe americano and hit the road. Heading out of Ribadeo, there were several other pilgrims on the road, thankfully none using trekking poles. We were a somewhat tight bunch of six for a bit, but gradually spread out as we hiked southward through the hillsides. No one seemed particularly chatty. One girl didn’t even return my ‘hola’.
There was a soft light to the morning and the clouds were ON POINT. Really stunning. Most of my morning photos focused more on the sky than the ground, but overall I was already loving our hike into the Galician hillsides. The day was cool and there was a nice breeze to accompany us. Though the skies threatened rain a couple times, there was nothing more than the tiniest of drizzles here and there.
The day would be a mix of paved roads and rural gravel tracks through forest and fields – which doesn’t sound so dissimilar to what we’ve been doing, but the rural scenery has changed a bit. The shades of the green hillsides have morphed through the regions. The fields and forests have changed. It looks familiar but also subtly different. Today the rolling green hillsides seemed to have browner edges along the top. And the hilltops and distant peaks seemed a bit pointier.
We were also greeted by the smell of eucalyptus, with dense groves of eucalyptus trees lining the road in several areas.
Though there were some shorter climbs and the day would include a total of 2,589 feet (~790m) of climbing, the miles ticked by relatively quickly. We didn’t stop for a break until a little before 1pm, around 11.5 miles into the day, which was – uncoincidentally – the first place that you could stop along the route anyway. Though we’d passed through some very small towns through the morning, they were more loose groupings of houses. The occasional church. Nowhere that would have a restaurant or cafe.
As the first – and only – place to stop along the route, the small shop/cafe was extremely busy when we arrived. Really busy. And every single person there was a peregrino (pilgrim). There must have been 20+ people there. Where the F did all of these people come from? We hardly see anyone on the roads. Apparently everyone is leaving town at least 30 minutes before us.
After watching the relative discombobulation happening within the cafe, we decided to just buy a bag of chips and fizzy drinks for a quick snack to power us through to Lourenzà, our stopping point for the day, which was only another five and a half miles away. Owing to Spain’s late lunch hours, we would likely still have time to get a meal when we arrived there.
And so, we continued on for another five and a half miles. We passed the occasional pilgrim. I could typically see someone in the not-so-far distance behind me. This was new for us. We rarely saw that many pilgrims, especially in the afternoon. As the final section into Santiago de Compostela, it will also likely be the busiest, as we saw at lunch. Some people walk only this section. In fact, some people only do the last 100km, which is all you technically need to do (on foot) to receive the Compostela, a document that verifies the completion of your Camino pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.
It was right around 3pm as we descended into the town of Lourenzà, where – after checking into our hotel – we rushed to get to one of the few open restaurants (and the only one serving meals) before 3:30pm. The woman who was working the desk at the hotel told us that we should be fine as long as we entered the restaurant before 3:30pm. After that “they may give you not nice looks” if we are asking to eat. We hurried.
Hiking into Lourenzá
Lucky for us, we were in time – only nice looks.
Lourenzà, as I have learned, is famous of is fabas (fava beans). They even have a fava bean interpretation center - that’s right – which, if it hadn’t been closed on Saturday afternoons, is honestly just the kind of kitschy place I would visit. Awe, shucks.
Anyway, with this in mind, I’d expected there to be something with fabas on the menu del dia. In hindsight, there may have been, under a dish name that did not directly include the word ‘fabas’. There was a first course that was translating to something with ‘chickpeas’. In my tired state, I was not putting this together.
And so, no fabas for us. A disappointment in the land of fabas. But, we endured, each having a simple pasta, some nice hake (a white fish), and a ‘torta de Santiago’ for dessert, which was kind of a like a slightly denser version of a sponge cake with an almond flavor. Actually not too bad. (This coming from someone that likes to see ‘chocolate’ or ‘caramel’ or - better yet - both of those things - listed as dessert ingredients).
Torta de Santiago
While we were late-lunching, Shawn made the discovery that ‘Saint James Day’ (also known as the Feast of Saint James) is on July 25 – coming right up. As you may or may not remember, the Camino de Santiago is ‘the way of Saint James’, so he is kind of a big deal around these parts.
There are celebrations of Saint James Day all along the Camino de Santiago, but nowhere is the day more celebrated or special than in Santiago de Compostela, where the remains of Saint James are believed to be buried in the Cathedral. There would be various events, traditions, music, and parties throughout the city. Special masses and pilgrim traditions. The arrival of pilgrims into the city was a big part of the celebration. In short, it would be a really awesome day to walk into Santiago de Compostela.
The beautiful San Salvador Monastery in Lorenzo (afternoon photo)
On our current penciled out schedule, we would not be arriving to Santiago de Compostela until July 27. But we didn’t actually have any firm bookings after tomorrow night, something we needed to look into tonight anyway. Could we do some long days and get there two days faster? We may have very sore feet, but we could make it happen.
San Salvador Monastery in Lorenzo (evening photo)
We went to work combining hiking days and mileages. Shawn pieced together the lodging, which was difficult in a couple of towns where lodging is already pretty sparse. But, we did it. We’re all booked up to arrive by July 25! Feet don’t fail us now!