An early start to beat the heat, but it also meant beating the opening hours of all the cafes in town. The path was illuminated by the setting full moon, which was spectacular but not photo worthy. After about three hours a truck stop for the autopista provided the required sustenance of coffee and toast. Other peregrinos detoured to a nearby town, not having learned the secrets of navigating by Google maps rather than a Camino app!
The scenery was more than dreary today, with the only redeeming features being a number of original Roman ‘milarios’, or milestones. It’s good to know that milestones were originally used by travellers before project managers sitting at desks purloined the term! They were spaced 1,000 Roman double-steps apart, which is 1481 metres. Here the math confuses me, as you’d think that converting double steps would at least give you an even number, and not a single step of 0.7405 metres! It also means that a Roman mile is less than a statute mile, and significantly less than a country mile. Originally they were engraved with the distance from the nearest town (mansio), and usually the name of the emperor who commissioned them or other pertinent details. Most of the stones have eroded, so the information is now missing. When new (a mere 2,000 years ago) they were half a metre in diameter and two or more metres tall.
This one is XXXVIII, being 38 miles from Merida. It’s known as the postman’s milestone as it has a cavity which the historians believe was used for mail for the nearby farm of Santiage de Bencaliz.
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