I’m not really sure if anyone other than friends and family have been reading my ramblings, but on the off chance they have, I figured I’d add a recap.
According to my running app (also works for walking fortunately 😀), I walked 785 km over 35 days of walking (average of around 22 km, which is in my comfort zone!) The app also says I gained 11,180m in altitude, which means I also descended around 10,120 given the elevation difference between Seville and A Gudiña. There were still another 203 km to Santiago, according to my calculations, and also a lot more hills.
The via de la plata has a reputation for being a hard Camino. It’s certainly much harder than the Camino Frances, but primarily due to the weather and inflexibility of the daily stages. It’s certainly easier than either the via francegina or the via francegina del sud, on which walks there is very little pilgrim oriented infrastructure, so you are constantly searching for accommodation on sites such as booking.com or Airbnb, and this sometimes means doing long days or going off route to find somewhere to stay.
I walked in temperatures ranging from the high 30s to low single digits, so the gear you need to carry has to cover a wide range of possibilities. Some days are hard, but a pilgrimage is supposed to involve some hardship, and let’s face it – if it was easy everyone would be doing it! Accommodation is, on average, very cheap. Apart from one night in a cheapo hotel beside the highway as there were no albergues in the vicinity (€33 on booking.com), albergues ranged in price from €5 to €20, with the higher end ones being brand new municipal albergues in a couple of towns. Price is not always an indicator of quality however. Our last night in A Gudiña was at an albergue run by the government. It was newly renovated, had great amenities (although no kitchen) and even had beautiful slate floors with underfloor heating!
Walking a few hundred kilometers north from Seville also educated me on the vastness of Spain. It was further reinforced by the train rides from and to Madrid, but at speeds in excess of 250 km/h, the emptiness is more of a blur. The via spends days passing through dehesa ‘forests’, with villages few and far between, and I thought the emptiness part of the appeal. And the villages in this emptiness appear to be struggling to survive. The via essentially follows the old national highway N630 – which in turn vaguely follows the old Roman road, as it is a natural north/south route through Spain’s interior. The national highway has been superseded by the autovia, which has its own incorporated service stops, so the need for roadside accommodation and restaurants has diminished greatly. The towns not on the old highway are on an even greater decline, and in many the complete absence of young people was glaring. One wonders what the future holds for these villages once the current generation has passed on. The dozen or so peregrinos who pass through each day during the spring or fall camino seasons are not enough to sustain businesses.
So now we are relaxing in a small town north of Barcelona. Blanes bills itself as ‘the gateway to the Costa Brava’, but for us the decision was based on the fact that it’s the last station on the coast for the commuter train from Barcelona. It’s a wonderfully laid back town, and has existed for hundreds of years before mass tourism took off. But I wouldn’t want to be here in peak summer season, as to justify all the restaurants on the beach promenade there would need to be an awful lot of vacationers. We have a few days here – daily refreshing swims, not too much walking while Susan’s ankle recovers, and nightly excursions into the old town to do quality control on the tapas and vino tinto. Fortunately our little rental studio is on the edge of the old town and only five minutes from the ocean, so minimal effort is required.
That’s it for now. Stay tuned for the next stroll to somewhere!
2saunter 