Category: Personal

Another excellent walking day, I’m really getting into my stride now 🙂 The distance between Quiroga and Monforte de Lemos on the Camino Invierno is given as 36km which is a bit far for us, although a first for us on this Camino is we met a fellow walker from Austria who was doing the whole 36km at speed.

Our solution was to ride in the car to Restaurant La Brada this reduced the distance to just less than 20km starting very close to a medieval bridge and a 200 metre climb 🙂

Dropping down into A Pobra do Brollón a wild boar and her family of piglets dashed across our path, fortunately, the father wasn’t around although Colin did get to meet the local election candidate, at length, in the cafe when we stopped for our morning drink 🙂

The scenery then became more rural and flatter apart from the final 100 metre climb before the descent into Monforte de Lemos and Geoff awaiting in the car to take us to the Hotel Ribeira and a short walk to the excellent Taperia Restaurant.

An excellent day walking of 19km.  The rain stayed away. although at one point it became quite cold.

The  Strava is here:

and the days’ pics are here:

Another excellent write up on the day by Colin here https://colindavies.blogspot.com/2019/05/thoughts-from-galicia-spain-20519.html

The distance via Camino between Borrenes and O Barco de Valdeorras according to my route is 36km so a pretty lengthy one!

Fortunately our host, Saturno, offered to drive us all in his 4WD to the Mirador de Orellan and then drop us of in the car park outside Las Medulas thus saving  7km walking on the Camino plus giving us a private viewing of the spectacular ruins of a mountain demolished by Roman slaves in the pursuit of gold for their masters.  This ably demonstrating the advantages of having a fluent Spanish speaker in our trio thanks, Colin!

We turned off the Camino to do the short walk to the Mirador de Pedrices to admire the ingenuity of the Roman engineers in using water as a blasting medium to break up the mountain. Whilst thinking why hasn’t anyone finished the job off with dynamite!

We then started the long descent into Puente de Domingo Florez to find a very welcome bar for a drink and some tapas the route then went up a hill and past an intriguing hydroelectric scheme, apparently built by the Germans to aid their extraction of Wolfram (Tungsten Ore) in the forties. The track is very undulating down the valley with great views of the surrounding countryside and the slate works alongside the main road below. We decided to end the days walking in the lovely town of Sobradelo having a great late lunch in the busy Meson Museo restaurant. Fortunately, Geoff joined us with Colin’s car so we could skip the final 9km to O Barco.

The Hotel O Camino had a very challenging electronic kiosk to obtain the entry key which took at least 20 minutes to issue the keys for the three of us.

The day itself was cool and overcast with periodic rain showers

So Strava says we walked the 23 km (The watch missed around 1km) in under 5 hours of walking so 4.6km/hour

Here are the pics of the day: