What a beautiful day, sunshine from the moment we started until and beyond our arrival in Casa da Laura (Laura’s home), a small albergue in Vilarinho, recommended by pretty much every post we’ve seen on the forum. It is indeed very pleasant and only 27.68km from Porto of which 500m or so was actually the result of maps.me leading me astray.

We left Porto quite early at around 7:30.

Much as we see in Spain, the Portuguese also seem to like their statues. I’ve no idea who these were, but the chap on horseback is clearly important as (a) he’s extremely large and (b) he’s adjacent to the cathedral.

Porto in the morning light was quite lovely.

as we wound our way through the myriad of narrow streets

first descending steeply and then regaining the height lost equally quickly to come out into a blaze of sunshine and a large open area with the ubiquitous statue in attendance.

We’d read pretty horrifying stories of pilgrims leaping out of the path of oncoming juggernauts and falling foul of the cobblestones.

Admittedly most of today’s walking took place on either the cobblestones or on a narrow pavement no more than 3 or 4 feet wide alongside which rushed tractors travelling at speeds that were quite ludicrous.

Thankfully stories of pilgrims getting sucked into the slipstream seemed fairly unreasonably but it would not be too difficult to imagine elderly pilgrims missing their step and falling under the wheels of these behemoths.

An aspect of the local architecture that I’d never seen before was the common use of tiles to decorate the outside of many of the houses and business premises.

There were some lovely flowers dotted around. These ones look much like colourful swallows.

There were orange and lemon trees still replete with produce.

Even the weeds were beautiful.

We made our way up along the central route through Portugal guided by the ever present yellow arrows and tiles of the Camino scallop shell on the path, on walls, lamposts and even dustbins.

We stopped frequently, starting a little under 5km from the hotel and stopping for a really decent ¢5 menu of the day after around 16km. Morning km are much shorter than those in the afternoon generally and today was no exception. We stopped increasingly frequently as we drew closer to Vilarinho.

As in Spain, the Portuguese seem to make much of their cemeteries and these images give an idea of the amount of work and money that goes into them.

Clearly being dead doesn’t prohibit a generous smattering of kitsch.

We passed more of these brassica plants, presumably left over from last season’s growth, possibly now intended for this year’s seed.

The final km or so found us wending our way through a cobblestone road enclosed by sturdy walls.

Finally – the last 200m to Casa da Laura

and a hot shower 🙂

The final image is Garmin’s map of today’s journey, not terribly informative but perhaps worth including.

Given tonight’s shenanigans in parliament I did wonder whether it was making a few choice observations but since it’s basically more of the same, there’s really no point. The devil to the lot of them.

Buen Camino