After a relatively short 21.5km, we’ve arrived in Tui the first town in Spain after leaving Portugal. The river Mino separates the two countries with Valenca on the southern bank and Tui on the northern. The two tier bridge has walkers and cars on the bottom tier, trains on the top.

I found this little cartoon at roughly the centre of the bridge.

This appeared at the start of the bridge

and this appeared at the end.

We’re now officially in Spain.

According to this poster over 81,000 pilgrims made this crossing in 2018.

Today’s trip was very pleasant and surprisingly short. We left around 8 o’clock, a little later than usual but given that the day was going to be short it was fine. Tom unfortunately had damaged his back overnight and had decided to take the day off. He waited at the empty albergue while the remaining three of us set out on an overcast, drizzly day.

Last night’s dinner had been interesting, pork chops the size of dinner plates and a portion of chips to put the Marston fish and chip shop to shame. Which means that I wasn’t feeling too hungry when we set out.

We stopped a km or so for some coffee to warm us up and then pressed on.

The rain continued until our second stop at a very pleasant, modern cafe an hour or so later.

We were all a little concerned about Tom who it transpired had been picked up with the luggage and deposited at Tui by this point. He’d tried walking into town but had ‘collapsed’ and had only made it back to the albergue with some difficulty. What a lad.

The route took us mainly along country paths and the occasional quiet country road so we made very good time.

We stopped for quite some time at a delightful cafe/albergue that was temporarily being run by a young French couple. They had walked the Camino Frances from near Limoges with a donkey to carry their tent etc. They’d made it to Santiago and were now heading south towards the algarve where they were meeting up with some friends with the intention of buying some land together. (No chance for British kids to do this after Brexit). They’d stopped at the albergue and had applied to look after it for the Canadian owners whilst they were out of the country. We had a superb breakfast of muesli with Greek yoghurt, a rich brownie, freshly squeezed orange juice from their orchard and a cracking cup of coffee. (At lunch time). We popped across to see the donkey before we left. He was brown, roughly the size of August and friendly. I’ve no idea why I didn’t take a photograph (sigh).

Here are some more images of the countryside we were passing through.

This is the first picture of a horreos being used for its intended purpose.

I’m impressed with the local entrepreneurs.

Clearly the Spanish like their dogs as much as we do.

We finally reached Valenca which sports a very large and imposing castle like structure alongside the river, presumably intended in earlier years for repelling Spanish invaders.

The top has long since been flattened and now hosts a collection of narrow streets full of cafes, restaurants and shops.

The bridge over the river you’ve seen earlier. Once on the Spanish side we walked quickly through narrow streets

to the cathedral, a less than imposing concrete like structure, imposing but bland.

That said, the pleasant young chap inside stamped our credentials with a smile whilst Dorothy was busy ordering fried giant prawns, fries, bread and wine in the restaurant opposite.

Juanita meanwhile had continued on to see what Tom was up to.

When we arrived an hour or so later he was in bed feeling somewhat sorry for himself. The three of us popped out to get him some food (salad as it turned out), we agreed to meet at 7:30 downstairs tomorrow morning and we’ve all retired to bed. The clocks here are an hour in front of the UK whereas Portugal’s clocks at set to GMT so we’ll be heading out at least an hour earlier than usual. It’s around 32km to Redondela tomorrow so best foot forward.

Buen Camino