Today we left O’Cebreiro, with Mike, and headed towards Triacastela.
Cebreiro’s Iglesia de Santa Maria (we didn’t get a chance to visit) has a story also to tell. It is said that during the middle ages, the Holy Grail was kept there and was used in masses. On one occasion, a villager struggled through the mountain snowstorm to get to the mass and when he finally arrived the monk celebrating the mass scolded him for doing it for the piece of bread and gulp of wine given out at the end of the ceremony. At that moment, the bread turned into flesh and the wine in the Holy Grail into blood. The remains of the blood and flesh are still kept in the church in a silver reliquary.
A slightly chilly morning, the sun was out and we were mostly above the cloud layer which was rolling in as we left. The above pictures are from yesterday evening and this morning just before we started walking.
Today was to be a mainly downhill kind of day, naturally it started with a little bit of a steep climb and some really stunning views of distant mountains / hills peeking though the cloud layer.
The path was nicely dappled with sunlight as we walked, mainly keeping to the same level above the clouds and then we started descending down into them. As we walked through the small village of Liñares the whole area was full of mist giving the place a wintery feel.
Then someone snuck in a very steep, but quite short, hill up to the top of Alto de San Roque (1,270m) and the Monumento al Peregrino (the work of the Galician sculptor José María Acuña) which was erected in 1993. I wanted to get a clear photo of the statue but there was a large family taking turns to have people on the statue for photos and taking their sweet time about it. There was even a queue waiting so I just snapped quickly during a family “turnover” hence the random person in the corner. The sun was really trying to burn through the cloud, eventually it did as we walked through Hospital, with the church in clear sunlight.
We then began our descent down into Triacastela, dropping down approx 600m over a distance of about 6km. It was steep but not as steep as we feared. The views were still as amazing as before as we dropped down into the valley.
Tomorrow is Mike’s last day with us as we head to Sarria (the most popular starting town on the Camino).