Today we had Kathryn and Tessa with us, and they stayed for the photo, as we headed towards O Pedrouzo.
Although the region has long been settled, even pre-dating Roman occupation, the current population of Arzúa are mostly of Basque extraction. Notable though is that Arzúa is the Galician municipality with the most cows per capita. The village is, for many pilgrims, the last stopping point before the final day trek into Santiago de Compostela. The Camino Frances and the Camino del Norte join in a single path in Arzúa before arriving in Santiago.
A nice temperature when we set out this morning even though the skies were overcast. We had to take a bit of a meandering diversion in town as part of the marked route was being dug up / repaired. Anyway it was marked clearly and we didn’t lose too much time / increase the distance for the day. We had some heavy rain yesterday afternoon (we were thankfully inside at the time) and this meant that the paths weren’t dusty and all the woods and fields looked a lush green.
Yesterday the huge crowds of people from the previous day didn’t materialise, but they were back today. We could only surmise that folks are taking the bus and skipping the harder stages. Each to their “own” Camino I suppose. The Nortes route merges with the Frances route (as mentioned above) here so that would be one reason for an increase in pilgrims today. You can get a slight feel of the “hordes” from the second photo.
As we walked on there were a few climbs and descents, but nothing like yesterday in scale. The sun was doing its best to shine and we could feel the air warming up. But it was very pleasant walking through the woods as we started one of our downhill sections. All the trees, on both sides, were planted in very formal formations which gave some interesting views but I much prefer the randomness of naturally occurring woodland.
We could hear loud music in the distance as we walked along and I thought it would be good to share what we saw and heard. Even the cows in the field looked unimpressed.
Surprisingly we didn’t walk through any towns today but we did eventually break free of the woodland and into farming country. Obviously early in the growing season as quite a few fields were growing produce but the plants were very small. A couple of distant mountains caught the eye as did a garden full of chickens and chicks (very hard to get a good photo).
Walking down the long descent to O Pedrouzo we saw plenty of eucalyptus trees. These aren’t native to Spain but came to Europe and to Galicia in the 19th century when a Galician monk brought some seeds from the faraway land of Australia where he had been a missionary. The species adapted so well to the local climate that it spread rapidly throughout the territory. Rather than come into town along the main road, we walked to our hotel through a quiet woods at the back of the town, checked in and then strolled up to have a quick look and see when the church would be open for our pilgrims stamp.
Today’s ice cream was early (before 4pm) as the heladeria was open earlier!
Tomorrow is the last day of our walk as we head into Santiago de Compostela.