Dawn

Dawn

Saturday, September 16, 2017

Thoughts from Galicia:16.9.17

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain

If you've arrived here because of an interest in Galicia or Pontevedra, see my web page here.

Life in Spain
  • Here's something from Newsweek on the future of bullfighing in Spai
And here's a rather caustic article on the EU by someone who isn't a Brexiteer.

CAMINO NEWS

Finally met some other pilgrims today, at a café in Matalpino - two Frenchwomen and an American girl, who'd met at the local albergue. The latter told me she was thinking of walking to the north coast via Sahagún and León and then walking south again to Santiago on the Camino Primitivo. I told her, in not so many words, that she was mad and suggested she concentrate on the Camino Invierno she was also considering.

Oh, and we saw, at the reception desk in our hotel in Cercedilla, a French couple we'd seen at breakfast  in our hotel in Manzanares, 2 days previous. It's getting crowded on this camino.

Here's some practical advice for those pilgrims coming after us from Manzanares . . . When you get to the car park at start of the national park, go left and look for real yellow camino signs and not the 'phoney' yellow sign you see soon after you enter the park. We were lucky and, confused by the absence of more signs, sought advice from a group of local walkers who guided us back down to the real camino. If not, we'd have ended up - pretty pissed off - at the top of a mountain, far from our actual destination. As it was, we had a very pleasant trip down to the camino we should have been on and then a delightful walk to Matalpino and then Navacerrada. After a huge lunch there, the slackers among us chose to do the 7km to Cercedilla by taxi, while 2 of us decided to continue on foot. And were rewarded, firstly, by a long and steep urban climb to the outskirts of the town and then an extremely pleasant bosky wall to Cercedilla and a not-so-pleasant 2km walk through the town to our hotel by the railway station, Here's the bosky bit:-


Finally: I was intrigued to note, as we sat taking a tiffin next to the church in Manzanares that - although I go on an on about Spanish noise levels - I've clearly developed filters in respect of screaming kids allowed to do what the hell they like by parents sitting at a nearby table. My colleagues, though, haven't and were rather pissed off at having our tranquillity pierced by a boy on a bike on a slope. Which be noisliy careened down numerous times. Such is life. In Spain, at least.

Anyway, here's the church we were sitting next to. Initially in peace and quiet . . . Note the stork nest.


 



No comments: