21:55 Mon.

26 Oct, 2020

Santiago de Compostela #6

We did it! 260km in 11 days!

Tags: 260km, camino de santiago, finish, santiago de compostela

°C

12:00 am

We started the day as you should, with a plate full of pasta, of course. It might sound weird, but we actually noticed we had more energy after eating like this. Guess walking the whole day burns some calories (although not as much as people seem to believe). 🙂

I’ve noticed quite a lot of low -fat , no sugar, fitness etc. drinks throughout Spain and Portugal. I’m not sure if they are just so health conscious, or is this the new “hit” with food. Anyway wasn’t complaining, ate more than my share of them.

This was the last stage (or was it?), of our Camino de Portuguese journey. The day was nice and sunny, and we just breezed over the landmarks showing 20, 15, 10, 5 and finally 0 km to the cathedral. Well, that is not exactly true, there is no 0 km sign at the cathedral. The path, especially toward the end was a bit tedious, as the last couple of hours were through the big city. About an hour before the end we saw the cathedral in the distance and in the early afternoon we reached it!

Stopping in a random store and seeing this, just had to take a photo. As we discussed later, much, much later, Aljoša thinks he and Jakob actually ate part of pigs head in the dinner on the first night.

We actually saw a couple of posters with similar theme all across the Portugal and Spain.

One of the last stops, about 2 hours away.

Jakob pointing toward the cathedral. We were still about an hour away, (I didn’t saw anything)

It is hard to describe, how we felt! It actually is somewhat of an achievement what we did, in total the distance we hiked was 260 km, and we did it in 11 days, through sun, rain, over the hills and rivers, the experience was truly magical. I’m probably going to make another post about the psychological aspect of the journey – pilgrimage.

We did it, 240 km in 11 days. Looking back at it, it was really amazing, I’m truly grateful for Jakob and Aljoša, to invite me with them, to spend two of my best weeks with them, for all the pains, secrets, blisters we shared. I’m truly honored and greatfull to have such a good friends in my life.

The cathedral was truly amazing, enormous, sadly the front was being renovated, so our final photo was a bit screwed, but it didn’t matter in the end, the important thing for us was that we did it. The only thing left was to go to the official Camino office, where we got our final stamp and certificates of the taken journey. After paying about 10 € for two pieces of paper, we were proud owners of the official certificate, written in Latin, with our Latin names.

We were quite good at collecting them. It’s like pokemon, you gotta catch them all.

We hanged out a bit more in front of the cathedral, after a while we came across some other pill grams, that we knew from the journey before. The only thing left now was find a place to sleep for the night, strangely there were no official albergues in the Santiago, but we found a really nice hostel, that was more or less used only by the pilgrims. It was even better than albergue and the cost was only 10 €.

Each bed had its own light, usb (and regular) charger and a curtain to cover it. It actually felt really snug in it.

The only thing left now, was to have an official last dinner, to celebrate our journey. In the evening we met up with two of the girls we befriended during the journey and went into a restaurant in the city centre, which after a lot of googling I determined is the best place to have paella in.

Inside the cathedral, sadly it’s renovated, but you could still go and visit all of it. It also has free entrance.

We felt a bit out of place, as the restaurant was moderately fancy, and we were all wearing sports clothes, since we didn’t have anything else, but the waiters didn’t care, I guess they were used to pilgrims coming to eat there. Oh yea, one more thing I forgot to mention, if you are not familiar with Spain, Spaniards have weird habits of eating really late, so most restaurants open after 8 or 9 pm.

The traditional food of Galicia is octopus. We tried it for the appetizer and I must say, it was truly amazing. It was served with baked potatoes and garlic. Really a must-try. The main dish was paella, not really traditional for Galicia, but more around the Valencia, but as it is one of my favorite dishes, I managed to persuade all the others to have it. To be honest, it wasn’t that hard, a big plate of rice, after eating so much pasta sounded great! 🙂 Sadly, it was just ok, nothing truly amazing. One of the reasons might be, that they made it in one pan for 5 people, so the rice didn’t cook enough / properly. For dessert, we decided that we need to go back to traditional food and what can be more traditional than Tarta de Santiago?! Again, we weren’t sorry, it was really excellent, or maybe we were in dire need of sugar in any case. All in all the price for all together was much steeper, than what we got used to, about 25 €/person, but hey it was last dinner. (Now that I’m writing this, I’m sorry we didn’t try to take a photo posing as last dinner).

Traditional octopus, it was really amazing and I’m not saying this just because I was so hungry.

Infamous sea fruit paella, one of my favorite dishes in the world.

Yea, I think Aljoša, Jakob and I could eat whole of it alone.

I was almost sorry I didn’t order the cake as well, it looked and smelled amazing.

This was our last day that we were all together, Aljoša sadly had to leave next day, as he had baby on the way, while Jakob and I could afford to stay for couple more days. We decided that since we were here already, we will try to reach the Fisterra. This is regarded as an extension of the Camino de Santiago, the last leg, where you walk to the ocean. It is about 90 km from Santiago, and we decided that we want to do it in 2 days.