Day 28 - Ponferrada to La Portela de Valcarce (38km)

Today was a day of two distinct halves. After an extended walk through the outskirts of Ponferrada - they fail to match the charm of the town centre - the morning saw us walking along narrow, not quite suburban, lanes. We were surrounded by small pastures and orchards, small fields growing a range of vegetables and other crops and the occasional area of shrub or woodland. Every so often we would pass a building or two, maybe a house or sometimes a small factory; it was a rural scene of private smallholdings rather than agriculture on an industrial scale. We had breakfast in Camponaraya, the only place approaching a village, got a guided tour from a very enthusiastic lady around a local church and then headed into the countryside again.

The afternoon saw us following the Camino along the bottom of the steep valley of the Pereje river, a route shared with two roads: the major motorway from Madrid to the port of La Coruña and what I assume to be the 'A' road that it replaced. For the main part the Camino followed the side of the 'A' road, which occasionally weaved under the huge concrete structure of the motorway, while the narrow, meandering river occasionally passed under the route of the road and Camino, the sound of flowing water making a nice change to the ever present traffic noise. All four snaked their way along the narrow valley floor apart from a couple of occasions where the Camino diverted to tiny villages that the road builders had considerately left a couple of hundred metres from the roads. But you were never away from the drone of traffic.

The two parts of the day were neatly split by the town of Villafranca, a lovely little place that we descended into during the middle of the day and which stretches along the Burbia river. It is a place I would like to go back to and spend time in. But for now we are spending the night in a small, modern hostel cum hotel near the main road in the few buildings that make up Valcarce, too tired to bother going out - although it looks as if there is nothing to really go out for anyway.

Villafranca