24th September, Via de la Plata, Day 6

To Fuenterroble de Salvatierra

First the good news: By 6am the rain had stopped and the forecast for the day was dry.

Now the bad news: Bed bugs. Although the albergue looked clean enough and I had slept in a silk liner, the little blighters had launched a night-time attack – I was a juicy target. All but Nico suffered the same fate, itching and scratching like blazes for the rest of the trip.

The route out of the town entailed a bit of a climb along a stretch of restored calzada romana (paved roman road) punctuated with quite large milarios with still-visible inscriptions. Crucifixes were a reminder that this Roman route has been adopted by pilgrims.

Half-asleep, sunburned, hungry, itching…with Banos de Montemayor in the background

The emperor Caesar Nerva Traianus Augustus (The emperor Trajan AD 98 - 117), son of Nerva, conqueror of Germany, high priest, with tribunician power, father of his country  (PP) Consul for the third time, restored this.  80 )CXXX).

Just shows that a good education is never wasted. In this instance it was Rick’s education. Thanks Rick!

 

No escape from graffiti

The next village, 11km ahead, was Puerto de Bejar, which I knew had an albergue that should provide breakfast. Well it would have done if it had been open. More of Aldi’s best washed down with finest corporation pop had to suffice.

The very closed albergue 

I’m a sucker for old signage, particularly signs painted directly onto the sides of buildings…it’s a Timperley thing. Anyway I couldn’t resist this:

 

 

Three familiar faces appeared – in good spirits too! They’d had a lie-in and hadn’t set off until past 7am…and at this stage they weren’t admitting to being bitten by bed-bugs. Well not just yet.

I trundled onwards leaving Olga, Nico and Miquel, I really wanted to find somewhere for breakfast. It wasn’t to be, even the next sizeable village couldn’t provide food and drink. Well it COULD, but the woman running the cafe bar decided that a bunch of hungry and thirsty peregrinos weren’t worth bothering opening for.

Fortunately the bread-van was doing it’s rounds so an enormous sponge cake was procured for not a lot of euros – this provided sustenance, but a coffee would have been nice.

The village was pleasantly old and tired, the sort of place you could spend a lazy couple of hours just wandering around and soaking up the atmosphere. Shame about the cafe bar.

    Buen Camino – have a good trip! Drinking water for peregrinos and the village launderette

Small villages in these more remote areas are a bit short on facilities so laundry tends to be done close to the village’s water source.

If you look carefully you can see Olga, Nico & Miquel ahead. Still another 18km to go but at least the sponge cake provided good sustenance. Shame about not being able to get a coffee though. Did I mention this before?  

This stretch of the camino has lots of bits of Roman remains – including more milarios. I THINK this is / was a milario:

I’d noticed lines of ants, busy doing ant-like stuff. I was careful of these things, the word on the calle was that these little beasties could cause me rather more irritation than the bugs from the previous night.

Caffeine relief came at the little village of Valdelacasa. This place had a few houses, a church (everywhere seems to have a church) and an old school house that had been converted to a cafe bar, presumably for peregrinos – there didn’t seem to be anyone else around.

Refreshed and rested it was time to get back on the trail. The terrain was fairly flat and not particularly exciting although odds and sods of pilgrimage stuff appeared from time to time, like this shelter:

Although it was a 30km day, an early start and limited opportunities for rest stops meant that we peregrinos arrived in the village of Fuenterroble de Salvatierra around 2pm. We were all hungry and thirsty so we piled into the first (only?) cafe bar in town. Jugs of beer, bottles of wine and a rather indifferent meal of spaghetti with a tomato sauce followed by something deep-fried with chips did the job. At least we’d been fed and watered.

The very magnificent albergue in the town is legendary. It’s run by the parish priest who is apparently quite a character, sadly we didn’t get to meet him.

The Albergue

Just one of the many dorms, inside (above), and outside (below)

This was quite a remarkable place. It has beds for 70+ peregrinos who get fed and watered for nothing more than a donation.

Easter Monday is when it all happens here, a mega fiesta all centred on the church – as many of these events are. The albergue which is also home to the parish priest (Don Blas Rodriguez Boyero) is used to store some of the stuff of such celebrations:

After washing the smelliest bits of my kit, I managed a lovely hot shower followed by a pleasant kip. Drinking wine and beer at lunchtime is all very well but there are side-effects!

More peregrinos arrived including Michel and Ermelinda. Ermelinda hailed from Hunduras so her knowledge of Spanish was to prove very helpful. The only problem was that she had very little English so translations had to be made via Michel in French and then to English.

We had chatted with Michel and Ermelinda a few times on this trip, but from now on we were in their very pleasant company more and more.

A couple of hours was spent back at the cafe bar – just to study the local evening life you understand. Nothing at all to do with drinking beer and eating tapas that kept appearing every time I ordered a beer.

Televised football seems to have the same effect here as it does in UK. It’s nice to see a ‘pub’ culture though. Strange to think that not many years ago the powers-that-be in Westminster were try to encourage a continental-type cafe culture, whilst the REAL cafe culture is more like our old pub culture.

I blame Sky TV. And greedy pubcos. It’s no wonder we don’t go to pubs in the evening these days. We have zillions of TV channels and cheap beer from supermarkets. It’s not rocket science….and unless our pubcos sit up and see what’s going on around them we’ll have fewer and fewer ‘real’ pubs.

Sky TV is here to stay. The survival of our pubs is in the hands of the pubcos who charge exhorbitant rents and restrict the beers their pubs can sell. Worse, they will only allow their landlords to buy beer from pubco-owned distribution companies….at inflated prices. It’s a cosy arrangement where the greedy pubcos have their tenants by the wotsits. And it hurts everyone. Except the pubcos.

If you need further convincing, take a wander down to your local micro-brewery tap. It will be independent of control of the big boys, will supply excellent and affordable beer. It will also very likely be busy – unlike the Enterprise / Punch whatever pubs up the road. There are exceptions of course, Joe Holts and J.D.Wetherspoons for example: they give customers what they want and are justifiably successful.

I’ll get off my soapbox now.

Anyway I slept rather well that night…in spite of my itchy bits.

Total distance for the day: 30km

Although the the route had so far been through gently undulating terrain and had the ‘feel’ of a very low level walk, the average altitude was a heady 3500’ ASL. Hardly high, but not what I expected.