Palas del Rei, Mile 443

The GPS track from today’s walk can be found at: https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/8809068257.

Our day today began much like all our groundhog-days begin: We start walking, slightly chilled and are soon quiet in our thoughts, walking in a line, often trudging uphill as we climb out of some river valley where last night’s town was located. After a few miles something very special, something that I had been hoping to see near the Camino while in Galicia finally appeared….well, a plaque explaining it ‘appeared’, but Helen and Dawn just kept walking. But I knew that I dearly wanted to see one of the ‘Castros’ – the BC-era, Celtic-origined forts that populate northwestern Spain. These are hilltop forts built by Celtic people in the period a few hundred years BC. There are numerous ones in Galicia, some bigger and better preserved than others. Being on foot this time around, I needed one not more than a couple hundred meters from the Camino and I hit the jackpot today here with the Castro de Castromajor. If you are interested, you can read more about these sole physical remainders of the pre-Roman, Celtic civilization in Galicia in Castros. Note that I am still investigating why so many towns’ names in this area are prefixed with “O “. It seems so very Irish like O’Malley, O’Shaughnessey, etc., except the word after the “O” seems Portuguese. I have learned that Galician is considered a language in the Portuguese family, not Spanish, which I found interesting. It is also interesting that Galician was admitted into the league of Celtic nations about 40 years ago only to be booted out a year later. Apparently modern Galician has only a few Celtic words left in it and the Celtic police want there to still be a living population keeping ancient Gaelic alive into order to be a member of this select group.

They do still play bagpipes here, though – that is undeniable.

In any event, while Helen and Dawn thought that I had left the trail to go on a very long pee break, I shot these photos of this particular Castro. I believe that Leslie and Kennedy will find these particularly interesting!

We have been playing hopscotch with the 2 girls from Columbia and the one girl from Brazil that all received frequent commentary during the part of our Camino that Kjell-Ake (and Len, Nancy, Jim and Rebecca) were with us. Well, we have re-aligned with them and pass and get passed by them multiple times every day. Since we now have only 3 more days before Santiago, we wanted to make sure we got a photo of this long-lived Camino-bubble before it was too late. These are all all sweet young women and Kjell-Ake wants me to remind them that they are all invited to Torrevieja after their Camino is complete 🙂

From left to right in the photo below you see Natalya, Sandra, Helen, Malu and Paul.

There are countless crosses like this one lining the sides of the Camino as we get ever-closer to the bones of St. James. This is a shot of Dawn stopping to admire this one.

Well, well. Door of the day or first view of this night’s lodging….which is it?…The answer is…BOTH. We are about 1 km before Palas del Rei and when we reached the location where our hotel was supposed to be we saw a burned-out building, including this doorway.

We looked further and we saw that this temporary tent had been set up. It turns out that the main office and restaurant of our hotel burned down on April 14, 2022. The lodging rooms are in separate buildings but they quickly constructed this tent (in which I am now drinking a great bottle of white wine, eating peanuts, and composing this blog entry).

Our room is fine. Since there is no restaurant here now, the hotel is offering free shuttle rides down to the town and back so that we can get supper. I feel very fortunate to be here, to be in good health, to have brought so many of my loved ones on parts of this Camino, God-willing, to complete the entire Camino Frances with Helen on Sunday. We will breathe a great sigh of thankfulness, ….. and then plunge back into our busy lives at home…but never forgetting that we had this, El Camino de Santiago, as a piece of our time on this earth. I am thankful.