Day 5 - Saturday 26th March

Today we walked 22km but it felt a lot further as it was almost completely on roads, they were quiet roads but it still gets to your feet to walk on tarmac for so long (there is more walking on roads on this route than there is for the Camino Frances but I suppose that that route is a lot more popular so there is the money available to build paths for people to walk on).

 

Today’s target was Ourense a city of about 107,000 people and so was definitely the biggest place we would be passing through on this Camino and we could see it from the size of the industrial area we passed through which took a while to traverse. Once we thought we were in the city we stopped at a bakery and bought some chicken empanda for dinner only to find that we were still some distance away (and thus regretted that we had bought dinner so early).

Just before the city we passed through a beautiful stone village with a bakery advertising that they had a sello so we went and got that on our credential.

In the city we knew that the albergue was off the camino path and we found a sign showing where to go but the sign was not well positioned so we were unsure which road we were meant to go down and were discussing which way to go down when a man wandered passed and pointed and said ‘that one’. We have found that on this Camino the locals are a lot happier to see you and help you than they are on the Frances (where they are pretty happy to se you but I suppose on that path they see too many Pilgrims to be too bothered whereas on this route Pilgrims are something of a rarity still).

The walk to the albergue seemed to take forever as we walked continually uphill through rain and then when we did find the albergue it was up another hill!

We arrived a bit after the guy we’d met in Holland who had already set up his bed so we chose two beds, put on all of the heaters we could find (the albergue was part of what had once been a monastery and so had very high ceilings) and then headed out into the city.

The Cathedral in Orense was rebuilt in the 13^th century and its Door of Paradise imitates Santiago Cathedral’s Door of Glory and it has a Holy Door which should be open for this special year. Unfortunately the Cathedral was not open (even though we were there between the opening hours that were up in the albergue) so we assumed that there must be some sort of preparations underway for Easter (although there were no signs of that either).

 

We wandered around finding somewhere to have tea but could find no where that looked nice so went onto the main square (which unusually is not flat but rather built on a slope) and found a café that did hot chocolate with condensed milk in – it was yummy and just the thing to sit inside and drink as we watched the rain outside!

Ourense was founded by the Romans because of its hot springs (Burgas) and the city holds one of the highest number of geothermal springs in Europe and there was a Roman bath close to the old town which we found.

Just below this is a modern outdoor bath (known as a Poza) where people had changing rooms to change into their swimming costumes and then sitting in the warm water (despite the rain but then the water was between 36-60⁰C so they probably did not notice the rain!). The baths did not have a sello but there were a couple of tourist shops nearby so we bought our first postcards to send to our family.

The albergue had a microwave and stove but no utensils (we later spoke to a group from Portugal who kept giving us food and they walk/cycle the route every year and told us that last year there had been a lot of pots and pans and so had asked the hospitelero about their disappearance and was told that pilgrims had been destroying them but there was a nice bar across the road that would take good care of Pilgrims who went in to eat. It turned out that this bar may have been run by the hospitelero’s relative). We went to the supermarket and bought microwavable rice and tortilla and saw the guy from yesterday coming out and he told us that he had moved to a private albergue as the Xunta was too busy. When we returned we found that there were now a grand total of 11 pilgrims (in an albergue with 40 beds). Admitadely this was the busiest that albergue were until we got to Santiago.

We ate before having showers seeing as the bathroom was now warm and then went off to bed (after the Portuguese group reminded us that the clocks were changing that night).