Stage 29 - Villaneuva de Campeán to Zamora (19.2km): 27/09/2014 07:13

Dinner in the Zamora albergue - hospitaleras Marie and Serenella are seated beyond Pauline

It was a little disquieting to be sharing a room with two men who were not on the Camino but they seemed decent enough and we had a good night's sleep. We decided the two Romanians were in the area for the grape harvest - two sets of secateurs were left on the kitchen worktop. We also decided that the owners of the local restaurant (Bar Via de la Plata), who also owned the albergue, had their own vineyard and that the men were working for them. The wine bottles in the restaurant carried the Bar Via de la Plata label.

Although we didn't have a long day we were on our way shortly after 7:00am as we wanted to have time to do some sightseeing in Zamora. We were going well on another cold morning until I managed to misinterpret a map. We turned right, as directed by the yellow arrows, shortly before the village of San Marcial which is not on the Camino. We were now heading east and the Camino would soon turn north again. When we came to a left turn I decided it had to be ours but all that did was take us to the northern end of San Marcial and on to a road leading to Zamora. We followed it for a kilometre or two until it crossed the Camino and we were back on track.

With no breakfast before we hit the road we stopped a couple of times to eat the bocadillos we had bought in the restaurant last night. As we get fitter we are no longer stopping every hour. In fact we have been known to walk for up to 2.5 hours without a proper break.

San Frontis church - our final stop before reaching the river.

Our final stop was actually in Zamora, on a bench outside one of 23 Romanesque churches surviving in the town from the 11^th and 12^th centuries. After that we had about a kilometre to go along a beautiful stretch of the Douro, overlooked by the 12th century cathedral and other ancient buildings, before crossing the mediaeval bridge and into the old city. Zamora is a remarkable city and was once hugely important in the Kingdom of Leon. Different groups fought over it for decades giving rise the Spanish saying “Zamora wasn’t won in an hour”, the equivalent of our “Rome wasn’t built in a day”.

We are in another fine albergue currently being run by two volunteer hospitaleras from Milan. Four of us were here when it opened at 2:00pm. After that there was a steady stream of Peregrinos; from Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Hungary and the US, and a man from Strabane who arrived as we were going out sightseeing. There were eight different nationalities among the 14 at the communal dinner.

We saw a fair bit of the town before the rain came on. On our walkabout the only church we actually saw the inside of was the Cathedral. We were planning to go back for the 6:00pm Mass but a fierce lightning storm with torrential rain ended that plan. I later went outside and found the church next door open. It was very bare inside and clearly no longer functions as a church.

Tonight we are sharing a six-bed dormitory with a German woman who has no English and younger Hungarian woman who has very good English. She picked up at least some of it in Dublin and Galway.

Now that I am posting this as a blog I find that the dozens of photographs that I took of old churches, the cathedral, the castle and other old buildings have disappeared. The same is true of tomorrow's photographs. I did manage to recover few that are shown from my Facebook page.

532km completed according to Googles "My Tracks", 370km to go, but I expect it will be more like 400km.