Camino Primitivo — Part II
Our Camino Crew; Paella, Pulpo, and Tapas; Los Hospitales; Old World Meets New World
The People, Pt. II: Our Camino Crew
Over the course of any long distance hike, people will often fall into groups as their itineraries align. The kilometers per day, key lodging points, and lunch breaks all filter travelers into a certain pace. My dad and I transiently hiked and ate and stayed with a number of fellow pilgrims over the two week journey, including some relentlessly cheery Lithuanians, and a fun and generous group of Americans, among others.
But with one particular group: over the course of one day we became friends, and by the fifth day we felt like we’d known each other for months. Something about cooking together, sharing the bathroom, making plans, discovering new places, and forming new experiences together will do that.
It was a full assortment of personalities, complete in a way that the differences complemented each other. And what made the group so very enjoyable were the ways in which everyone was generous of themselves, kind and considerate of each other, and insightful through our journey.
What stands out to me the most about this group of fellow hikers, though, is how much we loved to laugh. I suppose that goes along with everything above — a natural result of being friendly, supportive, intelligent, interesting, etc. And so maybe laughter, in turn, is one of the most significant factors leading to feeling close.
On the second night of the trip I saw some folks tossing a disc in a small section of Salas just outside the medieval wall. I found them again the next night in Tineo, but they said frisbee was cancelled for the day… after a rogue disc “kind of hit someone.”
Town square frisbee was a recurring theme of my camino. One or twice we were relegated to a small field or street. More often than not we were able to gently commandeer these wide open places to practice throws. Erica and Jason were much more serious players — they’d actually met on the club frisbee circuit in Spain, so this all was very apropos for them.
My favorite spots were in Grandas de Salime where we played a game of 2v2 in front of a small crowd of curious locals (especially my favorite was how we all said we would take it easy… on pavement, some of us barefoot and blistered) but as soon the game started it quickly got serious). In O Cadavo we had a huge section of town to work with. And in A Fonsagrada we brought a few new friends of frisbee and a couple bottles of wine out to the center of town.
Jason, Erica, and my dad and I were the Americans. We talked about where we were from. I soon realized I had actually seen Erica playing soccer against our school’s team in 2014 (…!?). We cooked American food together one evening. And sometimes while we were hiking we played word guessing games, which made the kilometers absolutely fly by.
One member of group was a fellow Classicist, and teacher. We only really talked about that once. I remember telling her I thought Bella was a nice name, thinking of the Italian cognate but forgetting entirely the Latin (“pretty”, and “wars”, respectively). She was also no stranger to long distance hikes, though I think her hike across Europe (the long way) is far more incredible. Originally from Britain, she picked up and moved to Turkey. Part of me wishes I could do something like that, but part of me also doesn’t think I could.
Another was a Swiss veterinarian PhD candidate from Geneva. A major story of her hike was being persistently plagued by blisters. Each night Joëlle would lay out an army of bandages and creams in front of her on the floor to dress the new wounds of the day.
She claimed her lack of quick wit is an anomaly compared to her friends. But I was impressed at the speed with which she could return playful banter in her third language. She and I tried to speak French a couple times, but let’s just say it was probably worse than my Spanish.
A German in our group had also hiked down to our camino with some others from the Camino Norde, along the northern coast of Spain. He enjoyed planning, as seen in the picture above discussing routes with my dad. In Tineo, when we were actually about to set off on a different route (since the Camino offers some choices) he asked us where going, and suggested the route over the Hospitales (shown below). That was the day that Team Spaghetti Bocadillos (I can’t remember if that name stuck or not) formed.
Then a few days later we added Sarah, an Italian. My dad and I were wandering uncertainly down a road when we encountered another hiker walking back. She told us it was not the Camino. We thanked her and turned around. A little while later we saw her again at a grocery store getting a highly sought after sello, or stamp, for our hiking passport. As we resumed hiking we said hello. I tried speaking Italian as soon as I found out where she was from, but Spanish-brain made it difficult. My dad shared about my mom and his trips to eastern Italy to find her heritage.
Lastly, someone who sometimes hiked with us all day (and whom sometimes we didn’t see for a couple days straight) is Silvia, an older woman from the Netherlands. She was always gregarious, but also always did her own thing. She was probably the only person we saw on both the first day of the Camino and the last.
I liked something she told us once when we were talking about hiking. “At first, I did not like to walk. I do 5km, then 10. Then, I do 35. I tell you, they say I can not walk 80km. So I did! I do not like it, they tell me I cannot do something. It makes me do it. You know this?”
While each pilgrim’s personalities are all a little different, the camino brings out the resiliency and flexibility (and cooperation, living in close quarters) needed to make the journey. Whether the Camino is hiked for religious or spiritual or cultural reasons, it is an exercise in humanism, distilled from so many other distractions of daily life. Whenever I think of my trip, I’m always grateful for having met such wonderful humans.
Spanish Food Part II: Paella, Pulpo, and Tapas
Paella
After Lugo, we stopped in Ferriera at a newer place called A Nave — “By Ship”. It looked sort of like an ark turned upside down. The hosts doubled as baristas and cooks… which is an efficient use of time, as people would check in, shower, then look for food and drink (and the town is only a couple buildings wide). One especially nice aspect of this albergue is that they offered communal dinners at long dining room tables. We elected to stay in for dinner, which featured paella, a rice, vegetable, and meat dish. This version used shrimp — a Galician take on an traditional Spanish dish.
The food was wonderful, but my favorite part was how they looked so cute and happy, posing there with the very large pan of paella, like they really loved hosting a bunch of strangers every night and showing them amazing hospitality. The albergue really is in the middle of nowhere, as far as town sizes go… but it’s between two of the largest towns on the trail, which has turned the area into a prime perigrino destination. Seems like if you love cooking a short menu for hungry, gracious people who would be content with the minimum in accommodations, this would be a dream job for a few summers.
Pulpo!
One of the common conversations for hungry hikers to bring up on the trail is food. And my dad (and mom, before we left) had been telling me about pulpo since the beginning. Galacia (specifically, the town of Melide) is famous for its octopus dish. Unlike calamari, popularly served fried, pulpo is cooked in a pot and then served with a fatty sauce like oil or butter, (like all good seafood. Here, at the Pulperia Ezequiel, you can watch the octopus being cooked as you walk in!
When we got into town we checked a couple places before finding a spot for the night. After the customary resting, showering, and checking the wifi, we scoped out the town for an octopus place. The siren’s song of cold beer and fellow hikers sitting out on a sidewalk cafe sidelined us for a while, but then we found the place my dad had visited four years before. We checked dinner hours. After about ten days on the quiet Primitivo where everyone sticks to “afternoon siesta and evening dinner” schedule, we found a place that stayed open all day!
We went back for laundry/journaling sorts of hiker chores, then went back out to see the city. A friend of ours was hiking over 50km that day, and she’d calculated on a 6pm arrival at a 5km/hr pace. Well, when you’ve been hiking for about a month, physical distance is basically clockwork… so we wandered over to the Camino then, and sure enough she’d just pulled into town!
We had a lovely dinner of bread, mixed salad, chorizo links, pulpo. That all with the wine was dehydrating… worth noting because Bella still had four or five km left to do that evening. It was absolutely delicious
The Italian group that we kept running into happened to sit down at our table as well. I pointed out that our Camino Primitivo was not shown on the map behind us — only the more famous Camino Francés. He thumped his chest and said, “il nostro camino è nel nostro cuore” — our journey is in our hearts. Gotta love the Italians :)
Tapas
Lastly — it wouldn’t be a complete picture of Spanish cuisine without tapas.
Santiago is a pilgrim destination as much as it is a tourist town with a beautiful cathedral. As such, there are going to be lot of tourist-trap restaurants. I once got a good tip once that if the place has a menu in four languages, you can assume they are hunting for tourists. When the menu is only in Spanish, that presents its own challenges, too… but, that is just part of the fun!
Google translate told us that the bomba in the top right was a “bomb” — ok, I can see that. Went out on a limb when we were ordering it though! Then the ambiguities of “cuts” and “slices” of meat… “beef” and “cow” and “steak” — not 100% sure what we were getting. We ended up getting beef kebab, veal, and deer meatballs. We also got jamon (prosciutto-like ham) and bread, and patatas bravas (brave potatoes!! kind of means “spicy”). We liked those so much we ordered them twice.
We had walked around the city for about 40 minutes looking for the perfect place to eat, and were not disappointed! It wasn’t the “crazy cheap but still delicious” peregrino menu, but it was an amazing last dinner in Spain.
The Hospitales
The morning after the spaghetti dinner and Asturian wine-pouring we woke up and left the albergue early in the morning. The ridge hike over the Hospitales would be entirely exposed and a lot of climbing, and it would be better not to attempt that when the sun was at its peak.
After a beautiful sunrise that we all briefly stopped to take a dozen of pictures of, we soon met a warning sign at the base of the climb.
“Attention! For the next 5km to Concellin is a path without bear. Danger!”
Sure, we’d heard that this was one of the most difficult hikes of the journey. But… “without bear”? Doesn’t hiking without bears generally lower the danger level?
The Spanish speakers in the group stood trying to figure out this sign for a couple minutes… until someone noticed that a “u” had been scratched out. “Sinuoso” — sinuous, winding, full of curves. That made more sense.
We resumed up the dangerous, windy, sinuous, and without-bear path. (But, there would be many cows!).
The 360° views were just incredible. I would recommend doing this section just for that. Walking among wild horses and cows was also a really cool aspect of this section of the trail. Then the history of how difficult this section could be many years ago and the winter was an intriguing aspect as well.
This path, the Ruta de los Hospitales, is one of two options when traveling the Camino Primitivo. While this word has nothing to do with hospitals, it has everything to do with hospitality. The route slowly ascends 2,000 feet and then rolls up and down, back and forth along the ridge.
During this time, the hike is almost completely exposed — which can be a lot in the summer, but way more significant in the winter. To help, shelters were built along the way, in case pilgrims needed to seek shelter from a storm.
Just above those clouds we reached a trail marker and a pile of rocks. I did not know it was a tradition to bring a rock up to the top with you. The hike was hard enough already as it was. We got some great pictures taken of the group up here at the top. It was too early to stop for lunch, so we only had a snack. I remember being hungry — especially because we had packed large bocadillos from the bar in Borres and I was really itching to break into it.
Old World Meets New World
One of the most fascinating parts about traveling from town to town through Northern Spain is seeing the Old World parts of Spain — especially when they are juxtaposed with the New World parts so closely.
Part of the difference is just “rural” and “city” living, sure. But living in a rural county, myself, so much the country life in Spain seems deliberately attached to an older, slower way of doing things. We didn’t see many large factory farms, at least not compared to the number of smaller farms. The interesting part is these small farms, with centuries-old barns and cows wearing cowbells, would also have new John Deere equipment among the older tools.
Probably daily I thought about things that I wanted to write about in this post. Most of it is subtle — like a house adorned in such a way that you’d swear it was a scene from the early 1900s… but then you see the WiFi hookup. Or more generally European: the towns arranged with roads that did not know they would ever accommodate motorized vehicles. A lot of the landscape is centuries of tradition littered with a recent push for modernity.
It is no coincidence that the Camino runs alongside so many old fountains, springs, churches, and even abandoned ore milling equipment. Unlike the Appalachian trail, most of the Camino paths were routed over routes that were already in use — hence the ruins.
Another reason behind the antiquity seems to be the charm of retaining as much of the old world as practical, where something new wouldn’t be obviously and completely better. While our country seems to have gone the way of industrializing everything before then taking steps “back” towards the slow food or organic food movements, it seems that northern Spain did not embrace industrialization to a fault, so quickly.
Believe me, I like buying cheese and meat wrapped in plastic as much as the next person. There are obvious advantages, of course. But some approaches seem less zealous — like how fresh bread is delivered to the countryside by van as with newspapers. That combination is the sort of mix of old and new that is both charming and convenient.
One of the iconic images of small towns in Asturias and Galicia is that of the horreo (pronounced, “or-ey-oh”). It wasn’t until I saw it written down that I saw the “h” and realized it came from the Latin word for “grain storehouse” (horreum). And that’s exactly what they are — mini grain silos, family-sized.
Propped up on precarious-looking stone stilts, these buildings were kept up and away from the damp ground, and from critters that might otherwise find their way into your food. A few appeared to still be used in some respect; others, floating cultural relics.
I think sometimes we take for granted how much of our culture in the US is predicated on how we grew up alongside farming and industrial revolutions. Our roots are in roads, large-scale farming, coal and timber, and urbanization. We similarly grew up with religion at the local level, though Spain also has religion at the national level (huge cathedrals) in a way we have not. Our cities are young, though. And our propensity to tear down and build new means that everything is always at least a little modern.
While Roman roads were painstakingly built to last for thousands of years, modern engineering figures the cost on how long structures should last before being refreshed. And it has worked very well for our growth, our economy. In the US, most things are 10–50 years old. I suppose Spaniards are used to it, but it seems foreign to me. The way that history is intertwined with culture is palpable. There is a sense of traveling back and forth through time as you walk.
