May 5, 2025, Morgade

I woke up in much better shape this morning, I was ready to get out walking. I skipped the breakfast at the hotel and started walking, but first I needed to find the Camino. It wasn’t hard, but it was a circuitous route due to the old city streets. I was able to actually find a pharmacy on the Camino open at 8:45 in the morning to pick up the equivalent to Spanish Tylenol.

Next was a walk up a bunch of stairs to the church and castle in the old part of the city. Before the top was a small restaurant where I got a hardy breakfast of 3 fried eggs, ham and toast. Once at the top, by the church, there was a very old cemetery that I went in to take a look.

Now it was time to go down hill and out of town. It was shocking at the number of people that were now on the Camino. So many people come out to walk the last segment in 4 to 5 days. Maybe once today I was out of sight of people. Most people were in groups of 5 and 6 people, some were families and some were friends. Now I played a new game trying to guess who was on their first day, it was like when Malcolm and I would guess if someone was from the US or Europe based on the brand of their pack, pants and shoes. When I looked at them I would see who was alone and who had clean clothes.

The Camino, after town, had its usual hills to deal with, at several times I had to cross water on small stone walkways or rickety wooden bridges. There was still plenty of water running down the trail and of course this is still cow country. At one point I walked up a steep hillside, the path was shaded by ancient chestnut trees. There was a woman offering stamps for credentials for a donation, she said in Spanish that the trees were chestnuts planted by the Roman’s.

My walk was just 12km or 7.5 miles, the distance went by fairly fast. I made 2 stops for breaks. One was a busy little bar on the outskirts of Serra and later on a garage that someone had put a couple of vending machines in. In the garage you could leave a message on a small piece of paper that would be posted on the wall. I was moving along when an elderly man asked me to help him adjust his trekking poles, he saw me using mine and figured I could help him out. He was alone and I could only imagine how a walk like this looked to him.

My small hotel is in Morgade which is also considered part of Serra. This place does it all and according to my guide book the population is 4, but there are more people than that working here. There is a bar, gift shop, restaurant with breakfast- lunch - dinner services , lodging and laundry.

I opted for a large late lunch and to have my clothes washed. My room is small with a step down into it and I share a bathroom with the room next door.

Just down the road is a small stone chapel that is open for viewing, but is it full of graffiti. There is so much graffiti all along the Camino.

While I pretty much kept to myself today, I did meet 2 interesting couples. The first were German and had started on the Camino in 2016 walking a week a year, they started in the Netherlands and are walking all the way to the Atlantic. The others were 2 guys at my hotel. They met 10 years ago on the first day walking down through the forest into Ronceavalles. They walked the entire Camino together at that time. Now, 10 years later, they came back to walk this final segment and enter Santiago on their 10 year anniversary, one is Canadian, the other is from Brazil.

This may seem strange to say since there were so many people on the Camino today, but it felt oddly lonely. I have been seeing many of the same people for the last 18 days, but today I saw no one I recognized in the crowds. The new people lack the pilgrim camaraderie because they are in their own little groups already.

Tomorrow the Boyd brothers will meet up with me and we will walk to Santiago together.