Day 7: It’s foggy again as I set out this morning but it isn’t nearly as thick as yesterday, and at this point the fog has become an inseparable part of this camino — and of this mystical land. By 11am, the fog clears and it’s sunny for the rest of the walk.
This is the last day of my camino, and that’s usually accompanied by a sense of excitement at approaching Santiago. But today I’m only going to Vigo, a large and unattractive city whose best feature might be its good transport connections with Lisbon. On one hand, this will be a somewhat anticlimactic end to this little camino; on the other, I can enjoy the walk without being consumed by my impending arrival, because, really, I don’t want to arrive. And I’m not the only one; at one point today, I see a pilgrim laying on the beach, propped up by her backpack, reading a book.
From A Ramallosa, I take the coastal route, as do quite a few others. It’s a nice path, passing a few local, low-key beaches and some cruzeiros to remind me where I am.
As I approach Vigo in the early afternoon, the city is fortunately hidden by coves and bays and I don’t actually see it until I’m basically in the outskirts. And then I have to walk through an urban jungle for an hour, but it’s not bad and there’s some street art to look at and before I know it, I’m at my accommodation and my camino is over.
As for the question I’ve been pondering throughout this pilgrimage — ‘Does this feel like a camino?’ — I think the answer lies inside each individual pilgrim more than anywhere else. If you take the Senda Litoral at every opportunity and stay overnight in the touristy beach towns, I suspect it doesn’t feel much like a camino. And if you’re just here for the ocean, you’d be better off on the Rota Vicentina, which is both more remote and more spectacular.
But if you look for the camino here, you’ll find it — in the monastery of Oia, where monks fired canons at pirates from the patio that also served as the pilgrim route; in the 9th-century church inscription mentioning Santiago in Castelo do Neiva; and in those quintessential and special markers of Galician culture: the cruzeiros and the shells and the hórreos and, yes, even the fog.
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