The Big Walk

Onto the plains - Day 21

An exit from the city along another giant main road brings us back to our own version of reality. We follow the road for four and a half hours but time seems to go quickly in the cool morning, and the beautiful light when looking back over the city provides compensation. We leave the road and reach the quiet town of Mansilla de los Mulas, as its name suggests still completely enclosed in huge, crumbling thirteenth century walls. Surrounded by a endlessly flat landscape, we’ve reached somewhere of a different character again. The narrow, battered streets and dusty plazas give something of the feel of a Wild West frontier town, an impression enhanced by the array of rifles on display in the local ironmongers. The older houses have projecting stories standing on rustic wooden stilts, rather than the balconies familiar from Galicia. The few people around seem to have darker skin and are wearing completely black clothing. Is this where the Maragato people now live? We lie down on a bench in one of the plazas, occasionally cooling our heads in the fountain, until a bar opens for the most enormous lunch, which we eat with a Dutch pilgrim who is planning to stay in the town tonight. He certainly likes his food, as he claims he’s going to have the whole three courses again in the evening. It’s still too hot to walk, so we go for a paddle in the shallow river outside the walls, and a siesta under the beech trees, before we finally set off again at six o’clock. We’re testing our new theory that a long siesta would mean we could add many more miles in the evening, but it proves a fallacy as it’s still anything but cool. Luckily for us, a tiny breeze enables us to continue.

The next village of Rereidos seems very poor, with many of the houses built of adobe, timber framed with mud smeared over wicker to form the walls. The sun here bakes it to the hardness of concrete. There are also many bodegas, underground storage chambers with ventilation chimneys and rounded doors at the top of the steep stairs leading in. They look just like hobbit holes; the director of Lord of the Rings could have saved a fortune on sets by filming here. The flat landscape still extends as far as we can see, with golden wheat fields interspersed with the bare brown soil. Everything is brown or yellow except the very occasional tree. The camino is dead straight and we end up playing ‘I spy’ in an attempt to relieve the monotony, but in such empty countryside it’s possible to guess almost instantly what each letter could be.

We set up camp at a pilgrims’ picnic area of stone tables and benches. It seemed deserted but as I write the journal many groups of local people keep walking by on the camino. I don’t think many of the villagers have cars. Only our second camp of the trip but it should be fine – I don’t think I’ve seen a cloud for a week.