Primero día - viernes el 16 del mayo

We were all packed and ready to go by 7:00, so we decided to set out while it was still cool, planning to eat breakfast when convenient. We were through the city, across the river, and out of town in short order, and passed through several villages in the course of the morning, none of which had anything open. We ended up walking for 4 hours without stopping, the last half-hour or so with a couple from Munich, Franz and Angela, and arriving at 11:00 at Villadangos, where our earlier plan had called for us to overnight.

The weather this morning was wonderful, starting at 10°C (50°F) and slowly warming, with just enough clouds to be pretty and enough wind to be pleasant. That, and the fact that we had made such time, encouraged us to go on farther, in fact to compress our first three days into two to buy a day at Cabo Fisterra, the cape at the end of the world. The only drawback was that the first three days would all be about 35km (21mi) - each day longer than any I had ever walked; after that we could ease off a bit.

So, we spent 1 1/2 hours at a little café in Villadangos, talking with other pilgrims and munching Spanish tortilla (tortilla española), a sort of potato-egg omelet-soufflé thing, tasty and filling. At first we debated the wisdom of resting that extra half-hour, but decided as the evening went on that it was a good thing.

Our morning walk had been a mix of walking beside highways and through villages. The afternoon was almost all along the N120, a very busy 2-lane highway, and I must say that as it got warmer and warmer, the kilometers seemed to stretch out and out and out. In reality, we kept a pretty even pace of about 5 km/h (3 mph), stopping only twice, and crossing the old "Roman bridge of XIIIc" (!) over the rio Orbigo and into Hospital de Orbigo about 16:00, having done 34 km (21 mi) in just under 7 walking hours. We opted for the parish refugio over the municipal as being several hundred meters farther down the road! The accommodations were, shall we say, modest: several cinder block bunkhouses with 6x2 beds in each. It did, however, have laundry sinks and clotheslines, so we were able to catch up on washing, and the weather was glorious for just lying around and resting our feet.

We sat around people-watching in the town until the restaurants opened at 19:30, had a pasta dinner, and crawled into bed before dark. I dropped off almost immediately.

• There are a lot of people on the way, even this early in the season. A couple of people we have talked to who also walked it last year have commented that there appear to be many more pilgrims this year, and that the refugios seem more crowded everywhere. I can see that trend leading to a big mess in not many more years - although the arrangement works well (as it seems), it looks to be fragile enough to be completely overloaded pretty easily.
• The system of refugios does work well, and one of the real joys of the walk was coming to a place, finding the alberge (hostel), showing your credencial, and being granted refuge for a night, either for a small fee, or, more commonly, for whatever donation we thought was right to make. It is to me little short of shocking that such a system exists, and particularly that it exists where commercial interests could so easily obtain. Looking at the exponential growth in the number of pilgrims in the last 20 years, I do not see how the system in its present form, for me an essential part of the experience, can continue for more than a few years longer.

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