5 October 2023
Ponferrada to Borrenes - 20 kms
Today we started the third of our three planned chemin/camino routes - the Camino Invierno - and it has been a great first day.
The Camino Invierno is around 270 kms long, depending on which route variations are walked. A wee piece about the Invierno borrowed from another website: "The Camino Invierno is the traditional way to Santiago de Compostela for pilgrims arriving in the late Autumn and winter. The Os Ancares mountains are the great divide between Castille-Leon and Galicia which can often become snowbound during the winter months.
So the Camino Invierno, the "Winter Way" was used - leading travellers around the snow-capped peaks of Cebreiro. It meets up with the last few miles of the Via de la Plata Sanabres to arrive by way of the most attractive approach to the great city (Santiago de Compostela), where you pass through the last remaining ancient pilgrim gate."
The Camino Invierno, now walked year round, is a very quiet camino route compared with the number of pilgrims who walk on the Camino Francés from Ponferrada. Understandably, due to the low number of pilgrims walking it, the Invierno doesn't have the pilgrim infrastructure of the Francés.
It felt good to step out on the Camino again after two full days in Ponferrada, good to be back walking. We were very much going against the flow of pilgrims as we walked towards the start of the Invierno this morning - so many were setting off from Ponferrada to continue on the Camino Francés.
Today's route was a mix of paths and roadside walking and took us through several small villages - we found a café/bar open in two of them and enjoyed stopping for a drink as this was quite rare on our other two routes.
The countryside is very different to the Basque country, and the houses and farm buildings are quite different too. We walked past many small vineyards and blocks of fruit trees. We saw apples, pears, quinces, pomegranates, figs, plums of some sort, grapes, kiwifruit, as well as walnuts and chestnuts.
Chestnuts were important to the Romans and are still important to the economy of the area today with chestnuts, and flour produced from them, being exported.
As usual, the morning was cool and fresh and by midday it was hot, 31°C by the afternoon - fortunately much of the walk was in the shade.
It was lovely to see hills all around us - I'm guessing I may not feel the same when we hit some steep ascents and descents. What we had today was very manageable.
