Lugo's Roman Walls and the Long Push South

Fonsagrada to Lugo is 52km, which by this point in the Primitivo stopped surprising me. What did surprise me was how good the walking felt for most of it, cool mountain fog wrapping the trail even as my legs argued otherwise from the previous day's effort.

The one real problem was my left ankle, which had started giving me a constant pins-and-needles feeling right at the point where the top lacing knot sits. I made a mental note to fix it that night rather than mid-stage, since stopping to relace on a long day costs more time than it saves. The trail itself was mostly packed dirt hugging the roadside, undulating without ever really climbing, pretty in patches and fairly forgettable in between. That's most Caminos, honestly. Not every kilometer earns a photograph.

Walking the walls

Lugo redeemed the day entirely. The Camino runs you straight along the top of the old Roman wall that circles the city, a genuinely intact fortification that's been standing for something over two thousand years, and I spent a couple of unplanned kilometers just walking its full loop before dropping back down into the old town. There's something about a wall that old still doing its one job, holding a shape, that puts a 52km day in useful perspective. I noticed something else in Lugo too: a real pull toward the old buildings there, tall windows, high ceilings, a bit rundown but full of character, the kind of place I'd choose over anything polished. That night I fixed the ankle problem by skipping the offending lacing hole entirely, and it worked perfectly for the rest of the trip.

A garage, a kitten, and the nationality game

South of Lugo the Camino gets quieter and stranger in the best way. About eight kilometers into one stage, a converted garage held two vending machines set up specifically for pilgrims, one for snacks and one that made surprisingly decent automated coffee. A kitten worked the small crowd of resting hikers while everyone recovered for a few minutes before pushing on.

Somewhere in that stretch I also worked out an entire, deeply unscientific system for guessing a pilgrim's nationality by their gear. Middle-aged American and Canadian women, without exception, wear On Cloud shoes. Osprey packs split between the UK and Australia. Bright, boldly colored kit usually means Scandinavian. It's the kind of game that only makes sense after enough days on trail that your brain starts looking for patterns in absolutely anything.

The trail itself turned to dirt and gravel through stretches of eucalyptus forest loud with birds that sounded exactly like the cockatoos back home, colored leaves already littering the ground as an early sign that autumn wasn't far off. I passed a couple of villages so small they weren't even in the guidebook, one with a bar at the top of a hill and another with an albergue at the bottom, both of which would have been easy to walk straight past without noticing.

Closing thought

Some days on a long Camino are about the landmark (a wall built by Romans, in this case) and some are about the small, unplanned moments in between (a kitten, a coffee vending machine, a ridiculous game about hiking shoes). Lugo and the stretch south of it gave me both in the same 48 hours. The numbers for these two days are up alongside the rest of the route if you're curious, and if you're plotting your own route through Galicia, mycaminoguide.com is built for exactly that kind of planning.

Next in this series, the final push to Santiago: The Last Tunnel: Walking Into Santiago on the Primitivo. The Hospitales route and the 48km day that came before Lugo are in The Hospitales Route: A Full Moon and 48km to Fonsagrada. Or hit subscribe to catch it.