Beginning the Camino Primitivo

 Hello, everyone.

In the title of this post, I referred to the Camino Primitivo. This path has its name because it is the route of the very first pilgrimage to Santiago, by King Sancho the Chaste with his court. The remains of the saint had just been found, in the center of that Christian graveyard from the first century AD. Sancho on learning of this wish to pay his respects to St. James the Elder whose great love for Spain was well known and reciprocated.

There are a number of ways to get from Oviedo, the capital of Asturias, to Santiago. They could have gone along the coast, but that is not only easy for Norse raiders to attack and steal the pilgrims for the slave markets, it is also a lot of climbing up and down as many of the villages along that coast are in fjords. They could have gone the way that is now called the French route, but that was too close to the not-solid border with the Moorish kingdoms and the pilgrims would have been in danger from raiders from the south. Or they could do what they did: walk through the mountains and along ridges until it was time to turn south to Santiago. 

The 100 km town on this route is the city of Lugo, which goes back to the Romans.

We left Hostal Fidalgo in Oviedo in the early morning--early for mid October, that is!--it was still around 8:30 or so. But at that latitude the sun sleeps later as the month goes on.

We walked alongside of a river for part of the day.

We liked the many flowers at this house we passed.

Got a midafternoon glass of wine and a chance to sit in a chair at the Villa Palatina. This was also a lodging, but we were going on to Grado.

The front view of the albergue/pension in Grado was posted in the en-route discussion series. 

While we were there, we rested and socialized with some of the family who own it and discovered the amazing Spanish game show: El Cazador. This is a quiz show with various features, and we got to practice listening to the host speak *very, very fast* while asking questions. Fortunately the questions, in Spanish, were also subtitled at the bottom of the screen.

Since then, we have found some of the show episodes on the internet and we enjoy watching it.