The country gave me plenty to look at and a great deal to walk through.

The first morning out of Gonzar the sky came down low and grey, a heavy lid over everything, and from the high ground the whole of Galicia lay below in shadow: dark plantations, a patchwork of fields and small roofs, a far ridge going blue with haze, and in the near foreground the dry grass gone to seed, pale and rustling, the only lit thing in the picture. Then the road. Just a road, a strip of tarmac running straight between a spruce and a clipped hedge, with a woman walking the verge ahead of me and two more figures further on, and nothing happening at all. That is the true face of a Camino morning, and nobody photographs it, and I did.

The stones counted for us. Santiago de Compostela, 78.1 km, cut into granite with the yellow arrow and the shell beneath it. And then, a little further on, a pilgrim carved into a slab beside the path, hat with a shell on the brim, cloak, staff, a book held against his chest. His face has been weathered nearly smooth and is still perfectly legible. Someone had set a real scallop shell on the ledge at his feet, and someone else had brushed a stroke of yellow paint on the stone beside him, and I loved that both of those were true at once: the old devotion and the new one, four hundred years apart, doing the same work.

Breakfast in Gonzar this morning was, surprisingly, a miss. I love Spanish food without reservation, and that morning the eggs came up tasting off and I set them aside, drank my coffee, and walked out into the day owing it nothing. Then the road did what the road does. A few kilometers on there was a small bar under a wisteria, two coffees, a plate of Ulloa cheese with quince beside it. The gift was in the order of things: what I had counted on fell away, and what I had not thought to ask for was waiting a little further on.

The bar had a gravel yard with white umbrellas and plenty of comfortable chairs, and it was near full. A woman sat with her legs stretched straight out in front of her, boots off and set aside, feet in orange socks resting on her pack, a glass of iced tea and a lemon tin on the marble table, her poles leaning against the wall. She was not talking to anyone. She was simply sitting in the deep, uncomplicated satisfaction of having stopped. Two men shared a bench with their packs slumped at their knees. Others ate quietly under the umbrellas, and a man in red went past behind them without breaking stride, poles swinging, already gone. In the yard a bare tree had been hung all over with ribbons and small bright things, left there by people we will never meet. Nobody hurried anybody. The whole place had the feel of a room where everyone has agreed, without saying so, that the walking will still be there in twenty minutes.

After the welcome stop, the path climbed away between dry stone walls, a sunken lane with ferns and ivy spilling over the sides and the bedrock breaking through the middle of the track like a step nobody built.

Beyond it the eucalyptus began. Not the shaggy oak woods we had been given until now, but eucalyptus: mature trees standing bare and straight along the ridge with their long sickle leaves high above, and beneath them a thicket of young growth carrying the round blue-grey juvenile leaf, so different you would swear they were another species. Three generations of one crop, and all of it silver, and all of it planted. I had thought of eucalyptus as an exotic thing. In Galicia it is an industry.

And then the sky broke, the way it does here, all at once and without apology. A stone farmstead at a bend in the road with new terracotta on one roof and old slate on the other and red geraniums against the granite. A wall of hydrangea, that deep saturated blue that only acid soil gives, spilling over a low wall in front of a bar with a hand-lettered sign that simply said OPEN. A single magnolia bloom, cupped and cream-white and not yet fully open, held up among leaves with copper undersides against a blue that had not existed an hour earlier. The road running on, empty and sunlit, with a tree’s shadow laid across it. Nothing was happening. Everything was.

In Palas de Rei they had spelled the town’s name out in cut stone letters in the pavement and laid the coat of arms in colored gravel, with a granite scallop set in the middle of it, and it was a little ridiculous and I was completely charmed. And we sat and ate: thick wedges of tomato, translucent rings of onion, a gloss of balsamic. Then the pulpo on its wooden plate, coins of octopus under olive oil and a red dust of pimentón and coarse salt, which is the only way it is served here and the only way it should be.

Our remaining trek today was only two more miles. John came up the lane with his poles slung across his shoulders like a yoke, grinning, delighted about being out and about and moving.

We came into San Xulián do Camino at half past three, a hamlet of a few stone houses and a lane, and La Pallota de San Cristóbal waiting at the end of it. The pack came off. The back that had been so tight a week ago had nothing to say at all. There was wine that evening, and caldo gallego, and a tortilla, and none of it was remarkable, and all of it was exactly enough. Later there was a cortado in gold light with a small blue plaque on the granite behind John reading BUEN CAMINO, and that was the day.

I have spent most of my life arranging things. It is what I am good at, and it is most of what I am paid for. Out here, day after day, the arrangement keeps coming apart in my hands and the day keeps turning out better than the one I had planned. Twenty kilometers of Galicia, a cheese I had not heard of, a woman with her boots off in a gravel yard, unapologetic for stopping, a plate of tomatoes in Palas de Rei so ripe they needed nothing but oil and salt. And I did nothing to earn any of it except keep going.

El peregrino agradece. Tomorrow, Melide.

The country path before Portomarín ran between low dry-stone walls, the stones furred with moss, brambles spilling over the top with their last pale flowers. Beyond the walls the land fell away in green fields and rose again to wooded ridges, and on the far line a row of wind turbines turned. The sky held grey most of the morning, the Galician default, and the light under it was soft and even.

Then the track went into the trees, oak and chestnut and tall pine, the branches closing overhead until the path turned cool and dim. Ivy climbed the old trunks, some of them swollen and burled with age. The walls ran on beside us the whole way, and for long stretches there was nothing to hear but gravel underfoot and, somewhere out of sight, cattle.

The villages had hórreos, the raised granaries of Galicia. Each is a long narrow box of stone or timber set up on legs, the walls slotted for air, the legs capped with flat stones a rat cannot climb over. A small cross tops one gable and a stone finial the other. They were built to keep grain and maize (corn) dry and off the ground, and most of them still stood in the yards and along the walls, in use or close to it.

Portomarín came after a long bridge. The river there is not really a river. It is the Belesar reservoir, wide and flat and still, and the bridge runs straight across it. Under the water is the old town.They flooded it in the early sixties for the dam.

Before the water rose they took the church apart. Every stone was numbered and carried up the hill and set back in its place, so the fortress-church of San Nicolás stands now in a new location up a hill. When the reservoir drops in a dry summer, the old streets surface, and the arch of the medieval bridge.

We stopped in the town for lunch. Set into the wall of St Nicholas church across from the table were stones with numbers painted on them, the system that moved the church. The whole old town was apparently rebuilt this way, piece by labeled piece. The numbers were still legible, a century and a half of stone turned into a packing list and then put back together.

We climbed out toward Gonzar after, the markers still counting down, the town behind us standing dry above the one it used to be.

A little before Gonzar we met a cat with her kittens at the edge of the path. Four or five of them, grey and small, just old enough to be out in the world. They spilled onto the gravel and back into the long grass, climbing the cut bank, falling off it, finding their feet again. One scrambled up the red earth after something only it could see and slid down and tried once more.

The mother sat a short way off in the green, white-chested, watching. She did not move when they stumbled. She let them climb and fall and right themselves, and only kept her eyes on them, close enough and far enough at once. When they had finished she was still there. We watched a while and then walked on.

Hands cast in iron, each holding a ball to strike the wood. A bearded face with curling metal hair. One shaped like a fish. Every old door wore something, a small made thing left for whoever came to knock. We climbed the Rúa Maior past them, the street narrow and in shadow, balconies above hung with flowers and one with a banner of the Santiago cross in purple and gold.

Sarria is where the Camino fills. To be given the Compostela in Santiago a pilgrim has to walk at least the last hundred kilometers, and Sarria is the nearest town past that line, so it is where most of the people walking the shortest way begin. The stone that marks the hundred kilometers comes a little further on. The crowd arrives before the marker does.

In a small square the town keeps a granite statue of a king, Alfonso the Ninth. Alfonso granted the royal charter to Villanova de Sarria and repopulated it. In 1230, late in his life, he set out on pilgrimage to the tomb of the Apostle at Santiago. He fell ill and died at Sarria before reaching the city. He was carried the rest of the way and buried in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, so in death he completed the journey that illness cut short. His tomb is in the cathedral still. The road he repopulated the town to serve was the road that took him.

One tower stood above the houses, round and battlemented, the last of four. The others were pulled down centuries ago in the revolts against the lords. A eucalyptus had grown up beside it, bark peeling, taller now than the wall.

Lower down, the market was open. Racks of clothes along the road, vans with their backs thrown wide, a few people looking at clothing displayed on the hangers or having an afternoon meal.

Outside of the market, a low wall held a plaque, and I stopped to read it. Aquí estiveron, it began, in Galician. Here stood. Below it ran a list of things once there and no longer: a hermitage, a market, a wayside cross, an old fair. The wall recorded that they had been there, on this spot,and that they were there no longer, keeping a record of its own subtractions. The fair had stood here because the road brought buyers to it. Then for a few long centuries the road carried fewer of them, and the fair became a line on a wall. The town has made its living off the ones passing through it for eight hundred years. Now the people are back and so is the market.

The way out of Sarria went down to a bridge. We crossed it in the late morning, the river low beneath us, a field unfolding just past the bridge. For all the walking still ahead, this was the crossing. On the far side of the bridge began the last hundred kilometers, and we were on them.

Beyond the bridge the country opened, the path running white through dry grass, the hills green and gold out to the mountains.

Then the track dropped into trees, and the light went green and close. An old chestnut stood by the path, its trunk split and knotted and still in leaf. Someone had set a stone at its foot, two words painted on it. Buen Camino.

We reached Casa Morgade in the late afternoon. Near a doorway a black cat stood on the slate and told us what it thought, then let us pass. And I was reminded of the Galician saying ,“I don’t believe in witches, but that they exist, they do.” This cat was definitely someone’s familiar.

Triacastela waited at the bottom in the valley. Three castles gave the place its name and not one of them survived. You arrive expecting walls and find a small Galician town, a church, a stamp for the credencial. It earned its place in history of the Way all the same. For centuries the pilgrims who stopped here took on a piece of limestone and carried it the long miles to the kilns at Castañeda, where it was burned to lime for the slow raising of the cathedral at Santiago. That way the medieval pilgrims participated in the construction of the cathedral.

Beyond the town the way divides. One arm climbs hard over San Xil and arrives sooner. The other bends south and is longer, leading down to Samos and its monastery, and that was the one we wanted.

It was the kinder road and the more beautiful. It drops into the river valley and keeps low, under old oak and chestnut, the track worn dark and packed smooth, edged here and there with set stone. The light came down in pieces through the leaves and moved when they moved. We went a long way without meeting anyone. The hamlets we passed were mostly shut, an empty house standing beside a lived-in one, and at one of them a garden had carried on without much help from anyone, the lavender gone violet and full, roses leaning over it into the blue.

Then the trees gave way and Samos was in front of us all at once, far too large for the few roofs gathered at its feet. San Xulián de Samos is among the oldest monasteries in the western world, founded in the sixth century and rebuilt many times since, the last time after a fire in 1951. The church front is high Baroque, ranked columns and saints in their niches around a great round eye of a window, bells above. Behind it lie some of the largest cloisters in Spain. The Benedictines came to it later and have held it ever since, and a handful of them live in it still.

What the place has done longest is take people in. When King Fruela I was assassinated, his widow and their young son came here for refuge, and the story goes that the boy was raised within these walls. He grew up to be Alfonso II, called the Chaste. In his reign, early in the ninth century, a hermit was said to have found the tomb of the apostle James in a field to the west. Alfonso made the journey from Oviedo to see it, the first pilgrim the road remembers, and ordered a church raised over the grave.

Why did he do so? Perhaps partly in faith and partly because he was a careful king. An apostle’s tomb discovered on his own soil was a rare gift to a small Christian kingdom pressed against Al-Andalus, a reason for the road west to fill and for Europe to come down it. What he built over the grave was modest, and the great cathedral rose long after him under other kings. But the road was made, and it filled, century upon century, the pilgrims and settlers who came the same who in time secured the kingdom, until the way west was among the most walked in the world.

And the monastery that had sheltered the orphaned boy went on sheltering the walkers he set in motion, a day west of Sarria with its door open, as it had opened for him. It takes pilgrims in to this day.

We stopped past La Faba, once the climb had crested. We sat at the edge of the road and made a small breakfast out of what we had with us, two David bars carried from home and water with the electrolyte tablets we had picked up at a pharmacy here, the kind that are good in the heat. Below us the valley had opened, green folding into green, the little towns set down in it, poppies along the verges and a cool wet wind that kept threatening rain and then thinking better of it.

O Cebreiro sat at the top. I had read that it was old. I was not prepared for how old it felt. The round stone houses with the thatched roofs, the pallozas, are pre-Roman, and between the mist and the green and the smell of woodsmoke the whole place felt less like a village than like a place time forgot to modernize. The oldest and strangest and most beautiful corner of the whole route, and we had walked straight up into it. A low stone church, dark and plain. Stone houses crowding around it. Packs leaning against the walls.

We stopped to eat at Venta Celta. Inside it was all dark beams and stone, a carved owl set into the wall, bundles of dried herbs hanging from the rafters. I tried the cheese the place is known for, the queixo do Cebreiro, soft and white, served with honey. It was like full-fat cottage cheese and then better than that. I could have gone for a second plate. We had a local empanada too, a meat pie we shared to refuel the muscles, which felt like the right first taste of Galicia.

Somewhere on the climb we had crossed the line into Galicia. There is a marker for it, a stone with the region’s arms, but the change had already reached us without it. The hills turned rounder and greener, the mist came down lower, and a man in a black beret and a white shirt stood at the side of the trail playing the gaita, the sound winding out through the trees. Perfectly celtic. It could have been Galicia or some wetter, older country to the north.

They say there are witches up here. Meigas. The Galicians have a line they like, half a joke and half not. Eu non creo nas meigas, mais habelas, hainas. I don’t believe in witches, but that they exist, they do. In that weather, on that mountain, with the owl watching from the wall, I was not in a hurry to tell them otherwise.

After O Cebreiro the walking turned kind. The high ground rolled gently for a long stretch, past Liñares, past the pilgrim cast in bronze at Alto San Roque, leaning into a wind that today was real. The sky had gone the color of slate. We passed through Hospital da Condesa and Padornelo, small places strung along the ridge, good markers to count yourself along by.

From Padornelo there was one more sharp pull up to Alto do Poio, the high point of the whole section at 1,330 meters, though after the morning it asked very little of us. After that the path tipped downhill and let us coast the rest of the way to Fonfría. The rain found us before the end, the way it had been promising all day. We walked the last of it wet.

The way out of Villafranca followed the Valcarce river upstream, and we walked it straight through, the way we have come to like best. No stops and no detours, just the path unspooling along the water while the motorway arched somewhere overhead on its tall legs and we stayed down below with the stone hamlets and the green. After yesterday’s heat, the shade felt wonderful.

What we will remember about today is not the kilometers. It was the people. We fell into step with one after another, in the loose and easy way the Camino arranges these things. Linda. Mark. Clara. Pat. Josh. Names traded on an incline, a story told for the length of a shared stretch of path and then folded away when the pace pulled us apart. So many of them were weeks into their walking, not days. People who had set out from places far behind us and were giving a whole season to the road.

John and I kept catching each other’s eye after these conversations. There was something aspirational in them, in the plain permission these walkers had given themselves to go slowly and go far. We have talked about it before. Today we talked about it again.

We reached Las Herrerías by the early afternoon, where the village lies strung along the river at the very foot of the climb into Galicia. We stayed at Casa do Ferreiro, which means the blacksmith’s house, with its rooms in a wing called La Fragua, the forge. Las Herrerías is named for its old ironworks, and here we were, resting for the night in the forge, in the village of the forges, at the bottom of the mountain.

Lunch was at Casa Polín, a sidewalk table looking out over the street, a serving of lentil soup we split between us, chicken, and a glass of the local white. A Godello grown just over the hills in the country we climb into tomorrow.

Two Dutch ladies we’d met in El Acebo joined us at the table, and over the meal they charmingly undid our plan for tomorrow. Push past O Cebreiro, they said, carry on to Fonfría, it’s worth the extra hours for a special albergue, A Reboleira, where they’d stayed on past Caminos. It turned out to be sold out, but the idea had already taken, and we’d push on to Fonfría regardless. We came to lunch with one itinerary and left with another. So much of this road is decided like that, by someone a little further along who tells you the next good thing.

Later, we walked down to the river. It ran cold and clear over a rocky bed, shaded by the trees, and we sat by it for a while and let the day’s heat go. It took me back to the river I waded into as a child, in the same cold shock and the same ease after.

Tomorrow the valley ends and the mountain begins. Tonight we rest at the bottom of it, already a little changed by the people who walked through our day.

Just past the square we fell into step with Johnny and Maia, who had come all the way from Florida to walk the Camino. We traded the usual things, where you started, what made us choose the Way, about slowing the world down, and then the easier things, and for a while there were four of us on the road instead of two. That is the small grace the Camino keeps handing you without being asked. You meet someone along the way and start chatting, walk an hour together, and part again, and it costs nothing and stays with you anyway.

The villages came one after another through the flat green country of the Bierzo: Columbrianos, then Camponaraya, with Cacabelos further on, and Villafranca waiting at the end.

At Camponaraya we stopped for an orange juice, and the woman behind the bar set down a small wedge of tortilla beside it, unasked. A little favor, she said, for the pilgrims. The Spanish tortilla is the plainest sort of marvel, just eggs and potato, sometimes a little onion, cooked slowly in good oil until it sets into a thick gold round and then cut into wedges. But the giving of it is its own old custom. All along this road the bars and the hosts press small free things on the people walking it, a coffee, a piece of fruit, a slice of something warm, la casa invita. It is the living thread of the hospitality that built the Camino in the first place, the medieval hospices and the open doors, still running quietly under the modern one. You arrive a stranger and someone feeds you for no reason at all.

In the same village we stepped into the parish church, cool and dim after the glare. The main altarpiece was high baroque and gold from floor to vault, eighteenth century, with carved saints pressed into service as columns, holding the whole shining weight on their shoulders. In a side chapel, in 1700s someone painted the Last Supper across the inside of a small dome, the apostles curving away around the table and cherubs tumbling through the corners below.A stork’s nest sat on the roof outside, of course. There is always a stork.

We bought cherries in Cacabelos and ate them on the way, dark and warm from the sun, the kind you do not bother to save. Lunch was at Casa Gato in Cacabelos, and I would send anyone there. There is no menu, you get whatever  the kitchen chose to prepare today. You get a soup, an entree, and a dessert. We began with a fish soup with green peas, then a stew of shrimp and mussels and white beans, then turkey braised soft with vegetables in a mushroom cream, and a flan to finish. The kitchen also brought a plate of spiced sausage with chickpeas and cabbage, and a cinnamon rice pudding beside the flan. It was way too much food to finish,  and we left very happy, which the owner appeared to regard as the only acceptable result.

Villafranca del Bierzo finally appeared below, where two rivers meet, the Burbia and the Valcarce, at the foot of the mountains that climb into Galicia. The town grew from a settlement of francos, the French settlers who came for the Camino and left it their name, the town of the Franks. It was a great medieval waystation, its noble houses lining the Calle del Agua, the last real town before the hard climb into Galicia. At the church of Santiago, right where you enter, there is a door called the Puerta del Perdón. The story goes that a pilgrim too ill or too spent to walk the final stretch to Santiago could pass through it and be counted as having finished, as if they had reached the city itself. I thought about that, coming in late and barely able to finish the fifteen miles in the heat. I liked that the road had made a place for the ones who could not go the whole way.

We got in well after the others. I am writing this from the Plaza Mayor, at El Casino, a glass of Bierzo white at my elbow and the light going soft over the square. Tomorrow we climb toward Las Herrerías, and the mountains after that.

We already knew that kind of ground. The drop from Manjarín the day before had been sharp and loose and rocky, a descent you feel in your knees and your concentration, and we were in no hurry to repeat it in worse form. So John and I chose a third way. We took a detour by a lush, secluded path with a romantic and ominous name, the Puentes de Malpaso, the Bridges of Bad Crossing.

I will be honest about why. On another hundred-degree day, the selling point was shade and less sharp, loose rock underfoot. The route revealed that it was so much more.

The way began through a small village Riego de Ambrós. After about thirty minutes of gentler descent, stone houses with wooden balconies came into view, with geraniums everywhere, red and pink spilling from pots along sills and steps, whole walls of them against the grey stone. Somebody here loves this place and tends to it daily, and you could feel it. Other houses stand abandoned and waiting for someone to adopt and love them again. We noticed this about several small villages, the new and restored coexisting with the modern and with the ancient and decrepit, and somehow in that there is charm. We walked through slowly, the morning still cool, the heat not yet down from the canopy, and then turned onto a tiny overgrown path that tipped us towards a toward the river and the real descent began.

It was not always an easy way down. The path narrowed and dropped sharply, and there were stretches with little to gain purchase on, the kind of footing where you have to stop and think carefully about how to solve the next few feet. Luckily John has the instincts and the balance of a cat, and I have always loved to climb things. So we picked our way down through the green and the quiet, and the heat stayed up in the canopy where it belonged.

And then, hidden in the woods and half-swallowed by vegetation, the bridges. Two of them, old stone arches over the water, the kind of thing you do not expect to find at the bottom of a forgotten ravine. We had stumbled onto something. They are said to be Roman, a crossing on the old road that once carried gold out of these mountains, though no one is fully certain of their age. There is a darker thread braided in too: in the years after the civil war this valley sheltered the maquis, the fighters who would not surrender, and one of the most storied of them is said to have been betrayed and killed somewhere among these stones. Romans and rebels, gold and resistance, all of it resting quietly under the trees where we found it by accident.

We stayed. We jumped from rock to rock, we took pictures of the small waterfalls, we played under the arches like the discovery was ours alone, which in a small way it was. We left only because we were getting hungry.

Down in Molinaseca we came to another grand Roman bridge, and this one stood in full view, a long sweep of pale stone arches striding across the Meruelo, clean and clear of the vegetation that had swallowed the two bridges we crossed earlier today. People have crossed it for centuries. The road we were walking on today was a Roman road, and these bridges were its bones, some famous and sunlit, some lost in a ravine, all of them still here, still carrying us west.

Lunch was the day’s other gift. We stopped at Las Meigas de Josema, a lovely place tucked into the town of Molinaseca, the kind of meal that earns its hour, and let it be long. There was a pineapple carpaccio with jamón that was new and exciting, bright and unexpected.

After Molinaseca, we came into the heat of the afternoon on the road to Campo, itself an old Roman village, and then to Ponferrada, where the Templar castle rises at the edge of the old town, its gates shut for the Monday. We did not need them open. We had already spent the day with older stones than these, the ones nobody guards, the ones you only find if you take the bad crossing on purpose.

Leaving El Acebo

Today is the mountain, the gentle climb to the Cruz de Ferro and the steep way down after, and the mountain does not reward hurry. It rewards patience and water and the willingness to be very slow for a while.

The heath was in full bloom. Heather spilling purple down the rocks, broom lit yellow along the track, and here and there a foxglove standing tall, pink and improbable, leaning out of the green like a question mark. The land up here is doing something tender and ferocious at once, all this softness growing straight out of the stone.

On the way up, small towers of balanced rock left by pilgrims who climbed here before us. Somewhere above us is Cruz de Ferro, the ultimate place where pilgrims set down the stone they have carried from home, and mine is in my pocket.

The valley opened behind us, hill folding back into hill into a blue distance, wind turbines turning slow on the far ridgelines like something patient keeping time.

By the time we reached Foncebadón the sun had found us. We leaned our packs against the stone wall of a little café with a scallop shell glowing on its sign, and sat down in the shade with coffee and some breakfast, and let the morning catch up to us.

The coffee did its work, and we shouldered the packs again. Just past the last houses of Foncebadon a low stone marker counted down the kilometers to Santiago, two hundred and thirty-six and change, with a little heap of pebbles balanced on top. Getting closer.

And then the cross.

You see it before you reach it, a tall weathered pole rising off a hill of stones, the small iron cross at the very top catching the light. Cruz de Ferro. The highest point of the whole Camino Frances, and the place where, for centuries, pilgrims have climbed the mound to lay down a stone carried from home.

We had picked ours hiking at the Baxter preserve back home and I had carried it in my pocket since. I took it out at the base of the mound and held it for a while. The pile is enormous up close, thousands upon thousands of stones, and almost none of them are only stones. There are names in marker. Dates. Photographs gone soft from the weather. Messages in scripts I could not read, Korean and others. A gold stone with a black spiral painted on it. A scallop shell. A pinecone someone decided belonged there too. Every one set down by a person who climbed up carrying something and chose to climb back down without it.

A little farther on we reached Manjarin, which is barely a place at all, a huddle of tin and tarp kept alive by a man who calls himself “Oso”, Bear, and tends to a shrine dedicated to Tomás Martínez de Paz. Tomás of Manjarin ran a pilgrim refuge here for many years, served coffee to the passing pilgrims, and styled himself the last of the Templars, keeping up the ethos. Tomás passed away this past January, a historic figure for the Camino, and now Bear is in the same spot, keeping up the tradition, serving coffee and refreshments. Flags everywhere, faded crosses, a sword laid across an image of the Virgin, a thermos of coffee, a stamp for the pilgrim’s passport. I loved the strangeness of it, this small kingdom of belief held together with rope and conviction at the top of a mountain.

Then the land opened all the way out. Ridge after ridge rolling toward the haze, the slow white turbines turning on the far peaks, the valley we would spend the afternoon descending into laid green and enormous below. I had slowed to the pace of nearly one mile an hour, grateful for the trekking poles and finding my way gingerly between jagged rocks and a steep descent. The way down was much more challenging than the way up and then there is the heatwave, 100 degrees this afternoon. Slightly more than 10 miles today, nearly 7 hours.

Tonight we stayed in Albergue La Casa del Peregrino in El Acebo, and having a communal dinner with other walkers was definitely the highlight of the day. On to Ponferrada tomorrow.

Leaving Rabanal

First glimpse of Foncebadon

The heather on the hill

Approaching Cruz de Ferro

Oso (Bear) tending the refugio (shelter) of Tomás de Majarin

That is where we came from

The land here in high summer is the color of straw, bleached pale, the open fields gone to seed and rustling. You might think such a country would feel spent. It is the opposite. The path runs green through the gold, hedged with shrubs and shaded by trees, and everywhere there are flowers, more of them than a dry June has any right to hold. Poppies first, a scatter of red through grass gone gold and silver in the sun. Then wildflowers in white and yellow crowding the verges, and butterflies among them, also white and yellow, traveling beside us in small flocks as if to keep us company before lifting off on errands of their own.

Somewhere before Murias, along the open road, someone long ago carved a scallop shell into a boulder, its rays softened now under lichen, still pointing the way. Then Murias de Rechivaldo, a quiet stone village of a few albergues, with one of those tiled fountains that every town here keeps for pilgrims, the water cool and safe to drink and never more welcome than at midday in this heat. Santa Catalina de Somoza came next, where a stork stood watch in her great untidy nest atop the church tower, unbothered by us or by anything at all. We reached it around noon, and on a hot Saturday at the start of the siesta there was little to be had, a pizza, some fruit, and a few baked things, so we made do with water and a banana, and walked on.

It was in El Ganso that we found our lunch, an albergue serving a plain green salad with fried eggs and lomo, simply done and exactly right. And there were doors along the way I will not forget: one painted a deep blue against the warm stone, another green with red roses spilling over the top as though the house could not hold its own happiness.

It was hot, the kind of heat that turns a patch of oak shade into a small mercy and makes you grateful for every tree that leans over the path. And the path did climb, gentle and steady, out of the gold and up into the woods, oak first and then pine, the air warm with honey and spice. In a green field a russet calf lifted his head to consider us, decided we were not worth the trouble, and went back to its grass.

All along the way, the signs. The yellow arrow, the shell, and here the red Templar crosses painted on white pillars, because this was their road once, the climb they guarded toward the mountains. At a stone cross in the shade of chestnut trees, pilgrims had left their stones, small offerings set down by people we will never meet, all of us following the same shell in the same direction.

We came into Rabanal del Camino in the late afternoon, tired in the good way, the way that feels earned. Not emptied by the day but filled by it. This, I think, is what the Camino teaches, gently and without lecturing: slow down enough, and the bleached and quiet world turns out to be full of small bright things, every one of them quietly insisting that you look.

— Robert Louis Stevenson