Via Lemovicensis: Of Noise and Silence

19 June 2026 Thom Pilgrim Reports, Via Lemovicensis

Breakfast at the albergue began at 7:30. We were all out the door before 7 AM, and somehow I was last of all. I contrived to lose the rubber tips on my hiking poles yesterday. I will have to replace those at first opportunity, since there’s a lot of road walking between now and Santiago.

It was a cold, misty morning. Hordes of pilgrims, including a group of eight teenagers, passed by me as I was adjusting my pack. The Camino began as it ended yesterday, as a concrete and gravel path beside two-lane highway.

It soon struck out into the trees, more dirt and stones.

I passed the first open bar perhaps a kilometer later, but I had no desire to stop. I passed the noisy and enthusiastic teenagers, and I had no desire to try to pass them again. I should know better.

I arrived at the village of Castromaior at about 7:15. The village church was locked, but for one euro you could illuminate the interior and peek through the hole. I declined.

It was here that I briefly caught up with Katie.

Just past the village, we found ourselves on a broad, smooth gravel road. This brought us to an access road of perhaps a hundred meters to one of the most important archaeological sites on the whole of the Iberian Peninsula. For whatever reason, Katie declined to visit it and walked on.

This site was inhabited from approximately the fourth century BC to the first century A.D., and the excavators left a small slice of it open for people to view.

All around the Castro the mist filled the valleys, as though I were standing on an island in the middle of the sea.

I met Jane and Kayla up there, and we admired the site and took some photos. It filled me with wonder to think that for five centuries people lived on this site, which was for more than a thousand years after completely forgotten.

In the mist and the early morning light, this is an absolutely magical place.

Meanwhile, the teenagers were ahead of me again, and now they were intermittently blasting music from their devices. The Camino continued beside the highway for a bit, and I passed the teenagers again. This time I was determined to put some distance between us.

The Camino returned shortly to the woods. Jane and Kyla had fallen behind, and I was on my own again.

When I entered the little hamlet of O Hospital at about 7:50 AM, the Camino had briefly turned to uneven and solid rock. It was back to the normal sort of trail as I left.

Just a few minutes later, I came to the albergue/bar that was my original destination yesterday. Instead, it was now a breakfast opportunity. The place was absolutely packed, and at one point the breakfast line was out the door.

Jane and Kyla caught up with me here, having taken some mysterious shortcut, and we had breakfast together. They headed out before I did.

By the time I left, it was after 8:30. The Camino continued on a highway overpass, and then again was a gravel path next to a road. Somehow, the mist was even heavier now. It was like walking through soup.

The Camino climbed up out of the valley, woods on one side and meadows on the other, and it became easier to breathe. The Camino now seemed to be populated mostly by packs of teenagers, in groups ranging in size anywhere from five to more than ten.

Most of them appear to have started in Portomarín early this morning, so I suspect their ultimate destination today is Palas de Rei, where I hope to have lunch.

My relationship with Francine had always been complex; of course it was – we’re human beings, and human beings are complicated creatures. But by this time a year ago, our interactions have been simplified to prayer, reading, and holding hands. Often, we just sat quietly in each other’s presence. Perhaps these last things were the things that bound us most tightly together.

I passed through the hamlet of Vendas de Narón at about 8:45 AM. There was plenty of new construction here, almost as though they were building a village from scratch.

Here I caught up with Erik and Frederick, who were just coming out of a café. We walked together for a while.

At about 9:15, we passed the first farmed eucalyptus Grove. These trees are an absolute plague here. They’re not native, and the local wildlife and plant life just don’t know how to interact with them. You will hear very few birds in a eucalyptus forest in Spain.

Just after this, we passed through the little hamlets of A Previsa, Os Lameiros de Abaixo, and Ligonde, where we talked with an American church group running a little donativo snack place.

By 9:55, we were walking through the village of A Eirexe de Ligonde. The mist had still not lifted. If anything, it seemed to be getting thicker again.

The Camino continued along the road, often on a gravel or dirt sidewalk. The terrain – what little of it you could see – was plowed fields and meadows and stands of trees.

Around 10:20, we stopped at the famous ant bar in A Formiga for a soda break.

By 10:55, we were passing through Lestedo on an asphalt road. This place was actually large enough to have a church. And it was actually open.

The retablos and side altars are folk art. Perhaps they are not great pieces of art, but they are clearly lovingly done and lovingly maintained. There was a local here with a passport stamp.

I made a brief visit, while Frederick and Erik walked on. I prayed here, and I lit a candle for Francine.

After this, I rode walked through the hamlet of Os Valos, where the gravel sidewalk returned. There were groups of music–blasting teenagers just ahead of me in the forest.

I managed to pass them, and I had a conversation with a pilgrim I had just met, Nick from Colorado.

By the time I left Nick behind in A Brea, at about 11:20, the Camino path was beginning to stray from the road.

When I caught up with Frederick and Erik, the Camino had returned to the roadside, if briefly. They fell behind in the little hamlet of O Rosario as the Camino returned to the woods.

The Camino’s approach to the town of Palas de Rei is through a long recreational area. The path is basically a gravel avenue past parks and camps and recreational facilities – everything from tennis courts to soccer fields to forest preserve – for several kilometers.

I finally entered the town itself just after 11:45. Since I had planned to take my lunch here, the timing was more or less perfect. I was also hoping to find a gear shop here to replace my hiking pole tips.

First, I stopped in the church of Saint Tirso. This is a place that very specifically ministers to pilgrims. Unfortunately, the whole time I was in there there was a Spanish woman very loudly talking on a cell phone pacing around the church, which pretty much prevented me from concentrating on anything.

One of the lovely things that this church does is provide a little slips of scripture. There are big fish bowls for the various languages, and you pull out a piece of paper with a random scripture on it. I often find that this helps shape the last few days of the Camino.

This time mine was Hebrews 12:1, which they have translated,

Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

I got new pole tips at a shop right on the Camino in town, and after a bit of a false start, I even managed to find a place for lunch.

Though the food was absolutely fantastic, lunch, as usual, lasted way too long. It was almost 1:30 before I was put the door. And I had a long way to go yet today.

Fortunately, unlike previous days, the air was cool and there was even a pleasant breeze blowing. Given that there wasn’t much of a cloud cover, I was unsure how long this was going to last. I decided to put up my umbrella once I was out of the city.

The Camino set out across the town through various alleys and streets, some of them are quite charming and some of them that looked like they were lined with abandoned ruins.

I left the city on a sidewalk which presently became a gravel path beside a highway.

The Camino soon left the highway to go uphill through the surprisingly rural hamlet of O Carballal de Arriba. There was intermittent tree cover and shade here, so I didn’t bother with the umbrella yet.

The Camino looped through the woods before returning briefly to the side of the road. And then, it was back to the woods. I briefly left the woods at about 2 PM to pass under the highway.

Soon the Camino returned to the woods, until I walked through the hamlet of San Xiao. Like so much of this part of Galicia, the majority of the buildings are old and made of stone with terra-cotta roofs. Where wood has been used in the construction, it has inevitably weathered to the same colour as the stone.

Little hamlets soon started running one into the other, and it was a difficult to tell where one ended and the next began: San Xiao, A Taberna, A Pallota, A Graña, a string of bars and cafés and albergues.

And then it was back to the woods on a holloway road.

I was utterly alone now. I had only passed two pilgrims since Palas de Rei. It was the first walking in silence since I left Sarria I think.

I was again reminded of the deep silence of Francine’s final week. What a strange inversion to the more typical noise of these last few days on Camino.

I passed through the scattered hamlet of A Ponte Campaña in the hot sunshine before returning to the cool woods.

At some point I ran the numbers and realized how late I was likely to arrive in Melide. So I did something I rarely did on prior Caminos: I booked a bed. The last thing I needed was to be hunting down an albergue, exhausted, in the middle of the evening.

I arrived in the hamlet of Casanova just after 2:30. I stopped in a bar for about ten minutes to drink a soda and refill my water bottles before continuing. After this, it was roadwalking on asphalt, but at least it was under the cover of the trees.

Soon enough I was on gravel again, and then dirt through the trees.

Within half an hour, the gaps in the woods started to get larger, and I was occasionally walking past fields of corn or wheat.

At about 3:15 or so, I started passing a scattered series of suburban homes on my left. Mostly, though, it was still woodland.

Soon, however, I started seeing buildings intermittently on both sides of the road. I met my third pilgrim since leaving town, and he was heading the opposite direction. And then passed an absurd automobile junkyard, with cars up on elevated platforms two and three stories high.

This was part of the village of O Coto. Shortly after this, Camino returned to alternating field and forest, and I started seeing a pair of pilgrims ahead of me in the distance.

I passed them in the village of O Laboreiro at about 3:35. From there, I crossed over a stream on an arched stone bridge into the farming hamlet of Desecabo.

It was here that I finally decided to put up the umbrella. Shade trees were now few and far between, and I was seeing more and more buildings just beyond the fields and scrub to either side of the gravel road. Somewhere off to my right I could hear the sounds of a highway.

I was beginning the long approach to the city of Melide.

The Camino briefly kissed the highway before moving away from it past suburban farmsteads with grazing sheep and neatly fenced yards growing corn.

I came to an industrial park at about 3:55 sitting incongruously among the trees and scrub. It went on and on, and the scrub gradually became rows of trees and manicured lawns. The highway was now about twenty meters to my right.

There was probably just over a kilometer of this before the Camino returned to the scrub. The highway was closer, now, and now perhaps 3 km ahead of me I could see the city through the trees.

Whenever I could see the highway, there would be outlets and big box stores on the other side. On the gravel road the Camino followed, there were now sometimes warehouses secured behind chain-link fences amongst the trees and scrub.

And then, suddenly and gloriously, the Camino returned to the forest, and the gravel road became dirt.

At about 4:20, the forest road rather suddenly dumped me out onto a stone road next to a glorious arched stone bridge. Beyond this was the city.

This restored medieval bridge crosses the Río Fuerlos into the village (suburb? neighborhood?) of Fuerlos. The little church here is quite special to me, though I’ve only once seen the door open, and that was a decade ago.

Neither was it open now.

Much of this area looks newly restored, though just a little further down the Camino there are many other houses for sale and falling into ruin.

Except for a few random small plots of farmland, the Camino was for all practical purposes in the city. A short stretch of gravel road passed through a rural suburban neighbourhood before suddenly be coming an asphalt avenue through high-density housing.

By 4:35, I was walking the sidewalks of the city of Melide. Since this is the place where the Camino Primitivo joins the Camino Francés, I have walked into this city six times now.

As the Camino moved through the various neighborhoods, I decided that my first order of business should probably be to find my albergue.

As the streets narrowed, I took down my umbrella. As I walked down the main avenue, I passed the famous Pulperia Ezequiel, as well as numerous other bars and cafés and Camino kitsch shops.

I left the avenue and headed into the older, quieter section of town with its narrow, winding medieval streets. By 5 PM, I was checked into my albergue.

After a bit of a rest and the usual pilgrim chores, I set out to visit local churches.

First I went to visit the chapel of San Antón. It’s a small place with an impressive retablo of our Lady of Guadalupe. There’s also a statue – really a diorama – of Saint James and the apparition/ bi-location of Our Lady of the Pillar.

Next, I tried to visit the main church of the town, San Pedro de Melide. The entire place was covered in scaffolding, apparently undergoing a government-backed restoration. The work seems massive. I wonder where the townspeople gather for Mass?

I returned to the chapel to pray Vespers and to light a candle for Francine.

Dinner was alone for the first time in I don’t know how long. It was a weirdly refreshing change.

Date: 19 June 2026