Galícia – Lugo

I have seen many lovely places during my Camino when I walked through Asturias and Galícia. It would be too long to talk about all of them, however I would like to show you Lugo as this was probably the prettiest town I’ve come across during the 345km.

The walk to the town was (I’ll be honest) horrible. It has a huge industrial ring around it and to get there I had to walk over highways, through barren lands and abandoned industrial buildings, farms and houses, probably the most boring part of my whole Camino. It was all forgiven though, when I got the first glimpses of Lugo itself.

The town is famous as this is the only place in Europe (Wikipedia says that in the whole world) that is protected by completely intact, continuous circle of Roman walls. It has 71 towers and ten gates and in order to find the hostel we had to walk through one, the Porta de San Pedro.

The 10-15m high walls run around the inner city for over 2kms and they are so thick that it is possible to walk all the way around on them. As soon as I dropped my stuff in the hostel (and had lunch, a shower and a siesta) I was off to climb to the top. It feels strange to walk around something that was built in the 3^rd century. Just as I suspected, you get great views over Lugo.

As with every bigger city, Lugo also has an impressive cathedral that is a main stopping point of many pilgrims on the Camino.

In front of the town hall there’s a lovely big square full of trees and benches. The many terraces that line it tempt you to sit down for a café con leche. I let myself be tempted and wrote my Camino journal at one of these tables.

Some more photos of this lovely city. I find it fascinating that while every other Roman wall was knocked down to make place for the growth of the places, Lugo kept its walls and let the city spill over them. I thought that within the walls the place will be crammed and full of narrow streets but it is actually bright and spacious with many places to sit on a bench and enjoy the sunshine.

The post office.

Similar to Oviedo, the way out of the city for the pilgrims is indicated by scallops on the ground.

My Camino team.

We left Lugo early the next day, when the sun was just coming up over the city.

I’ll finish off with an interesting fact I found. The elder daughter of the current king of Spain, Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia, Infanta Elena, who is in succession for the Spanish throne the fourth in the line, since 1995 is the Duchess of Lugo.