Pontevedra to the Nunnery

 

On Tuesday, we walked from Vigo to the town of Pontevedra—a long walk on a lot of asphalt again, yet somehow our feet seem to be mostly recovering overnight. We walked again under cloud cover that kept us cool, with clearing in the evening and a gorgeous day on Wednesday, which we spent poking around the old town of Pontevedra.

Pontevedra has been an important stop on the Portuguese Camino for centuries, and in honor of that, it has a church—the Igrexia de Virxen Peregrina—the church of the virgin peregrina (?) with a floor plan in the shape of a scallop shell (not really evident by the photo of the interior below.)

Pontevedra had many 15th and 16th century churches, a cathedral, a massive convent and a very nice museum where I learned a bit about 19th and early 20th century Spanish art—I basically know nothing about art of any kind. Pontevedra is also notable for being the port city that the Santa Maria was built in. 

But the most interesting was just wandering the very narrow streets of the old town and poking around in the market.

Today we walked for the first time in the rain. A steady, light rain as we headed up, up into the mixed eucalyptus and oak forest and then into dense fog, just in time for our arrival at the viewpoint—the Atlantic Ocean was nowhere to be seen!

We also somehow missed the petroglyphs in the fog, but we learned one very interesting thing on our way through one of the little towns in the hills.

This is called a calvarie, and almost all towns have these little squares with a crucifix and also, as this one has, a public fountain. A calvarie has both a sacred, symbolic role and also a protective function. They tended to be placed at crossroads, and it is believed their initial purpose was to Christianize places of pagan worship. In fact, popular culture links the calvarie with magic spaces where witches and souls in purgatory held meetings. 

Our long, hilly walk in the rain wasn’t nearly as difficult as we imagined and we arrived in Armenteira with no problem. Our lodging tonight is in an actual working convent, of the Cistercian Order (a branch of the Benedictines.) We were shown to our modest but very comfortable rooms in what had been the abbot’s living quarters (when it was a monastery, starting in the 12th century.) 

The sisters hold a “blessing for the peregrinos” every evening at 7, and we were among about 30 pilgrims on the Camino who came to the chapel from their neighboring places of lodging for the blessing. It was quite nice, although pretty much all in Spanish, with a lot of singing by the nuns and then a short story and then the blessing for our journey ahead. It was all very cool, and we met up with several people we had talked with on the trail today—from Italy, Germany and Montreal.

We have only 3 more days of walking until we arrive in Santiago de Compostela. It seems hard to believe that we are coming to the end of this pilgrimage.