Day 4 Vila Franca de Xira - Azambuja

Sunday, April 7, 2024

It is nice when a hostel has a continental breakfast available for its guests, whether free or for a nominal fee; it doesn’t matter. It is best to start the day with food in your belly. When you leave to walk, it could be a while before another opportunity to eat arises. It can be hard to find something open in the early morning or during siesta time in the afternoon. Many businesses are closed on Sunday. Businesses that are open on Sunday usually open late morning or early afternoon. In October 2021, on my first Camino, in the town of Mansilla de Mulas, while roaming around looking for a restaurant for dinner, we learned from a local that all the restaurants are closed on Wednesdays. We had to buy food from a mercado and bring it back to the albergue. I now try to keep a couple of apples or other snacks with me on my walk.

I asked the hostel attendant to point me in the direction of the Camino. “It is easy,” he told me. “Just go down to the railroad tracks and turn left.” He pointed out the door and to the left.

I spotted a yellow arrow on the side of a building and made my way to the railroad tracks. On the way to the tracks, I saw from a distance and to my right, the Vila Franca de Xira Bullring, also called the Palha Blanco Bullring. The bullring is named after Jose Pereira Palha Blanco, a cattle raiser responsible for organizing a group of benefactors to fund the project.

I arrived at the tracks and looked around. I did not see any arrows. I scanned the area again. Still no arrows.  I made a left as instructed. What reason should the guy at the hostel have to give me wrong information?

I walked along and could see the tracks through the buildings on my right. After a few blocks, the road ended, and I had to take a left. I noted the tracks continued straight. Here we go again, I thought. I went up to the main road and turned right. I was on my new Camino variant. Spiritual in the sense that I had to keep up my spirits.

I walked along the road following my GPS until I saw that I could get to the other side of the track through a train station at Castanheira do Ribatejo. I took a side road to the station, took an elevator up to the crosswalk, then down the other side to get on a dirt road that ran along the track. I was back on the official Camino path.

I started following the dirt path when I was passed by Aleta from the Czech Republic. She was still asleep when I left the albergue. Not knowing that I had just managed to get on the Camino path, she looked at me funny when I commented that I had not seen many markers. “Are you kidding?” she said. “There is one every hundred meters or so. Look at the back of signs or poles. See,” she said, pointing to an arrow at the back of a road sign. She moved on, and I saw many arrows while walking along the tracks. Sometimes, on a long section without any options to take another path, there are many yellow arrows. Sometimes, when you come across a fork in the road or a crossroad, arrows are hard to find, often set back ten or twelve meters into the path. I believed that if I had looked across the tracks when I first approached them, I would have seen a yellow arrow. It would have been nice to have one on both sides. Or maybe I just missed it because I was trusting the hospitalero at the casa.

After a while, the monotony of walking along the train tracks set in—the only excitement came from the occasional train that whizzed past.

When walking these long stretches, I focus on something up ahead as my target. Often, it is a church bell tower in a small village. Sometimes, it is the end of a field or the start of the forest. I pick an object to watch grow larger as I approach. It shows I am making progress. That makes me feel better about reaching my goal. This time, I focused on the smokestacks and cooling tower of a power plant reaching into the sky, as tall or taller than a church bell tower.

I set myself on auto-drive and let my thoughts go where they may. 

The monotony of the desolate walk along the rails was temporarily eliminated when I ran into Jo and Phil from Australia. They were friendly and interesting. It was a pleasure walking with them for a while.

A Camino marker took me off the wide path near the railroad tracks and onto a narrow one-person-wide path. The smell of fresh cow poop greeted me as I passed pastures on the outskirts of town. I made my way through a tunnel under a highway, sidestepped around flooded sections of the path, and emerged into the municipality of Azambuja. The hours of isolation walking along the trails was replaced by an active city atmosphere. It felt crowded. The energy on the Camino changes many times on the way to Santiago.

I passed the Bullring Ortigão Costa. Bullfighting is popular in Portugal and Spain. The official home of bullfighting in Portugal is the Campo Pequeno Bullring in Lisbon. I then passed a five-story apartment with laundry drying on lines strung outside the high-rise windows. Just past the apartment was a bronze statue of a fireman, a tribute to the bombeiros.

I was following the GPS to the Casa da Rainha. My phone announced that I had arrived. I was looking around for the entrance when I heard yelling. It was Jo and Phil. The entrance is around the corner, they told me. I pushed through the green metal-grated door of the Casa da Rainha and climbed the stairs to the first floor. (In Europe, the ground floor is floor zero; in the United States, it is floor one).

At the top of the stairs was a hallway. On a small registration table on the right wall was a stamp for the credential. The first room on the right was a little kitchen area for the guests’ use. The kitchen opened to an outside patio. The guests’ rooms lined each side of the hallway.

No one was around, so I called the number for the Casa. The lady who answered gave me the number for a lockbox at the bottom of the stairs that contained the key to my room. She told me the information was emailed to me. It probably was.

It was a nice private room with a private bathroom. The queen-sized bed had an ornate metal bedframe. I liked the extra space for my sleep. The window in the room opened to a small wrought-iron balcony that overlooked the street. The water in the shower was nice and hot. I enjoyed having a private room. When I booked my rooms, I tried to mix it up with dorm rooms and private rooms. Dorm rooms were good for meeting fellow pilgrims, but the lack of privacy can sometimes be annoying, and it can be noisy when trying to sleep.

I went out to find someplace to eat. I found a restaurant not too far away and enjoyed a bowl of delicious cabbage soup, strip steak, French fries, and rice. I was surprised to see the double starch. I ate every bit.

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