SARRIA TO PORTOMARIN

I hadn't liked Sarria the last time I was there, and I didn't much like it this time either. I knew why; there was something missing...a hole in Sarria's soul, and it was this. Sometime not so long ago, as the history of towns go, somebody got the bright idea to mine out Sarria's medieval stones and use them somewhere else. Where there should have been a charming old town, there were only fragments; a church here, a tower there, a bit of wall. Everything else had become a victim of the twentieth century.

Just as I was heading for the ayuntamiento, the town hall, to get my sello, I met the Oregonians, and was able to show them the way. The woman inside took one look at the backpacks and pointed...Arriba! (this made me think of Speedy Gonzales, rather than, "the place you are looking for is upstairs"). We seemed to be part of the rush of late-rising pilgrims. It was a real assembly line in there. Stamp! "Buen Camino" "Gracias"; repeat!

It was so cool to be able to walk confidently along the path, knowing exactly where I was going. Here were the stone steps leading up to the vanished old town, and there to the right, the cafe where I'd had tostadas and greengage jam three years before. Here was the overlook where I could look back over the town, here the convento with its palimpsest of styles, and here, oh dear, was the incredibly steep path down to the trail. Some things hadn't changed.

  The Roman Bridge was still the same.  The trail still meandered by the railway track. I met my first Camino horse here, wearing a shell on his breastplate. But my beloved backward time-untouched Galicia was changing. Everywhere, things had been tarted up. There were pop machines and souvenir stands; the government had been putting in a lot of infrastructure money too. I wasn't sure I liked that, really. I preferred to think of Galicia as a place where doing something like this:

which took who-knows-how-long to complete but which lasted forever, was valued; where people took a creative approach to a problem, rather than using brute force to achieve their ends;

where if you couldn't go over or under or around an obstacle, you just went through it.

Where creative re-use was valued:

I blamed the Holy Year in 2011. Where in Portomarin there were two hostels in 2008, there were now five, ranging from very basic to quite swish. And there were billboards along the Camino advertising them. I was affronted.