Today is the first day of the second Camino this year. The first Camino was the Olvidado which went from Bilbao to Ponferrada for about 550km. This second Camino is an alternate route of the Camino Frances (which I walked in 2015) and goes from Ponferrada to Santiago for about 266km.

Ponferrada seems like a nice city. By looking at it, you would think it’s several times larger than Santa Rosa by all of the traits you would find in a larger city – dense housing in the center, quality public transit, museums, cultural centers, etc. But Ponferrada actually only has just under half the population that Santa Rosa does.

The river Sil bisects Ponferrada and the Camino de Invierno follows it for much of its length. The first day out of Ponferrada takes us on mountain dirt roads which turn into farm tracks. It takes us above the valley floor which shows not an insignificant agricultural valley which runs to the west and south. Being above the valley floor, we were able to observe the high mountains on the other side, which we would have taken via the French way. O Cebreiro at 1300m loomed in the distance.

The Camino took us through alternating wet and dry ecosystems depending on the slope we were on. We were treated to orchards of cherry and chestnut trees, mixed with vineyards and little gardens with fine loam soil on the wet side and oak scrub with wild lavender and rocky soil on the dry side.

As we climbed towards our destination of Las Médulas (more on that later), we cut an unnecessary 5.5km off the trail by bipassing a deviation to a town with no services and a castle. Since I saw a castle yesterday, we decided to take a trail, instead of the highway. The trail took us to climbing 100m in 700m, instead of 4km of road. During this vertical climb, we were treated to shade, light breezes and an hour off our day of walking.

Whether you walk 2km in a day or 42km in a day, the last two are always the hardest. If not physically, then psychologically. Today – was both. Walking on a highway, up hill, no shade and 33°C temperatures made for a complete drenching of everything we were wearing – including the pack. Good thing for a shower and bed at the place we are staying.

Las Médulas… a surprise on the Camino. I really hadn’t thought about doing this Camino, and therefore had not researched anything about it. Las Médulas is a UNESCO site – a controversial one at that. This is the site of the most lucrative, most important and largest open pit gold mine in the Roman Empire. Similar to placer mining where they wash away mountains to get to the gold, here they injected water brought via aqueducts underneath the mountains to cause them to collapse and then wash the fluvial deposits with even more water to extract the gold. This caused huge sections of the mountains to simply disappear. It also filled canyons and valleys with red silt and made reservoirs with the runoff. Now that several hundred years have passed, the vegetation has reclaimed the bare remains of the mine and has created indescribable sights from the remains of mountains. The reason this is a controversial UNESCO site is because of the destruction caused by humans. But the reclaiming of the site by Gaia shows just how resilient Mother Nature is when it comes to the human pestilence and it’s impact on the earth.

For purpose of transparency, I didn’t go hiking into the area, I just saw it from afar, so all of the pictures of Las Médulas but two are not mine.