Today we walked the first leg of our Camino Portuguese. “Unofficially” anyway.

The traditional Camino started at the Porto Cathedral and followed a 12 km inland route to Matosinhos. In the middle ages Porto was a town and most of this walk was through countryside. Porto is now a city of 1.5 million and the walk is 100% on pavement through busy, noisy commercial, residential and business districts with very little way finding and is not very pleasant. Purists still walk this route but some take the Metro from Porto to Matosinhos and start walking from there. This is what our tour company Caminoways do.  We wanted to walk the full Camino from the Cathedral in Porto to the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, not get the train for the first 12km. Caminoways had us taking the train and then walking 25km from Matosinhos to Povoa Varzim on the first day. It is too much for us these days to walk the 12km plus the 25km in one day. We asked Caminoways to amend our itinerary but they wouldn’t.

So we decided to do our own cunning plan. A popular alternative these days is to walk Porto to Matosinhos alongside the Douro River and then along the coast. This is what we did today. We have used one of our days in Porto to walk to Matosinhos and then got the train back to Porto. On Wednesday, the “official” start of our Camino we will train to Matosinhos and walk from there.

There is a park we walk through on the way to the Metro and this morning we noticed there are huge blue ants in the park, and over the road on a building and 100 metres down the road on another building. They are about a metre long and made of fabric and metal and are quite lovely. Of course we had to sing the ants go marching song on our way to the Metro. At the cathedral we had our photo taken and set off down to the river. What a different place it was. Yesterday it was heaving with people, all hustle and bustle and noise in the hot sun on a Sunday afternoon. This Monday morning it was almost empty, quiet and cool. And it was misty. We knew Porto could be foggy. Westerly winds from the Atlantic Ocean bring in cool moist air which cause condensation and precipitation. So it can be cool and foggy on the coast and hot and sunny further inland.  This was one of those foggy days.

The best part of today was walking along the Douro River to where it flows into the ocean. The path is right alongside the river and sometimes cantilevered out over it. This is  an older part of Porto with interesting old houses, chapels, fishing villages, a bird observation area and the tram line runs down to the ocean. You also get to walk under the imposing Ponte da Arrabida. A very high concrete arch bridge over the river. At the mouth of the river there are two lighthouses, both at the end of long piers. From the land you could hardly make them out in the fog and you had to walk right out to them to get a good look.

As you walk along beside the ocean the character changes. The path becomes a wide promenade and the road becomes multi lane. For about 5 kms there are large modern characterless apartments facing out to sea. There are lots of parks, trees, sandy beaches (each with a lone life guard but not a soul on the beach or in the water), sports facilities for beach football and volley ball, surf schools, an aquarium, a castle, a huge sculpture over a roundabout representing a fish net,  memorials to seafaring tragedies and lots more. This is the beach settlement and resort for Porto.

Matosinhos looks older and has a port on the river. There was a large cruise ship at the dock and there are container wharves, an oil tank farm and all the ugly industrial stuff that goes with a working port. From here we got the Metro back to the hotel and lunch in the nearby food hall again.  It was foggy until early afternoon but then cleared and it warmed up a lot.

Tomorrow we will be tourists in Porto and then on Wednesday we will be peregrinos again and train out to Matosinhos and start the real walking.