With twenty miles to do I set off at 7.15am with André and Tova, a Danish woman who I had originally met in Zamora. We followed the road out of town and around the base of the hill on which sat the old village; the official path actually went up into old Sanabria only to come back down again further round and slightly along the road, but having made that ascent yesterday we all agreed we could miss it this morning. We walked through woodland and alongside a small but noisy stream before paralleling a long, straight and thankfully quiet road that stretched off to the distance and where our different paces eventually had us spread out along its length. The purple outline of hills sat on the horizon as I walked, slowly resolving itself into detail as I progressed: a blank purple smudge gradually separated itself into distinguishable valleys and slopes; patches of green began to stand out, eventually becoming woods and trees; and finally, to complete the picture, emerging grey patches of rock resolved themselves into crags with definable cracks and fissures.
It was a while later that I left the road to follow a woodland track, more oak but now mixed with pine as I climbed the foot slopes of those hills that I had been walking towards earlier. Streams and small waterfalls made an appearance, sometimes visible at other times only heard, and slowly the hills that had previously been at a distance began to surround me. I dropped down into a narrow valley and followed the line of a stream along the valley floor; it was a shaded and tranquil world of trees, singing birds and the rush and gurgle of fast flowing water and one where I could quite happily have spent the rest of the day.
I left the woods and broke into open ground at which point a more unnatural element was stamped upon the landscape: first a high speed rail line and then main roads, curving gracefully as they sat high up on their vast concrete supports that allowed them to straddle valleys before burrowing their way through inconvenient hillsides. Meanwhile I weaved my way underneath them, up and around valley heads and over ridge lines only to maybe then join them again on the other side. At other times my route kept them hidden from view but not out of earshot; it would be some time before I eventually escaped their presence.
My last hour was again a track through woods, a track lined with timeless, moss covered boulders like giant green sponges lost from the sea, and weaving along the slope of yet another small valley. Somewhere below I could hear the dancing sound of a small river while my route crossed thin rivulets that were feeding it from above. As I emerged from the trees and entered the fringes of Lubián, the albergue almost the first building I encountered, it felt as if I were in a village in the middle of nowhere, nestled in the landscape, surrounded by hills and with narrow car free streets and no modern trappings. A bar just up from the albergue afforded great views down an untouched valley and I sat outside drinking beer and wine, chatting with fellow walkers and being beaten by Patrick at chess as we whiled the evening away.
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