Today is my last day of walking. It has not really sunk in. Even telling the only other two people in the albergue this morning and hearing those words spoken aloud did not seem to make it any more real; the certainty that after only thirteen more miles it will all be over remained an elusive phantasm that my mind seemed unable to grasp.
Towards the end of yesterday the open countryside was becoming dotted with houses. Today as the morning progressed those dotted houses coalesced into small villages and the villages slowly merged into the surrounds of A Coruña. As final days go it was going to be pretty forgettable for its beauty given that I was heading into a port city. I was blessed with no rain and there was a nice enough stretch along the river a few miles before the finish but for the large part, once I had entered the outskirts of the city it was mostly square blocks of flats and tourist accommodation built so as to snatch glimpses of the water. The last stretch was a long curving walk to the old town around what once was probably a beautiful bay but was now home to a fast main road, lined with shops on one side and with a backdrop of industry and port facilities on the other, until it finally ended by the city marina and a wide pedestrian area with outdoor cafes and restaurants. But you had to look hard to find the sea.
At just after midday I reached the 72 kilometre marker by a Romanesque church in the old town indicating the start of the route to Santiago and the end of my route from Cadiz, fifty two days and some 840 miles after I had started. I sat and reflected for a couple of minutes, although it now all seemed a bit of an anticlimax, before heaving my rucksack on my back and heading to a tiny bar in the narrow streets of the old town for a celebratory drink and a shellfish lunch.
I headed out to explore later in the afternoon. My destination was the Tower of Hercules, a massive construction overlooking the North Atlantic coast and the oldest extant lighthouse in the world; it was known to have existed in the 1st Century. It is probably A Coruna's most famous sight and I had originally been there in 2008 when I sailed into A Coruna having crossed the Bay of Biscay. Afterwards I walked back to the old town via the wide and busy coast road with views across the water to the rocky cliffs of northern Spain and a wide beach behind which no patch existed that wasn’t the tall, square block of a hotel.
I finished the day in a cafe in the old town eating seafood and drinking beer. It was quiet as it was still early for Spain although late enough for me; I was going to make the most of having a proper bed for the night. Tomorrow I have nowhere to walk to.
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