Pecene to Tui

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Well we made it…506 km completed in 19 days of walking and that’s Portugal ✅. We are surprised how quickly that has gone and we still stick to our lines that we would not recommend the walk from Lisbon to Porto as a “must do”. However, since Porto things have been “back to normal”.

It was only a 17km day today and we made it to the twin border towns of Valenca and Tui in about 4 hours. Interestingly, got chatting away and missed a couple of turns – this hasn’t happened to us before so, thinking caps are back on as we prepare to welcome the new amigos, Melinda, David and Denise tomorrow.

The old part of Valenca is very pretty and is built within the old fortress. Valenca was given its name in 1262 – interesting to walk through a dry moat to enter the old walled city fortress. We walked through the fortress exited the other side and came to the International Bridge which took us from Portugal to Spain – photo opportunity! Amazing still that you cross a river, change languages, histories change and the culture changes…we just don’t get that really – except I’m positive that our colleagues in the ‘east’ think the same of us in the ‘west’ sometimes.

Having made it to Tui we wandered around the old part of the town and got the sense that this is very much a medieval town centre. The Cathedral de Santa Maria dates from 1120 – with some renovations in 1251! So we have set our watches forward and hour, watched the Spanish come out for drinks and tapas before heading off to dinner at 9.30pm…and at 10.35 it is twilight…the kids are outside making a racket and the walkers are all safely tucked into their rooms.

Tomorrow is a day off – so a late start – the washing was done this afternoon and its basically a wander around town and then meet the newbies at the bus stop at 7.30 and we begin the last 100 or so kilometres on Sunday morning.