I arrived in Oviedo from London nervous and excited. I’m a well-seasoned traveler, but somehow this felt different. I was starting my Camino the next day. This was something I’d never done. I’d camped for a week in the BWCA when my son was a baby and again when he was a toddler, and we did some family tent camping for long weekends when the kids were growing up, but a 14-day, 193-mile hike was something completely different.
Getting There
I had to laugh when the KLM app said I had a “short” 36-minute walk to my gate in Amsterdam. Because it was my first entry point into the Schengen area, I also needed to go through immigration. The new scanning area was chaotic and confusing: you scan your passport at a kiosk, then rejoin a queue near where you first approach the area for another scan. It felt wrong, but the person working there said it was where we were supposed to be. Even so, it didn’t take long, and I was at my gate within 25 minutes, where I grabbed lunch and waited for the next leg of my flight. I guess they expected me to walk slower.
Oviedo
I decided to take the bus into the city since that seemed to be the most efficient way to get there. It took a while to collect my luggage from baggage claim and find where exactly the bus into the city center would be. The weather was nice, so the wait wasn’t too bad. The first surprise when we finally got there was that Oviedo is a big city. I didn’t expect it to be that big. As I lugged my suitcase from the bus station, it felt strange to be in a large city; how could this be the start point? My expectation was a small, remote village where the kings of Asturias once lived, but instead, I was walking into a regional capital. The hotel was nice. I checked in, then prepared my day-one hiking gear. I also checked with an AI tool on whether to wear hiking boots or trail runners for the first stage. The travel company sent a packet of information, a printout of my hotels for each day as well as instructions how to get to the hotel from the marked trail. They also included a scallop shell, which I affixed to my pack. The shell is a signal to others that you’re a pilgrim. This act gave more weight to the fact that my Camino was finally here and I was now officially ready to start. Once everything was ready, I headed out to explore the city some more and to have dinner.
The next realization I had was that very little English is spoken in Oviedo. I found an ice cream shop (no translation needed), went to a craft beer bar (definitely didn’t need translation), then headed to a restaurant. Unfortunately, the restaurant I wanted wasn’t open to serve yet since most Spanish restaurants serve the evening meal closer to 9:00pm. I sat at an open-air café and had a glass of wine trying to decide whether I wanted to wait a few hours for dinner or to find a restaurant that catered to pilgrims and would be serving dinner earlier. In the end, I decided to try another place. While this one had a sign saying they had English menus, that wasn’t the case. No worries, I could snap pictures of the menu and get help from an AI tool. However, somehow, instead of ordering a cheese plate to start, I ordered an Estrella Galicia beer. The beer turned out to be delicious, and I decided the universe thought I needed that more than cheese. This was an early indication of how my restaurant experiences would go in Asturias, the region of the first part of my Camino. I would decide what I wanted, try to order in Spanish, and end up with something different.
The First Stamp
Since I was expecting to head out early the next day, before the cathedral opened, I decided to go to the main albergue in Oviedo to get a stamp (or sello) to start my progress to the Compostela. Each pilgrim carries credentials (or a passport type booklet) that is fashioned after the historical process where pilgrims got letters of safe passage from priests or bishops that allowed them to safely travel to Santiago to visit the tomb of St. James. To earn the Compostela, you have to show that you walked the route, with at least two stamps a day for the last 100 km, and didn’t just turn up in Santiago without having done the pilgrimage. I wanted a stamp that clearly said I started from Oviedo, the start of the original first Camino route. The man at the albergue wasn’t happy that I wanted a stamp that night, and I didn’t want to tell him that I wouldn’t be there in the morning since I was staying at a hotel. He reluctantly stamped it once I assured him that I was indeed leaving the next day. With that, I made my way back to the hotel.
That first night, I tried to get some sleep even though I was nervous about how my Camino would unfold. While I do know the days of the week, somehow I forgot that reception at the hotel said breakfast on weekends is at 8:00, so I was ready bright and early at 7:00. When I arrived an hour later, it surprised me that I was the only one there. I noticed that they had set out foil and plastic wrap, so clearly, they expected pilgrims to pack up snacks for the trail. Where were the pilgrims? This reinforced my arrival when I didn’t really see anyone who was obviously doing the Camino. As I finished, a few pilgrims straggled in, but I had finished packing up some snacks and wanted to get underway. We wished each other “Buen Camino” and I went up to my room to finish getting ready for the first day. I dropped my suitcase at reception for the transport company and headed out to start my Camino.
The app I had paid for wasn’t great for Oviedo. Between Google Maps and the app descriptions of various landmarks in the city, I worked my way through the tangle of streets where markers for the Camino were not evident. I caught sight of a few other people with packs of various sizes, and by following them as well as a combination of Google and the app, I got to the edge of the city, where the app said there were plenty of markers. It could have fooled me! I couldn’t make sense of where to go. I saw another woman who was equally confused. Between Google and our two different apps, we finally got to the trail and set out.
Besides the confusion about where we were supposed to go, the lack of pilgrims and my nerves, the next surprise was the number of paved roads. The first several miles were along the shoulder of roads. There were some hardpack trails, but until we were well out of the city, we were on rural roads. The woman I had walked with at first stopped to get her poles out of her pack, and I got the sense she wasn’t looking for companionship on the trail, so I went on. I came upon a small church and saw some other pilgrims taking photos and getting a stamp. I used the stamp and met a man from Houston, Texas. We chatted a bit, and he asked me to take his picture. After we took pictures for each other, I carried on while he spent some time there. Once again, it wasn’t difficult to tell when someone isn’t looking for companionship on the trail. I never saw him again after that first day.
Lunch, Cider and a Stamp
I stopped briefly for coffee and sponge cake, then carried on to an albergue (similar to a youth hostel) that I remembered was either in the guidebook or an AI recommendation. Villa Palatina has a good reputation for food, so I decided to have lunch. While various forms of pork are popular in Asturias, it’s also a large cattle-raising area, so thankfully beef was on the menu.
I also decided I needed to try the local cider, or sidra since I stuck to wine and beer the night before. The tradition here is that the server holds the glass at their hip in one hand and the bottle with the other, and pours from their shoulder into the glass. Yes, there is definitely spillage, but the point is to aerate the cider. After this demonstration, the server gave me an aerator, like a Coravin, that uses nitrogen gas to squirt the cider out and aerate it. It was different than British ciders, and I decided I’d stick to wine or beer. As the other pilgrims and I finished our meals, the server came out with their sello to stamp our credentials with their unique foot-shaped stamp.
Then I carried on to my first destination, Grado.
Arriving in Grado
After a long day of walking and hiking, I arrived in Grado. One of the first things I saw when I walked into the center of Grado was a bench shaped like an open book. It’s called “El banco de la poesía,” and it carries a poem by Fernando Beltrán, “Ciudad de paso,” or “city of passage.” It’s about being a stranger in a town you’re only passing through, with no home, family or friends there, and still finding a moment of belonging or shelter. It was an apt welcome for a pilgrim who would be a visitor in each town for exactly one night. That evening, the nightly routine I would follow for the next two weeks began. I’ll describe the daily rhythm in my next post.
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