Camino Portugués: Vilaboa to Vigo – 26.8km

With four days of walking the Camino Portugués in reverse ahead of us, you can imagine we were relieved to wake up to blue skies and sunshine.

Thankfully, a good night’s sleep had worked wonders and most of last night’s aches and pains had disappeared. When undertaking any long distance hike, there’s always a day when you can barely put one foot in front of the other – hopefully yesterday was that day. Whatever. When the sun is out and the view from your hotel room is as good as ours then it’s nay impossible not to feel energised.

There were no tea-making facilities in this hotel – and no breakfast – which motivated us to make an earlyish start at 8.25 am. Yesterday, the hotel receptionist had recommended Pasteleria Goluts, just a few hundred metres along the main road so that’s where we headed. Goodness, you can tell this place is used to serving hungry pilgrims. In addition to our actual order – tea/coffee, the largest croissant I’d ever seen (for Harri) and a cake (for me) – the waitress brought us four additional items – smaller croissants and cakes. Our second order of tea and coffee came with even more ‘tapas’. Altogether, we had four free cakes, two free croissants, Harri’s enormous croissant, my cake, two pots of tea and two coffees for 8,63 euros (well under £7.50 in June 2025).

Our bellies full and with two cakes tucked away for elevenses, we finally got moving at 9.30 am, by which time it was really warm and sunny.

Joining the Camino Portugués

Having enjoyed our recent and headache-free experience of caminho walking, we were very much looking forward to joining the popular Camino Portugués, or Portuguese Camino, this morning. There was one proviso: we’d be walking it in the opposite direction to almost every other pilgrim in Galicia. In medieval times, of course, pilgrims would have walked the route to Santiago de Compostela in both directions (how else would they get home), however the majority of modern-day pilgrims tend to walk the route in one direction only, heading north to the city.

I’ve mentioned there are a lot of caminho options in this part of the world. The Stingy Nomads explain the various routes really well (with easy-to-understand maps).

We crossed Ponte Medieval de Pontesampaio again, noting that the tide was lower than last night. Almost immediately we reached Arcade, we started seeing pilgrims … and, as we’d anticipated, they were all heading in the opposite direction to us. In fact, we saw more pilgrims in those first five minutes in Arcade than we saw on the entire Caminho da Geira e dos Arrieiros last week. There was a huge variation in the amount people were carrying. One woman sagged under a rucksack as large as her, while others were carrying tiny little drawstring bags. Some pilgrims were dressed for cooler northern climes, and we passed one woman in her 60s who was sporting a full-length knee brace. If undertaking a pilgrimage is supposed to be about suffering, some of these people were opting for the full experience. By the time we left Arcade, we’d passed around 100 pilgrims, including a queue waiting for their stamp.

We refrained from buying the distinctive caminho seashell from one of the many vendors we passed. Harri said he’d feel like a fraud because we weren’t walking the entire caminho. I disagreed. You can gain the coveted caminho certificate by walking just 100 kilometres; we’ll have covered over 350 kilometres by the time we reach Viana do Castelo at the end of the week.

We stopped to chat to two men from Miami, one of whom walked a different caminho last year. He is writing a journal about his experience so we had our photograph taken with him.

This morning’s walking was delightful and even our first steep hill couldn’t suppress my exuberance at being on the coast again. As we gained height, the views just went on improving. Now, we could clearly see the rugged Cíes Islands, an archipelago stretching across the mouth of the Ria de Vigo, which form part of the Atlantic Islands National Park. I’ve always loved islands, particularly uninhabited ones. It is possible to visit these islands but you do need to apply for a permit, hence plan ahead. In 2007, The Guardian newspaper rated Rodas Beach, the strip of sand which links two of the three islands, as the best in the world. Presumably, one of the reasons access is restricted (and only possible in summer) is to keep it unspoilt by mass tourism.

We reached Redondela, where the Camino Portugués routes heading north converge and we would be joining the increasingly popular coastal route to walk south. As we wandered through town, I found myself feeling sorry for the locals. There were pilgrims everywhere, frequently bringing the traffic to a standstill as they meandered along the narrow streets without a care in the world.

After Redondela, there was a steep hill that went on and on and on, with just the occasional level section for us to recover sufficiently to tackle the next few hundred metres. We received caring smiles from those pilgrims fortunate enough to be coming down. It took us 35 minutes to get to the top of that hill, by which time we’d witnessed several near misses between meandering pilgrims and impatient/reckless Spanish drivers who refused to slow down. Maybe I didn’t feel such sympathy for locals after all.

Lunatic drivers aside, the walking was wonderful. The trail up here was wide and shaded; to our right, the hillside was steep and wooded … with nothing to prevent us tumbling down to the coast. We could still just about see the tiny islet we’d looked out on from last night’s hotel terrace. Closer was another little island, this one boasting a stone quay and a sand bar. There was no doubt the Galician coast was take-your-breath-away gorgeous. I wondered why anyone would live in Ponteareas when you could be here, less than 30 kilometres away.

At a font, we filled our bottles with icy-cold water and devoured our free cakes. During our ten-minute breather, at least 30 or 40 pilgrims walked past. Were some of them locals out for a stroll, we wondered. Surely they couldn’t all be pilgrims. It was hard to tell when so many caminho walkers weren’t carrying full packs although we suspected the ones still wearing long-sleeved fleeces must be doing the full distance otherwise why set off in so many clothes?

Through the trees, we started to get glimpses of the sprawling Galician metropolis that is Vigo. The largest city in the region by a good distance had a population of 293,652 in 2023. It dwarfs medium-sized Portuguese cities like Braga, Coimbra and Setúbal, and is even bigger than Porto (248,769 in 2023).

I was surprised at the extent of the port area – there are over 9 km of berths – naively believing Vigo to be just ‘another’ coastal town. The city is, in fact, Europe’s largest fishing port and handles roughly 800,000 tonnes of tonnes of fish every year. Over 30% of Spain’s frozen fish is exported from Vigo.

With about 3 km to go, we were gradually descending into Vigo through the suburbs. It took all our willpower to walk past several bars, but we didn’t want to stop until we were within spitting distance of our accommodation – it’s so hard to get going again in the heat.

An evening in Vigo

I was definitely in the mood to embrace the vibrancy of a city like Vigo. We stopped for a beer and for five euros we got beer, a coca cola (in an old-fashioned glass bottle), olives and some tapas.

After a shower, a short rest and a change of shoes, we left our funky, young professional studio and headed out to explore the city. It was nearly 7 pm and still 27 degrees, the warmest evening we’ve encountered since Castro Laboreiro. This time, thankfully, there was no storm brewing.

I immediately liked Vigo, not least because there is a series of moving airport-like escalators to transport visitors up the hills. Maybe it’s a stretch to think the city installed them to aid we weary pilgrims? I was impressed by the little workstations with charging points that were dotted along the line too.

At 7.30 pm on a Sunday evening, Vigo was positively buzzing. We continued uphill (without the help of an escalator) then climbed a lot of steps to reach the stunning Castelo do Castro. Like so many fortresses on both sides of the border, this popular 17th-century landmark owes its existence to the continued conflict between Spain and Portugal.

Quite a lot of the original fortress remains, with delightful parklands in between the old walls and several viewpoints overlooking Vigo and the estuary – and those docks. Now we were actually in Vigo, we had even better views of the Cíes Islands. Castelo do Castro is clearly a popular place for locals because the place was lively well into this Sunday evening. It wasn’t all about eating and drinking either – many people were just sitting around on the grass chatting. All the interpretation boards were in Spanish and Galician, but it was still interesting to browse the old photographs which showed what the landscape around us looked like before the port’s major expansion.

In the main shopping streets, we were surprised to find many shops still open – and impressed by the beautiful architecture above those shop fronts.

Eventually it was time to eat. We don’t do five-star restaurants on holiday – or at any time really – so we’d asked Google to find us a nearby Mexican restaurant where we could eat before 8.30 pm. The result was a Galician chain which focused on delicious burritos. There was far too much food really, but somehow we managed to eat everything placed in front of us.

You can’t see everything in a few hours but we’d really enjoyed our short time in Vigo. I think we will be returning to Galicia.

Accommodation

We stayed at Vigo Center Rooms and paid 52,20 euros for a beautifully fitted studio apartment in the centre of the city, which I rated as one of the best places we’ve stayed on this trip. Not only was it central, but there was olive oil and other condiments in the kitchen cupboard. Frustratingly, this was one night I didn’t need them as we’d already decided to eat out.

Our route

This stage was mapped at 25.1 km with 362 metres of ascent.

Tracking with Outdoor Active, I recorded 26.8 km with 326 metres of ascent. We did an additional 5.3 km on our evening stroll around Vigo.

Download the GPX file of our hike here.