Our first stop today on the way to Cacabelos was Ponferrada. Approaching the city we had a beautiful mountain view on our left side, and on our right housing, with areas of graffiti. It was quite the contrast. Ponferrada was a really interesting city. The Ponferrada Castle is a great example of a Templar castle. It was built around the 12th Century (the time of the Crusades). Ponferrada is also the home of Europe’s largest wind turbine factory.

The region we are in is called El Bierzo. Our walk today took us through several vineyards. It is harvest time, so we saw workers in the fields, tractors hauling trailers filled with grapes to the Vineyard Cooperative.

At one of the vineyards, the workers were very interested in our Camino walk. One worker asked us where we started from. They weren’t familiar with St Jean, but when Steve said Roncesvalles, his coworker knew where it was, and translated for him- he knew it was a long way, gave us a huge smile, and then gave us big clusters of both red and white grapes.

This part of the route is through some of El Bierzo’s best grape growing areas. The main grape here is the Mencía, a descendent of the Caberet Franc grape, said to have been carried here by a French pilgrim. From it are produced the area’s distinctive reds and rosés. Another grape variety, La Godello, is used to produce white wine.

A short time later we walked by a small operation that was hand pressing red and white grapes to make a rose wine. That was interesting to watch!

After checking into our room, getting out of our boots, and showering, we walked the town of Cacabelos. We picked up a bottle of the local Mencia red wine, and sat down to work on uploading photos, and posting our blog for today.

Today we walked 16 miles that was relatively flat- only 51 flights of stairs!

After today’s walk we are less than 200 km from Santiago. We do have a few more mountain top experiences in our future, but we are now comfortable being able to start walking shorter days!