Broad Sunlit Uplands

CAMINO FRANCÉS – Day 10: Friday 18 April 2025 – BELORADO to SAN JUAN de ORTEGA (24 [+2] kilometres)

Firstly, wishing you all a very Happy Easter, whether with me on the trail or following these random musings back at home in the UK, or elsewhere in the world. This Easter will be a very different one for me – ‘alone’ on my pilgrimage, as I wander across northern Spain. In actual fact, today is Day 10 of my Camino Francés walk, and being a day ahead of my schedule at present, I have completed 11 or the 33 Stages set out in my guidebook (John Brierley). This means that I am around a third of the way along the path from St Jean Pied de Port in France to my destination at Santiago de Compostela; the stats back this up, as I have now covered 260 kilometres (162 miles) of the 779 (484) total distance. How time flies!

This afternoon’s walk marked a significant change from the last few days of undulating vineyards and farmland, as I reached the scarp and ascended the wooded track up onto the Meseta Central. This upland plateau covers much of the central parts of the Iberian peninsula, and I will be crossing its northern reaches over the next couple of weeks: aside from a couple of visits to Madrid many years ago, I have never set foot in this area of Spain before, so the experience ahead of me is quite enticing. Looking at the altitudes of my overnight ports of call for the next fortnight or so these are all in the region of 800 to 1,000 metres above sea level, so the massif that I am to traverse stands as high as any peak in England.

I have been lucky through my first week and a half to avoid the rain almost completely on the Camino during the walking day. Even the few minutes of light rain that fell as I made my way into Logroño did not necessitate the deployment of my waterproofs. The evenings have been different, and overnight rain has fallen after dark at least seven times so far, thrice as heavy storms. And now, as I write this, late in the afternoon in my albergue in San Juan de Ortega the rain is falling quite heavily again (and a poor drenched couple have just shown up at the door, about two hours after my arrival here). The sunny intervals and clear days have not provided too much of a heat problem either, to date, although there has been quite a strong headwind from the west these last three days, quite gusty and chilly at times, that has required the wearing of three layers.

My current plan, having ‘made up a day’, is to proceed tomorrow to Burgos and to stay there for two nights, in order to enjoy to the full the Easter Sunday festivities there. I am told that these celebrations are not to be missed. so I have another short-ish day tomorrow, when I hope to be reporting back from from the medieval city of Burgos.

My Blog heading today ‘Broad Sunlit Uplands’ is taken from a song of that title written and performed by Mike Oldfield on his 1999 album ‘The Millennium Bell’. The number is an instrumental piece, written by Oldfield, who in turn took his title from words by Winston Churchill.