Noja, Cantabria

 Noja, Cantabria 

Breakfast at the Cosmopol Hotel just a little way along the seafront in Laredo is publicised to start at 8.30. When the hotel is hosting pilgrims, especially when they are using the Correos luggage delivery service which will move their bags on from one town to the next town, so pilgrims only need to carry a day pack, but the downside to this service is no lie-ins as the bags need to be in reception before 8am. On some days the bags had been whisked away by Correos before we had left the hotel. It all depended on whether the hotel as at the start of the pick up route or towards the end.

Either way, the Cosmopol Hotel offered breakfast for pilgrims at 8.00am, so that they could drop their bags off, have breakfast and set off on the next leg of their Camino. There was also no point in offering breakfast even earlier, which some early rising pilgrims prefer, and complained about as they had paid for breakfast but it was always late.

There is a tip to be shared here. If you are an early riser, if the hotel offers a discount not to have breakfast, then it may be to your advantage to not have a hotel breakfast so that you can get up and start walking as soon as you like. Cafes open early and their are plenty along the route and mentioned in guidebooks so planning ahead is easy. You can walk several kilometres of your planned day's walk and incorporate a breakfast stop along the way. 

As for breakfast time in the Cosmopol Hotel in Laredo, the summer ferry only starts at 9am in the morning. It is a half an hour walk along the seafront from the hotel to the ferry, so there is no point in offering an even earlier breakfast. 

The ferry closes in winter and pilgrims following this route in winter have to make a long detour following busy roads to cross the river estuary and its tributaries.

The route is obvious, having researched it on Google maps and using satellite imagery, but it is poorly marked on the ground. Sometimes there is only a single arrow and no reassuring secondary arrow just a little further along to confirm that you are going the right way. I didn't see a yellow arrow but there was a sign in Spanish for the ferry. 

There is a lot of signage and distractions seeking your attention. There is a surf school, an indoor tennis academy, a sailing club, a pier, a beach, a camping ground and a large car park with signs saying no over night camping but with several camper vans that looked like they had been here all night. 

The was just a small wooden finger pointing board positioned between a dune covered with pampas grass and a cafe to a boardwalk across the sand to the ferry.

The ferry didn't call at the nearby pier, it just nudged against the sand of the beach. There was an orderly queue of pilgrims waiting to cross on the first ferry of the day. It reminded me of wartime films of the evacuation of soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk. 

The ferry was tiny and I feared that I would not make it aboard and would have to wait for the next ferry. It runs every 20 minutues until dusk so it wouldn't take a whole chunk of time out of my planned day. I also half hoped that Leslie, Kim and Gail might catch me up here but they were nowhere to be seen. 

The skipper was counting us aboard and I was the second to last to aboard. There were only a handful of seats left empty but being nearly last on meant that I would I would be off first. It wasn't a long stretch of water but there were a lot of passengers.

The skipper revved the egines  to get us off the beach. The shore shelved deeply and using the current of the estuary, we pulled away from the beach and moved into open water. Then the captain throttled back and we drifted for a while as fares were collected.

Once everyone had paid, the skipper opened the throttle and we steered towards the concrete wharf  in the centre of Santoña. Santoña is the place where Christopher Columbus' ship, the Santa Maria used on first first trip to South America was built. It is also the home to Juan de la Cosa, who was the cartographer on Columbus' second voyage.

There are two routes from the landing stage in Santoña. The shorter route goes due north through the town to the beach at Berria. The alternative, and onger rute goes around the peninsula. The advantage of tis route is that it takes visitors past the Fuerte San Martin and the Fuerte San Carlos, two forts that protect the entrance to the estuary that date from the Peninsula Wars.

The pilgrims that left the boat roughly split into two two equal groups, half walking around the peninsula and the other half going through the town centre. Both route met up again at Playa de Berria, where there is another split in the route. There is one along the beach and another along the road that runs parallel to the beach. Walking on sand can be tiring, and there was another long stretch later that day, so I opted for the road.

At the end of the beach the two paths join and there is a steep climb over rocks up and around a headland. The guide warns that this stretch can be slippery after rain. Whilst the rocks give a good surface, there are also stretches with clay which is often at an angle. I could places where pilgrims ahead of me had slipped on the wet clay. I took my time but slipped and received a gash to my arm as long as a hand from the elbow. I didn't notice it at first until blood was running down my arm and dripping off my hand.

I washed the wound with water. Four Irish pilgrims caught me up. Being on the outside of the arm, I couldn't get a good look at the wound but one of them said he'd seen worse and once the blood had dried it would be alright. He offered a plaster but I said that it would dry shortly and be alright. They walked on and I went even more slowly over the slippery patches, sometimes going backwards and using my hands.

 

The next beach was a long and wide expanse of sand...

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...until it reaches a river where the trail turns inland to cross a small stone bridge, just wide enough for two people or one horse. It is called the Roman Bridge but was only built in the 17th century.

As the trail approaches the next town of Noja. there was a new style of marker, a waist high concrete pylon with a scallop shell near the top and underneath, an arrow, painted yellow showing the way.

Noja was where I was staying the night at a hotel on the north side of town a kilometre away from El Camino. In the centre of the town, a local nobleman in the 17th century had built a house around a former medieval tower. It is a plain house but has a huge carving above the window of his coat of arms.

My hotel for the night, designed to  look old but recently built. The insides were equally designed to look old with fake rough sawn roof beams, and peeling plaster and brick effect facing bricks covering the concrete pillars and walls,  The bedroom telephones were something out of 1920s films with twisted cords and rotary dialing. The reception was in the basement and the subbasement housed an underground garage. The enclosed balconies are an architectural feature of old buildings further west in Galicia but not unknown in Cantabria.