El Acebo is a beautiful little village with many quaint looking hotels and albergues, two of which bear the same name – La Casa del Peregrino. We stayed in the one in yesterday’s photo, at the top end of the village and ate dinner in the one at the bottom of the village – both obviously owned by the same people, one a boutique hotel and one an albergue.
We had the choice of breakfast from 7am in the albergue or 9am in the boutique hotel, so we had a bit of a sleep in, had the best breakfast we’ve had on any camino and set off at 10am.
We had been warned about the up coming section, and it was both better than we had feared and worse than we expected! We drop about 900m from yesterday’s peak of 1515m over a bit more than 10km to 610m at Molinaseco. The majority was done yesterday – about 500m over 3 to 4kms – but we used the road a lot then.
The road was not as close today, so we kept to the trail all day with some very tough sections at times. We had a fairly good run into Riego de Ambrós, a village in the same style as Acebo, but it was hard going from there to another beautiful but very different village on the rio Maruelo, Molinaseca, where we had a much needed break.
From there it was a simple walk along the road (on footpaths rather than the stone tracks we’ve encountered to date) through Molinaseca’s newer houses, over a hill and then into Ponferrada’s outer suburbs. It’s always tricky wending your way through a big city to find the hotel but, after a bit of circle work at the end, we made it!
A couple of days of stunning scenery but hard in the feet at times. We have a couple of nights in Ponferrada before tackling the next section over the last lot of mountains into Galicia. 17kms today bringing us to 545km in total. The route video is here.
steelewalking 