Camino de Portuguese Day 7: Tamel to Ponte de Lima
Hiking the Camino de Portuguese from Tamel to Ponte de Lima | Vaca de Cordas Festival | June 2026
I was pleasantly surprised by how well I slept in our first Albergue along the Camino. It wasn’t completely full and everyone was generally pretty quiet, making it a very good first hostel experience for us. When others started stirring around 5:30, we also got up and started to prepare for today’s hike. Today we would be walking 25km to Ponte de Lima, our longest distance yet, so we were glad to be getting an early start. I was especially excited to actually get to see a sunrise, and this morning’s did not disappoint. For the first half hour of our walk, the hills glowed in soft pink and golden light. The morning air was cool and felt so good after having spent much of the last 5 days walking in afternoon sun.
The trail started by going through the small town of Tamel, then continued on through spread out neighborhoods, villages, and farmland. We made good time and didn’t take our first break until 2.5 hours in to the walk. We didn’t have any food on us and hoped to find a cafe or convenience store along the way. However, this wasn’t as easy as we had in mind. There were a few points where we knew if we walked a ways off trail we could probably find something, but we didn’t want to go too far and the one time we did follow signs for a cafe, it turned out to be closed.
However, the trail still provided snacks along the way. At two different homes, there were little tables set out with packaged homemade cookies for a small donation, which we were so grateful for. This was the first instance of what would become our saying throughout the hike: The trail will provide.
We finally came to our first cafe at 11:30, 5 1/2 hours after we started walking, when we were 20 km into our walk! We met our friend from Latvia here who had experienced the same things we had: starting out with no food, having no success with finding cafes along the trail, and being saved by cookies. This brings up two other truths that accompany the Camino: You’re never really alone, and even when you are physically alone, there’s someone not far behind or in front of you that’s having nearly the same experience you are.
We ordered a coke and pastries to share, and while we were sitting outside chatting with our friend, the store owner came out and asked if we knew about the events taking place tonight in our rest town, Ponte de Lima. As it turned out, we were arriving just in time for a yearly festival, Vacas da Cordas, part of the greater celebration of Corpus Cristi. He explained a little about what it was — basically the main event was when they took a cow(?), tied a rope to it, and had people lead it in circles around a church three times then walked it through the city streets down to the river. Of course, the language barrier made understanding the finer details of this event more mysterious and intriguing. We began referring to it as “Cow and Rope”. He warned that it would be very busy, and to make sure we had food for tomorrow because more places could be closed. We thanked him for the heads up.
We were intrigued by the “Cow and Rope”, but our immediate concern was the crowds. The albergues are not especially large, and while they are only for Pilgrims, who knew how many more would be present in the city, that possibly planned their arrival just for this event? With all this in mind, and powered by Coke and chocolate croissants, we were ready to knock out our last 5 km to Ponte de Lima. My feet were starting to ache, but I pushed on, knowing it’d be worth it to make it to the town and get to enjoy the festivities there.
As we arrived in Ponte de Lima, we were very impressed with how beautiful this town was. We walked through the Avenue of Sycamores, with a promenade of tall sycamores along either side of the path, which gave way to the main part of town, with shops, restaurants, and historic buildings all lined up on the right and the Lima river on the left. The view of the Medieval bridge spanning across the river with a historic church on the opposite side was especially picturesque. Besides all that, there were already lots of food trucks and other vendors setting up in preparation for the festival, as well as a large stage for a musical performance later.
We crossed the bridge and made our way to the Albergue, which was just a little ways North of the river. It wasn’t open yet, so we set our backpacks next to a few others at entrance to stand in as our place in line, then found a bench to sit down and rest. Our concerns about not having a spot for the night were misplaced, at least this early in the afternoon. We were #3 and 4 in line.
Our Latvian friend made it shortly after we did, and then another woman from Quebec joined us and we started chatting with her. We learned that rather than doing a traditional pilgrimage from point A to Santiago, she was making up her own path, connecting different trails together and staying in Portugal. She had walked North up the coast and was coming South on the Central, and thinking of heading East towards Braga after this. She shared a bit about what we could expect the next day, and we told her about our hike today and recommended the Albergue and restaurant we had enjoyed the night before.
When the Albergue opened, we got checked in and found our beds, then rested a bit more before venturing out. Just like our last hostel, it was only 5 Euro per person for the night. For dinner, we ate at a restaurant called the Casa de Terra, where I tried my first glass of Port and we each had sandwiches with lots of meat, just what we needed. It felt very medieval in this very medieval city. After eating, we wandered around the town a bit, stopping in to the historic jail for stamps and buying some pastries from a street vendor for breakfast the next day.
By this point, it was becoming quite crowded, and it seemed that people were already finding their places to sit and watch the “Cow and Rope” activities either in the green space near the river, or on the bridge. There were even family groups, or company sponsors with matching T-shirts for the event. We joined them on the bridge, believing the main event would start at 6 (because the cafe owner from earlier had said it was at 6) and started to wait. 6 came and went, and while our curiosity grew, standing on my very sore and blistered feet was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. I sat down and started reading to pass the time, until we learned from someone else that it would actually be starting at 8. We did not have the will to stay out that long, so instead we walked back to the Albergue for the evening. There was a large balcony off of our third-story room that provided a decent view of the field, if a little far off, so when the bull finally showed up fashionably late, we were still able to get a little idea of what was going on. As it turns out, instead of just “cow” and “rope”, two or more LONG ropes are tied to the horns of a BULL. Then the crowd uses the ropes to check the bull from charging one way or the other into the opposing crowd. People get hurt and there were multiple sirens throughout the evening. And before you ask, we don’t know what happens to the bull, but we choose to believe he is led to lush green meadows after such an ordeal. I guess it’s just one of those events that we never would have heard of if we had never come here, or came here any other time, but because we were here we were able to experience just a part of the Vacas da Cordas festival.
The festivities continued long after the bull part was over, with music going on late into the night. But after our long hike and early morning, I was exhausted and actually fell asleep before the lights were turned off in the room. I even slept through the late arrival of some of the pilgrims who had stayed out late partying!
