BURGOS TO VILLAFRANCA MONTES DE OCA – 43 miles return
From our lovely leafy campsite near Burgos, Camping Fuentes Blancas (22euros), we cycled east along the bank of the Rio Arlanzon and joined the Camino going contraflow. Unfortunately the Trail was right next to a main road for the first few miles, with lorries thundering past. It didn’t take us long before the Camino forked off into the hills, but we felt sorry for the walkers who would have spent much longer next to the traffic before arriving at Burgos.
This is the first time we’ve experienced this and we are now more than a third of the way along The Way, 175 miles from St Jean Pied de Port and 308 miles from Santiago de Compostella. Between cities, most of the Camino has been through the Spanish countryside.
Our ride took us past Yacimientos de Atapuerca, an archeological site where human remains were found dating to more than 1 million years ago. (We saw the exhibits in the Museum of Human Evolution in Burgos.)
Then we headed into the countryside and the hills, through forests and finally came to a memorial to 300 people who were executed by Franco’s supporters at the beginning if the Civil War in 1936.
After spending some time and thoughts about these atrocities, we made a huge detour to avoid navigating a very steep rocky hill with our bikes. This took us down a track which felt like no one had encountered for a long time, thick woods to both sides where it felt like bears and wolves could be lurking. And then Penny ran over an old rusty piece of barbed wire, she sped off hoping and praying it hadn’t caused a puncture as we were now an hour late for Jessie. Fortunately no puncture materialised, and after half an hour we saw a combine harvester in the distance cutting sunflowers. What a relief!
The rest of the ride was at break neck speed to get back before Jessie woke up and started barking for her food.
