Another stunning day hike along the cliffs of Galicia.
We started the day with a bonus stop at the Igrexa de Santo André do Hío.
This rural church seems small, but inside it is exceptionally lovely. The pale stone with white and silver accents gives the church an eerie, haunted feeling. Maybe “magical” is a better word.
We hopped back in the car and headed to the Playa de Nerga and made our route following the cliffs along the small peninsula.
We walked along the beach a ways. It was covered in large vieira shells. I have never seen so many in one place! It was really hard not to stuff our pockets full of shells and weigh ourselves down at the beginning of the hike.
And then of course… the UP. There was a lot of UP this trip. Strava recorded about 425m elevation gain, but it felt like more. It is funny to me that since moving to Galicia, half of my photos are at an angle, but it is a little difficult to figure out which way is level sometimes.
Once we reached the top, the path smoothed out a little. There were some ruins to explore as well as some incredible views.
We were able to shed the long sleeves and hoodies. We had anticipated a gray day, maybe a little rain as to be expected in Galicia in early spring, but the sun burned off the cloud cover around midday. We ended up getting a bit warm as there is a lot less wind here than the northern Costa de Morta.
We made our way down to the next beach.
And back up again… to the Faro de Punta Robaleira
At some point, we stopped for lunch on a rocky ledge that overlooked the whole coast in every direction.
And we found O Facho de Donón. It is an old roman sanctuary that is part of an ongoing excavation of a large castro.
This is where we turned our path to circle back. We repeated the same path back through Donón, then turned inward, away from the coast, to skip the peninsula and head back to the car. If you follow me on Strava, be sure you dont repeat my path unless you have thick pants and solid hiking boots. This inland path was a trail for jabali. My friend suffered a bit and said we were going “como cabritas” which has been an ongoing joke since.
I am not sure how it is possible that we somehow had to go up so much to go down. The path back down the mountain was at least a third uphill. My legs were a bit dead by then.
Round trip was a little over 17km, and took almost 5 hours with exploring the castro and taking lunch. We made it back to Playa Nerga with little time to spare. We watched the sunset before heading back to the car.
PigTailz 