It's been 8 years since I haven't been to Portugal and 12 from my first visit, that's why I was very much looking forward coming back one third time to see the northern part of the country. Walking the Camino de la costa gave me the chance to see the part that goes from Oporto to a pretty small fishing town bordering Spain called Camihna. From there the only way to go to Spain is to jump on a small motor boat and cross the Mihno river, for a crossing that lasts only a couple of minutes.
Once you leave Oporto and the surrounding towns of Matosihnos the rest is pretty much a smooth walk along the ocean on a series of comfortable wooden pathways, going through town after town in a sort of magical portuguese realism, made of old careful people that don't speak anything but portuguese and are there to greet and support pilgrims in all their needs.
This corner of Europe has definitely been left back in time and that contributes to give to northern Portugal a certain charm. Being autumn the weather was a bit rough, the rain poured down heavily during a good part of the trip and the stormy ocean gave a certain romanticism to the whole adventure.
The dark poetry of Fernando Pessoa came into my mind during those days ("I am nothing. I will never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.") and I guess his very introspective and almost depressing vision of the human kind must have had something to do with all of this.
Another remarkable thing that I noticed on the camino were the bridges of Gustave Eiffel. Eiffel was a french civil engineer, mostly famous for the construction of the Eiffel tower, a very nationalistic monument aimed to represent french modernity in the World's Fair of 1889. Eiffel is also present in Portugal on a number of different bridges, the most famous one is the puente Maria Pía, part of the former railway station that divides the city of Porto from Villa Nova de Gaia but there is another one I had the chance to walk on entering Viana do Castelo and one in Camihna.
