Camino Primitivo - Etapa 1, Oviedo to Grado

13.4.2013

25.2km

Oviedo. La Iglesia de San Tirso el Real (9th Century), original Pre-Romanesque window.

Oviedo. Catedral de San Salvador, Cámera Santa (9th Century, but nearly all reconstruction after Civil War bombing).

My Camino officially began here.

Cámera Santa, Arca Santa and Cruz de los Angeles (both 10th Century).

Cámera Santa, Cruz de la Victoria (gilded in 10th Century, wooden cross inside said to have been carried by Don Pelayo at Battle of Covadonga in 722).

Cámera Santa, Santiago (left).

There are several standard directional markers for the Camino. In Oviedo, as in many cities through which it passes, they are brass scallop shells on the pavement.  (The scallop shell is one of the primary symbols of the Camino de Santiago. It is believed that it began with the medieval pilgrims who went on to the Atlantic after Santiago and picked up a scallop shell as a memento of completing their pilgrimage. The converging ridges of the shell came to symbolize the different Camino routes all leading to Santiago.)

"Let the speculators and billionaires pay for the crisis." Communist Party of Asturias graffiti in Oviedo.

Oviedo "La Florida" neighborhood monument honoring "...the first pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela by Asturian King Alphonso II, 'The Chaste'" and bidding all pilgrims who pass "Buen Camino".

Often, I came to learn, the way is marked, or the marker is supplemented by, a spray-painted yellow arrow.

This is the most standard marker style (at least on the Camino Primitivo) - the blue-and-yellow shell tile mounted on a concrete base (or, secondarily, on a wall or building).

Beginning to clear the city.

"La Florida" road and sidewalk to nowhere. I saw plenty of evidence of the financial crisis, and the overbuilding of apartments and infrastructure that helped precipitate it, in Spain anyway.

Finally in the countryside.

My first pilgrim chapel, la Capilla del Carmen, near the town of Santa María de Loriana.

An Angelus for the pilgrims posted on the door of the chapel.

The first of many - essential - pilgrim fountains, just below the chapel.

Lavandera tradicional de Lloríana - the first of many trail-side public lavanderas

for pre-plumbing pilgrims to wash their clothes and themselves along the way.

Mahou cerveza ad, posted to a fence. Effective, but gratuitously cruel to give the kilometers remaining.

The first rest stop - Casa Valdés in the village of La Bolguina.

The Way.

The second rest stop - Feliciano, indeed, after a long, hot ascent into the town of Premoño.

A Roman road.

A particularly nice example of the dozens of Asturian hórreos (elevated granaries, primarily for drying corn) I have passed already (and the hundreds I will see in the days to come). Note, too, the Camino marker tile on the farmhouse.

Romanesque bridge at Peñaflor.

3.6km to Grado, and bed.