Day 17 – Casar de Caceres to Grimaldo.  Now, this day was always going to be a bit of a challenge because the idea has been to walk from Casar de Caceres past the embalse, the big reservoir, up to a casa rural.

But that is about a 33.8 kilometer day, which is a little bit beyond me to be honest, and a lot of it was on road and it is ridiculously hot. This is actually a section where in the past the Pilgrim has died of dehydration.

The challenge is that part of the way along after 22 kilometres, there used to be an albergue that’s now been closed. One of the locals was telling us it’s all a little bit political about, you know, who runs it and so on. It was not possible to stay at an albergue at the embalse. There’s a number of different options that people often try to take. One can be to actually walk from casa de caceres to where the albergue is on the embalse and then get a taxi to pick you up to take you to Cañaveral. Another option would be to get a taxi to take you to the embalse and then walk on to Cañaveral.

Overall, we actually ended up doing a slightly different option because we were walking as a group of three at the time and one was injured, and that person spoke very good Spanish.

What we aimed to do was to walk from Casa de Caceres to pretty close to the Albergue at the embalse so which is 20 kilometres. That turned out to be a fantastic walk. I think it’s quite a new route. It’s very well signposted and it’s a beautiful track. We really made good time on that and the views were outstanding, particularly with the reservoirs from the high ground to have a look at.

The third member of our party who was injured, arranged a taxi from Casa de Caceres to pick us up at the embalse. The question there was do we get that taxi to Cañaveral? And then, because of the difficulty of some of the distances on this route that would have left us an 8K walk into Grimaldo the next day. So, they thought, let’s just get that taxi all the way into Grimaldo. We skipped through Cañaveral, and jumped off at Grimaldo. That made the planning for the next day just so much simpler.

We had an amazing Casa rural in Grimaldo. The guy who was running it had done a fantastic conversion and he gave us lots of really good information about the local area and particularly about the route coming up the next day. I’ll talk about that tomorrow. But overall, an outstanding day again on the VDLP.

We stayed at La Posada de Grimaldo, which was really nice.  And we had a washing machine and a self serve breakfast provided.  THere awsa bar and albergue just next door for lunch.