The Camino leaves Sarria across a medieval bridge and climbs almost immediately into oak and chestnut woodland, the kind of trail where your boots find a rhythm before your brain catches up. The 22-kilometer stage to Portomarín took me just under six hours, with a coffee stop in Morgade and a longer break in Ferreiros, where the 12th-century Igrexa de Santa María still stands beside the path.

Portomarín itself is a strange, moving story. The original town was flooded in the 1960s when the Belesar reservoir was built, and its Romanesque church, the Iglesia de San Xoán, was dismantled and rebuilt stone by stone on higher ground. I crossed the long footbridge over the reservoir at dusk, watched swallows cutting low over the water, and found a bed at Albergue Ferramenteiro for around 12 euros.

This was the longest stage of my week, about 25 kilometers through a landscape that shifts between eucalyptus plantations and dense oak forest. The path rolls rather than climbs, but by hour four the rolling starts to feel personal. I stopped for a bocadillo and a café con leche at Casa Domingo in Ligonde, where a wall covered in pilgrim credentials from decades past made the whole thing feel less like a hike and more like a relay.

Palas de Rei doesn't have the drama of Portomarín, but it has something better after a long day: an albergue with a working washing machine and a bar serving caldo galego, the white bean and greens broth that Galicia seems to produce automatically once the temperature drops.

At Melide, about 14 kilometers into the day, the Camino Francés merges with the Camino Primitivo, and the town's pulperías fill with pilgrims from both routes comparing blisters over plates of octopus. I ate lunch at Ezequiel, a pulpería serving pulpo a la gallega, boiled octopus sliced onto a wooden platter and dusted with smoked paprika and coarse salt, since the 1970s. A ración runs about 12-16 euros and easily feeds two people who've just walked half a marathon.

The final stretch into Arzúa runs through farmland dotted with hórreos, the raised stone granaries scattered across the Galician countryside. Arzúa gives its name to a DOP cheese, queso de Arzúa-Ulloa, and I bought a wedge from a small shop near the church to eat with bread on the trail the next morning.

At 19 kilometers, this was the shortest day of the week and the one where I finally stopped checking my watch. The trail crosses several small rivers on stone and wood footbridges and passes through hamlets barely large enough to have a name on the map, let alone a bar. I ate a simple pilgrim menu, soup, grilled trout, flan, and a glass of Ribeiro wine, for about 12 euros at a roadside albergue outside Salceda.

O Pedrouzo has grown into a proper pilgrim town, with several albergues, a supermarket, and the last real opportunity to buy blister plasters before Santiago. I went to bed early, aware that Monte do Gozo and the cathedral were less than 20 kilometers away.

The final 20 kilometers begin in eucalyptus forest and end, abruptly, on a hill called Monte do Gozo, the Hill of Joy, where medieval pilgrims first glimpsed the cathedral's spires. From there the Camino drops into Santiago's outskirts, past the airport road, through a stretch of roundabouts and apartment blocks that nobody photographs, before the old town's granite streets take over completely.

I walked under the Arco do Franco and into the Praza do Obradoiro at almost exactly 1 p.m., which is when the square fills with pilgrims lying flat on their backs, packs still on, staring up at the cathedral's baroque west facade. I queued at the Pilgrim's Office on Rúa Carretas, the wait ran close to an hour, and left with my Compostela certificate and a distance certificate noting the exact kilometers walked.