We made an early start, not stopping for breakfast before we left. The noisy, late arriving guests turned out to be a hoard of national police and armed to the teeth. Good thing I didn’t go out and tell them to quiet down!
It was an easy departure out of La Junta and we were relieved to see good waymarking, both the red and white stripes connoting the GR 245 and yellow camino arrows. Because this route is much less walked, for the first sections we only had a somewhat dated PDF guide that gave us a more sketched in overview, but not the detailed route description and pointers that we usually have from our favourite source of camino information, gronze.com. And hence our relief to be able to relax into following the arrows and other markers. We also had our offline map, Organic Maps, with GPX tracks downloaded, which was another good source of information about the route.
There were places where improvements to the camino were being made, but also a couple of narrow places to squeeze by the traffic, including one on a bridge but luckily the cars here were respectful. The morning light was beautiful and the air still fresh. After the series of storms we encountered while we walked the Portuguese Camino in October, it felt somewhat miraculous to be in shorts and t-shirts in early November.
The first climb took us up past citrus groves being harvested by Arabic speakers. The ascent got steeper and steeper and we took it very slowly knowing we had all the time we needed with just a 12 kilometre day. Luckily the descent was much more gradual. Then another climb up in among scattered houses and olive trees. We stopped to chat with one man who was harvesting his trees – he has about 50 – that he’ll have pressed for oil for his own and his family’s consumption. As we continued to climb it was wonderful to look back at where we’d come. And then eventually we were high enough to look back and see the Mediterranean—and was that Africa on the horizon? Not sure but I think perhaps it was.
The descent into Almogía was on a steep narrow path followed by a steep sidewalk ascent into the town itself. And on and on, up and up. It turned out the municipal albergue (pilgrim hostal) was the only accommodation in town, and we finally located it, tucked in next to the playing courts. A friendly man who was passing by on bicycle was a civil defense volunteer so let us in, showed us around and left us to fill in the paperwork. This was our first municipal albergue on this trip. For our Portuguese camino, we’d booked ahead into small hotels or private albergues, places we could have our own room. Partly we don’t sleep well in dorms and partly we were just emerging from the very narrow world we’d lived through with Covid and felt our own room would be safer.
But, with nothing else on offer, the albergue was very welcome. There were four sets of bunks, so room for eight pilgrims. An entrance area had a microwave and a couple of chairs, so we knew we could do some food and we’d seen a Día grocery store as we’d searched for the albergue.
We showered and then had a delicious lunch at the nearby Hostal Posada del Almogía. This had been on our list of places to stay but when we inquired they weren’t housing guests at the moment. But it was a friendly place for settling in at an outdoor table among the locals and whiling away the afternoon.
Two more pilgrims arrived at the albergue late in the afternoon (just as I was thinking we might have this place to ourselves). They were exhausted after their stage from Málaga and it had me feeling pleased about having divided it into two shorter days. We enjoyed a walk around the upper part of the town including beautiful views of all the whites houses below bathed in sunset colours, restocked groceries and returned to the Posada for a glass of wine, indoors this time since the evening had cooled off.