El Palau d'Anglesola

June 7, 2022

We had a good night's sleep at the Hotel Can Peixan in Alcarràs. It is run by a friendly family who made our stay really enjoyable. Their Menu del Dia was the standard eleven euros but was a step above the run of the mill stuff. They also offered a tasting menu of regional specialties which many of the locals were tucking into on Whit Monday.

We started out this morning on the N-2 (usually demarcated on maps as the N-II) which was terribly busy. Within ten kilometers we escaped into Lleida (also known as Lérida - names in Catalonia are often in both Spanish and Catalan). Here we found a quiet route through a park that led us north of the city center.

Catedral de Santa Maria de la Seu Vella, the old Cathedral. Originally a Visigoth church, then a mosque and then back into a massively reconstructed Christian cathedral between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Phillip V turned it into a military citadel in the eighteenth century because it commanded such a good defensive position.

Then it was onto a maze of farm roads that took us via Bellvís to El Palau d'Anglesola. Mostly unsealed but seldom too rough and far better than the busy N-II.

We followed a local railway line out of Lleida.

After an unnecessary climb up to the village of Alcoletge we dropped down to some gently sloping farmland for the rest of the way.

Navigation was interesting at times. Leigh suggesting that we go left.

Yesterday I had called ahead to the municipal albergue in El Palau d'Anglesola to make sure we could stay there. It only has four beds so I wanted to be sure we would get a slot. When we arrived it turned out that four other pilgrims had booked it but we would be accommodated in the dance studio of the municipal sports center. It turned out to be a lot more spacious than the actual albergue itself so I wasn't put out at all. Jaume, the administrator of the albergue, has gone out of his way to make sure we are comfortable.

At about six thirty Jaume arrived with another peregrino, an elderly French guy from Carcassonne, from where he has walked, who looks like he is able to walk a lot further each day than most of the peregrinos we have met along the way. He has taken up residence in the far corner of the dance studio, a lot further away than if we had been in the albergue itself. He has no English and I have no French so we have spent much of the evening chatting in Spanish - sharing a glass of wine or two makes a foreign language a lot easier.

Today's ride: 41 km (25 miles)
Total: 2,624 km (1,630 miles)

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