TOMAR (Portugal)

In December 2022, we started sharing a series on our blog with cities we encountered on the Portuguese Camino. We walked this Camino in March/April 2018. We are now continuing these posts. In case you forgot, here is the first big city we started walking from:

  • Lisbon was beautiful, old charm and very hilly! We started our 620km walk from here – a walk that took us 26 days to complete. You can read about our first big city on the Portuguese Camino here.

The cities on the Portuguese Camino are not as big as those on the Camino Frances in Spain. But that doesn’t mean it was any less attractive. We are again going to show some photos of the smaller towns/villages on our way.

Our first big city after Lisbon was Tomar. It took us 5 days and 167km to walk from Lisbon to Tomar. This meant that we walked a distance of more than 30km every day. Here are some of the highlights from those first five days:

Day 1: Verdelha de Baixo (32.7km):

It took us a long time to leave Lisbon behind. After about 8km we reached the Expo ’98 Maritime Park (Parque das Nacoes). Here we saw the amazing Vasco da Gama Bridge. This bridge, with a total length of 17km, was the longest bridge in Europe when it was opened in 1998.

Vasco da Gama Bridge

Beautiful tiled building in Vila Franca de Xira

(You can read about the hiking of Day 1 here)

Day 2: Azambuja (32.4km)

The biggest surprise on this day was the amazing murals we saw on a river path at Alhandra. Here are pictures of just two of them, but I think there must have been about 8 or 9 of these very creative murals.

Mural of a pilgrim

A dog on a leash

(You can read about the hiking of Day 2 here)

Day 3: Santarem (33.2km)

This was a day of walking through beautiful green farm fields. We also saw our first ancient Roman road.

Early mornings on the Camino are the best

Lovely shades of green on our walk

(You can read about the hiking of Day 3 here)

Day 4: Golega (34.4km)

We started walking in sunshine and ended the day in heavy rain showers! We walked through our fair share of mud, but also enjoyed beautiful scenery.

Here I’m trying to dry out in the village of Vale da Figueira

We saw lovely cork trees and a lot of mud

Threatening clouds and a green field

(You can read about the hiking of Day 4 here)

Day 5: Tomar (32.1km)

I woke up with a swollen and painful ankle and at one point considered taking the train instead of walking. But I pushed on, which I was very happy about, because we walked through beautiful forests.

A 16th century Parish church in Atalaia

Steep hill in a woodland

Bench with lovely tiled background

(You can read about the hiking of Day 5 here)

Tomar:

When we arrived in Tomar, we went straight to our accommodation, Hostel 2300 Thomar. Our room overlooked a cobbled street with lots of bars. I promise, I don’t know how we manage to choose our accommodation so well every time!

The view from our balcony and that very first beer after a long walk

Tomar was the last Templar town to be commissioned for construction and one of Portugal’s historical jewels. It was constructed under the orders of Gualdim de Pais, the 4th Grand Master of the Knights Templar of Portugal in the late 12th century. (Wikepedia)

Republic Square (Praça da República) with the statue of Gualdim Pais

Restaurants along Republic Square

Fascinating door

We stayed a second day in Tomar to rest … and well, also because of my inexplicably swollen ankle/foot.

(You can read about our rest day in Tomar here)

A significant difference between left and right

As mentioned, Tomar is an ancient city with so much history and our rest day was actually ideal to explore this city. There is the castle, a medieval synagogue and some lovely churches to see.

But in the end, we just enjoyed a super nice lunch in one of the back streets and then crossed the Nabao River over the old bridge Ponte Velha to walk around the park and gardens.

Our view while enjoying lunch

Sunday lunch

Crossing the Nabao River over the old bridge Ponte Velha

Views of the city with the castle in the background

The next day we had to make a difficult decision:

  • Would I be able to walk further?
  • Should we end our Camino here?
  • What other alternatives do we have?

We will tell you all about it in our next post about big cities on the Portuguese Camino.

In Tomar