Day 1 – Lisbon to Alverca do Ribatejo – 08-May-2018

The day started as expected, with a relatively early start, breakfast, packing and getting organized. We’d had a really good night’s sleep, a most welcome outcome after the two previous nights of wrestlesness and noise.

The walk today was supposed to be from Lisbon to Alverca Da Ribatejo, approximately 30 kms. However we had spoken to a number of people who had done the walk and a number of them had not been too complimentary about this stage of the walk. The walk out of the city was reportedly through much suburban, industrial and marshy areas, so we took the decision to take an Uber out of Lisbon to a place called Santa Iria Da Povoa, some 18kms out of Lisbon. This was meant to take us out of the hustle and bustle of the city and hopefully into some more palatable walking conditions. The first issue we came across was that the Uber driver didn’t really too much of an idea about where to drop us off, so we started about 1km from where we should have. We eventually reached Alverca Da Ribatejo at around 11:00am, after walking thru some really dangerous and concerning roads and intersections – not enjoyable at all. 

We stopped for coffee at a small cafe in Alverca Da Ribatejo, and being still fairly early in the day, we decided to continue on to Vila Franca De Xira, another 10 kms away. Fortunately the majority of the trail from there wasn’t too bad, although it did take some effort to walk out of this town. The last seven or eight kms was on good board walk or paved trail, always following the River Tagus, which was pleasant enough.

Some time earlier, we had met and struck up a conversation with an Ozzie lady, called Julie, from Sandy Bay in Victoria, who walked with us for the whole way to Vila Franca De Xira. 

We arrived Vila Franca De Xira at approximately 1:30 in the afternoon and started looking from accommodation. To our horror, the person at the first hostel told us there was no availability and that virtually the whole town’s hostels were booked out. Apparently there is a major festival going on in the next week at Fatima, which is about 90kms up the road, so all the pilgrim refuges have been booked out.

The lady at the hostel was most helpful and was able to find some accommodation at a hotel just out of town, so we four decided to go for that, as there was precious little else around.

We later established that the scarcity of available accommodation was going to be an issue for the next few days, but, after all, that’s life on the camino.

We had a nice lunch in Vila Franca De Xira, walked the couple of kms to our hotel and sorted ourselves out.