My Journey to Santiago de Compostela Part XIII
We left Tosantos before sunrise. The moon was full and gorgeous. A strange thing happened to us while it was still dark. While the entire Camino was signaled with a yellow arrow every two hundred meters or less, we used an app called CaminoNinja to find our way. At one intersection, the yellow arrow pointed to the left away from the trail we were following. So we turned left and followed another group of pilgrims headed that way. After we had walked about two hundred meters, we realized that we had taken the wrong way and we could corroborate this on CaminoNinja. We screamed at the group ahead of us to come back but they could not hear us. We had a strange feeling that that arrow had been placed by someone wanting to get us off the trail to maybe rob us. We had our lanterns but it was so dark we could not see very far. Thankfully, we were able to get back on track and resume our journey to Atapuerca.
After crossing Villafranca Montes de Oca, a nice little town of 114 souls, we went on to climb to Montes de Oca (altitude 1.130 meters) and through the forest, quite a nice stroll with a drop in temperature for a change but luckily no rain. The next 11 kilometers were slightly downhill to San Juan de Ortega, a very small town with 26 inhabitants and although it is a typical overnight stop on the Camino, we decided to walk another 6 kilometers to Atapuerca so the journey to Burgos would be shorter the next day.
“The deposits of the Sierra de Atapuerca are located about 15 km east of the city of Burgos. They began to have special scientific and social relevance after the discovery of the remains of Sima de los Huesos in 1992, and the discovery, two years later, of human remains (over 900,000 years old) that defined a new species known as Homo Ancestor. Fossil remains and evidence of the presence of five different hominid species have been found in the sites of the Sierra de Atapuerca: Homo sp . (yet to be determined, 1,300,000 years), Homo antecessor (850,000 years), pre-neanderthal (500,000 years), Homo neanderthalen sis (50,000 years), and Homo sapiens. “
We visited the monument where the excavations took place and wanted to visit the museum but unfortunately, it was closed.
So we simply went to our albergue for a shower, do some laundry and search for a place to have dinner. At dinner, I met Amanda, from Jersey (an island in the English Channel) and Susanne from Denmark. We engaged in a nice spiritual conversation which led to us planning to walk together the next day and find a place in the forest to do a group meditation.
