San Juan de Ortega

We left Belorado at day break in the rain. It rained for 3 hours which meant we had mud and slippery rocks to deal with. We are Southern California girls and we don't hike in the rain because there's not a whole lot of it where we come from. Today we had on all our rain gear: rain pants, rain coat, gaiters for our boots and a gaiter for our neck to keep the cold out.  We crossed over the Rio Tiron and the Rio Oca.  Then we climbed up to the top of two peaks;  Alto Mojapan and Alto Pedraja.  The highest elevation was 3,773.  We passed through several small villages during the first part of the day: Tosantos, Villambistia, Epinosa and then we had lunch in Villafranca. The second half of the day we climbed, and climbed and climbed. Passing oak trees along the way and then pines trees towards the top.  We hiked for about 3 hours across the top of the mountain range where we saw huge wind turbines spinning away.  We then made our decent down to the quaint village of San Juan de Ortega. This small hamlet has one cafe, a hostel, a church some homes and that's about it. The town is named after San Juan who was a disciple of Saint Dominic and like his mentor became known for his great works to serve the pilgrim to Santiago.  The church was built in the early 1400's. San Juan is entombed in the church in a simple stone sarcophagus, shown pictured below.  In the center of the church there is a very ornate crypt of Queen Isabel of Castile also pictured below.

Today we walked 15.1 miles.  We are now over one third of the way to Santiago.  Only 340 miles to go!