San Millán de la Cogolla

The alarm went off at the ungodly hour of 6am. We showered, had a coffee and was actually on the road by 6.45am. It was strange to see heading out of Odeceixe that there were dozens of young Indian men stood at the roadside. It was obvious that these were migrants waiting to be picked up for cheap labour, almost certainly on the local farms. We had noticed that there were a lot of Indian lads in the costal resorts south of Lisbon, BUT, and we looked, a distinct lack of Indian restaurants.

Our journey took us back up the Atlantic coast on the route we had previously travelled down. We stopped at a petrol station outside of Vila Nova de Milfontes, where we filled up & gave Pearl a much needed wash. We continued north past the hideous looking port town of Sines, before heading east just before getting to Lisbon. We then passed Evora, apparently, and then drove along the beautiful winding well kept roads of the Alentejo wine region with it’s vineyards & numerous precariously balanced stork nests.

We skirted around the attractive looking fort town of Elvas, then crossed into Spain at the scruffy border town of Badajoz. For the next 200 odd miles we raced along a dual carriageway through the prairie like Sierra de San Pedro, passing the towns of Salamanca, Valladolid & Burgos. It was then here we turned off into the La Rioja region, that was a vista of rolling fields of mown wheat gold, sunflower yellow, vine green and dotted with attractive little terracotta coloured villages.

Eventually at 6.30pm, after 577 miles and 10 hours 18 minutes of driving, we arrived at Hosteria del Monasterio de San Millán, an enormous imposing monastery in the village of San Millán. This was our accommodation for the night. We checked in and went up to our room 201, which definitely had the wow factor, particularly the 2 large arched wooden doors that opened to reveal a balcony looking down into the courtyard.

We had reserved a table for dinner at the monastery & went down in the best clothes we had available at 8.30pm. We were initially shocked to discover that we were the only diners for the evening, so it turned out we had a waiter and a cook for our exclusive use with opera playing in the background.

The menu wasn’t cheap, but we had decided we could afford to splash out as we were ‘slumming’ it by camping for the next 5 nights. Naturally, we chose the dearest starter (to share), then we both ordered the dearest main course, with a bottle of the monastery’s own reserve red wine.

Our starter was described as COW CARPACCIO, FOIE AND MATURE CHEESE and our main as BEEF SIRLOIN WITH MUSHROOMS AND FOIE, which we ordered as medium rare. Effectively we ordered pretty much just raw beef and foie gras for both starters and mains. It was however as expected very lovely, although Jackie revealed she couldn’t understand all the fuss over foie gras, it was just “tasteless pate”.

As soon as dinner was done, we retired to bed absolutely shattered.

Song of the Day : Get Me to a Monastery by The Divine Comedy.Read more