June 14, 2024:

Upon arriving in a town after a long stretch on the Camino de Santiago, pilgrims often stop at the first bar they see. If it’s morning, we may get a coffee and a snack, maybe some for water; later in the day it may be a beer or glass of wine to celebrate our achievement.

So the first bar in town gets a lot of traffic.

Too much, in my opinion.

On this Camino I’ve noticed I miss the true Spanish experience of a bar, so today my father and I passed the first one and stepped into Taberna Mateo in Fuentesnuevas (5.5 km After Ponferrada) on the Camino Frances.

I ordered drinks for my father and then dashed off to use the bathroom.

Upon my return, I saw the plate of tortilla de patatas sitting in front of my father. “Did you order that?” I asked.

“No,” he said. Which I should have suspected as my father speaks hardly a word of Spanish.

I asked the bartender and he said it comes with our drinks (tea for me and soda for my father).

“The pilgrims always stop at the first bar in a town. They don’t do this for the pilgrims. Here, I serve everyone something with their drink—here it doesn’t matter if you are a pilgrim or not. We are the same.”

I grabbed the fork and asked the bartender, “tortilla with or without onions?” This is the age old debate among Spaniards—they all have an opinion.

“With,” he said, smiling. I smiled back and dug in. Best tortilla I’ve had on the Camino.

A local came in and started chatting with us. “It’s like family here,” he explained. The bartender joined in the conversation between customers. The beer distributor arrived with the order. We all commiserated about the latest drug-related crime that was on the television.

After we left, my father said, “I could have stayed there for hours watching everything going on. That girl who was sitting outside with the tattoos—I think she’s the bartender’s girlfriend. Because when the beer guy pulled up, he talked to her first.”

My father left his hiking stick there by mistake. A Camino friend that was just behind us picked it up for us. The bartender told her, “An old guy left it here.” Dad is 76. He laughed when he heard this.

Both she and I speak Spanish. Would I have had this interaction otherwise? I’m not sure. But if I were about to head off on my first Camino, I’d try to pick up some Spanish as the Camino opens just a little more when you do 😁

Unless you’re my father. When people ask if he speaks Spanish, he just points to me and says, “That’s what she’s here for.” 😂

What Dad takes pictures of on the Camino.

(For those of you that are thinking that this story sounds familiar, I posted it and others on Facebook when we were on the Camino, but somehow never posted them on my blog. So I’ll be doing that over the next few days.)