A group of pilgrims gather at Saint Mary-on-the-Rock, Ellon, at 5-15am to join the bus, which takes us to Aberdeen Airport for the 6-40am flight to Heathrow Airport.  In London we check in for the 9-35am flight to Lisbon.

We arrive at 12-05pm and pass through the airport formalities to meet Manuel Alves, who is our guide, and Baptista our driver - Guia and Motorista in Portuguese.

We leave the Hotel Cristal at 9-30am and travel the 28 kilometres to Fatima, where between May and October 1917 the Virgin Mary appeared to three children. In 1917 it was a tiny place, today the population of the town is 7,500 and it attracts four million visitors a year.

The visitors come because on May 13th 1917 three shepherd children – Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta – saw a vision of Our Lady. However, only 10 year old Lucia could hear both her request that the children return on the 13th day of each month for the next six months and the other messages that she gave them.

We pack and leave the Hotel Cristal at 9-0am and travel through Nazare where a statue of Our Lady is said to have been brought from Nazareth.  The statue was “lost” in the fourth century , “rediscovered” in the 18th and is now in the Church on the Promontorio do Sitio, three hundred feet above the beach.

We travel on to Alcobaca, a small town of 5000 people, in the centre of which is the former Cistercian Monastery of Santa Maria, a UNESCO world heritage site.

We leave the Hotel Ofir at 9-30am and drive the 30 kilometres to Porto, Portugal’s second largest city, with a population of 325,000. In Roman times there was a settlement on the south side of the river Douro, near its mouth, called Cale and this became an important crossing on the Lisbon to Braga road. Eventually another settlement, Portus (harbour) grew up on the north bank and Portus-Cale gave its name to the county of Portcalia, which lay between the Douro and Minho rivers. Henri of Burgundy was given this land on his marriage to the daughter of the King of Leon in 1095 and from here his son Alfonso Henriques began the Reconqista that eventually led to the independent Kingdom of Portugal.

We leave the hotel at 9-0am and head for the “Cradle of the Portuguese Nation”, the town of Guimaraes, which now has a population of 22,000. It was in Guimaraes in 1110 that Alfonso Henriques was born and from here twenty years later that the Reconquista, the battles against the Moors, was begun.

Alfonso was recognised as King of Portucale in 1143 and made Coimbra his capital, but Guimaraes still regards itself as the nation’s first capital.

An early start for the key day of our pilgrimage. We leave the hotel soon after 7-0am and drive north towards Spain. We pass through Vianna do Castelo and later travel along the banks of the Minho river, which forms the border with Spain, to the town of Valenca do Minho where we meet the motorway which leads to Santiago de Compostela.   We make a coffee stop close to Pontevedra and arrive in Santiago soon after 10-0am, 11-0am Spanish time as Spain is an hour ahead of Portugal.

A final, and leisurely, breakfast at the Ofir and we say farewell to Peter and Tricia, who are staying another day before returning to Spain for a visit to Toledo.  Then at 10-0am we travel southward to Lisbon, making a lunch stop near Coimbra.  We arrive in Lisbon soon after 3-0pm and have a confusing afternoon. 

The hotel phones ring with a wake-up call just before 5-0am and we load the luggage on the coach by 6-0am.  Breakfast in the dining room at 6-15am and then the short journey to the airport.  We say our farewells to Manuel and Baptista and extra gifts of whisky and shortbread are given.