Portuguese Way Connecting Route

The Portuguese Way Connecting Route is a linking path of roughly 40 km between Caminha and Valença do Minho, in the north of Portugal’s Viana do Castelo district. Its function is transitional: it allows pilgrims on the Portuguese Coastal Way to leave the Atlantic shore and rejoin the inland Portuguese Way without crossing the Minho estuary by ferry to Spain.

The route turns away from the sea at Caminha and heads east along the southern bank of the Minho, the river that forms the frontier with Galicia. The corridor is narrow, hemmed between the water and the wooded slopes of the Serra de Arga, and passes through riverside parishes including Seixas, Lanhelas, Vila Nova de Cerveira with its restored fortress walls, and Gondarém. Much of the way makes use of the Ecovia do Minho, a surfaced greenway built along a former railway alignment, which keeps the walking flat and largely free of traffic.

Valença sits at the end of the route and is dominated by its seventeenth and eighteenth-century Vauban-style fortress, a double ring of bastions enclosing the old town above the river. From there the international bridge, designed in part by Gustave Eiffel’s firm and opened in 1886, carries pilgrims across to Tui in Spain.

The connection appeals to those deterred by the ferry crossing, its timetable and seasonal gaps in service, or by the exposed Spanish coastal stages beyond A Guarda. It carries fewer walkers than either of the routes it joins, and waymarking has historically been less consistent, though signage along the greenway has improved.