Vía de la Plata
27.5 km, 5 m up and 135 m down, through 2 places, 1 of which has somewhere to sleep. Where you stop is up to you.
Every place on the path in order, with the distance from Almendralejo. Most are too small to sleep in — a fountain, a chapel, a bar that may or may not be open — but they are what the day is actually made of.
If you made your way to the N-630 while in Torremejía there is no need to retrace your steps. Follow it out of town and you will rejoin the camino which emerges from your right. If follows adjacent to the road before arrows and a bollard direct you towards a path on your right. It passes the Ence Mérida factory and heads straight to the outskirts of Mérida where the arrows are a bit unclear. When you emerge onto the road you will see ahead of you a bridge over the river; you need to follow the trail (not the road) which passes underneath that bridge. It leads directly to a small riverside park and at the end of the park is the pedestrian bridge over the río into Mérida.
Once over the bridge the camino immediately turns left to follow a path along the river, avoiding altogether any meaningful entrance into the city of Mérida.
The camino does not make any real entrance into the oldest parts of Mérida and with the exception of the Alcazaba (the castle at the end of the bridge) and the Acueducto de Los Milagros it avoids passing any of the most significant buildings in the city.
From the shadow of the aqueduct, the camino proceeds northward to a set of roundabouts. At the first roundabout it bears left, and at the second roundabout, it does the same to follow along with the Avenida del Lago to Proserpina.
Distances are the sum of the town-to-town measurements in my data, not a straight line on a map. Climb and descent come from the altitude of each place listed above, so they under-read where the path goes over a hill between two of them.
Esta entidad ha sido beneficiaria de una ayuda del Programa de incentivos a la movilidad eficiente y sostenible (MOVES III), gestionado por la Xunta de Galicia a través del Instituto Enerxético de Galicia (INEGA) en el marco del Real Decreto 266/2021, y cofinanciada por la Unión Europea — NextGenerationEU, dentro del Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia.