Short Last Stage to Fatima
31 July 2025
We rise early and start walking at 6:20. The sunrise is great to see. I normally don’t start this early but this is a real good idea to start the day in a special way.
The good thing to start walking from Ourem, is that this stage is not so long, so you have lots of energy to enter the mysterious city and see all the things you will want to see! The distance is 15 km to the Sanctuary but we take the touristic route which adds 2-3 km. We like to show you all!
We didn’t see any cafes. Nothing to drink or eat. We enter Fatima via the ‘backdoor’. At the end of the route there is a small dirt road with lots of stones which goes up to Fatima. It is in the shadow. In Winter this road becomes a stream. When you enter the village you’ll see a house being renovated, already for a long time. Looks like they will never finish. You see an ugly cement thing, which we cannot call a house yet. They are working on the street, so there is not a nice ‘entre’ to the real thing here.
A few moments later you see a church where the shepherd children were baptised. It is closed, but if it is open, you can enter and buy some religious souvenirs.
The Chief Pilgrim wants to go to the Sanctuary first. This is for him the most important place. Every day he prays with them the rosary at 18:30-19:00. Today he can be there the whole afternoon and evening praying!
House in Aljustrel and Angels in Valinhos
Walking into Fatima I see that we enter the village Aljustrel. This is the village where the sheperds lived. We go there. I like to see all again, and show the Chief Pilgrim the houses of the children. He goes to Fatima twice a year but strange enough he never visited their houses. The village is very touristic but that is okay, we just go into the house of Francisco and Jacinta, the house of their family on the other side of the road, where they were when the pestilence broke out, and where the boy died, At the end of the street we visit the house of Lucia.
Then we continue to the place where they met the angels and Maria once. We also walk to Valinhos, there they met angels too, and the Via sacra to the Sanctuario in Fatima starts there, This is a very nice route to follow before going to Fatima. No cars, just a sacred path. From Aljustrel I didn’t follow the signs Carmelita anymore, but I saw a similar Fatima arrow. It says Medio Tejo. Just follow these!
Finishing the Via Sacra, you are on a normal busy road, where we see the roundabout with nice statues of the Children.
Hotel Ribeiro with Bacalhau
Now we head to our two star hotel Ribeira, next to the Bacalhau restaurant! It is unbelievable that we pay 25 euros for two beds in a private room. When I went in 12 October I looked for hotels too, and all including this one was more than 100-200 euro and a lot hotels work with a minimum stay of 3 nights.
Again we didn’t see a pilgrim walking. When you see the news about pilgrimages it looks crowded but it is not here in mid Portugal. They all start in Porto and walk to Santiago. This one new documentary of BBC is about Fatima road and pilgrims!
Have a look, an interesting documentary about the pilgrimage in Portugal.
