We Walk from Il Telegrafo to Portovenere

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The previous night we heard the thunder rolling around the hills, the forecast storms having finally arrived. However the morning was fine so it was a good time to walk the other end of Cinque Terre. We had originally considered walking the whole way from Rio Maggiore but decided that this would take too long and be quite arduous as we would have to climb a high hill called Il Telegrafo, for obvious reasons. We got a bus up to the top of the hill instead. It drove along a steep winding road with sheer drops on the right, though at least these mostly had a fence or a wall. Tamara was very glad to reach the top, where we and some other walkers had a consultation about the correct track as the signage was not all that clear. We reached a consensus and set off through the forest on a fairly gentle trail. We walked quite a lot of the way with a very nice American couple who spend a lot of their time travelling as they don’t much like being in America these days. They did not like Donald Trump at all, we haven’t met anyone who does.





The trail became steeper but still mostly in forest and zigzagged down the hill for quite a distance before climbing up to the small village of Campiglia where many of the houses have a magnificent view over the sea. Not long after this the trail was cut into steep high slopes and was quite rough underfoot so constant attention was required. The views were most impressive if rather vertiginous. Although we were descending it seemed an awfully long way to Portovenere. We passed a quarry where they extract a special black marble. The mine is underground so it does not affect the environment the way an opencast quarry does. The track descended through forest and came out above Portovenere with fine views over the old fortifications and the coast and also along to the neighbouring town of La Spezia.





We saw the local ferry coming in so we hurried to the ferry terminal where we found that our passes did not include ferry travel as we had thought. The ferrymen said they would wait so we rushed to the ticket office and ran back with our tickets, fortunately there were some other people cutting it fine. The seas were still a bit heavy so the ferry only stopped at Monterosso. The trip was well worth while as we had wonderful views of the cliffs and villages. It was a bit disconcerting to see where we had probably walked along high above the shoreline. It was still only mid afternoon so we got off the train at Vernazza, the only one of the five villages that we had not yet seen. It is probably the smallest and is very photogenic with its tiny beach, but otherwise there was not much to see so we took the train back to Rio Maggiore and had a rest before going to the neighbouring village of Manarola for dinner.





We had both remembered a whole line of attractive looking restaurants but there weren’t actually that many, however we found one that looked quite nice and were given a table just above the street from where we could see the world go by. We had another good minestrone, I think we will have to learn to make our own Ligutrian style. Tamara had an excellent pasta with octopus in hot sauce and Dave had lasagne primavera which is a vegetarian lasagne, washed down with a glass of the local wine.

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