Monte Alba

     It was a sunny 20 degree day in Vigo (70 in fahrenheit) so I went hiking with four friends. Some of my friends had told me that you could take an urban bus in Vigo to several mountains, including Monte Galiñeiro and Monte Alba. I met Nicole 3 years ago when I studied in Sevilla, Spain because we have several friends in common and now she is living in Vigo and teaching English as well. And the other three girls are German, Portuguese and French and we met them because Nicole and I study Portuguese at the Official Language School and Maren, Vanille and Diana are language assistants in the language school. So the common language among us all is Spanish.
      We all got on the bus at different times and were sitting all together, when we passed a nice park (the biggest green area in Vigo) Diana asked me what it was and a lady beside us talked about the park. We started talking and she asked us where we were from and asked us about our plan. She suggested we get off at a different bus stop than we had planned and hike Monte Alba instead of Monte Galiñeiro. A girl in her 20s was also sitting close to us on the bus and told us that she lives near the bus stop and could show us how to get to the trail. She told us to follow a road until we saw signs for a trail, but we never found the trail so we just stayed on the road, but that wasn't so bad at all, because we still had many nice views of Vigo, the bay, and the Cíes islands.

Roadside chestnut collecting.

The dreaded selfie stick photo

A little off-roading

      We saw smoke and realised that we had made it to a restaurant. We only stopped for a drink because of time restraints, but next time we are definitely planning on eating there because there were so many people eating there and everything looked delicious. Now we know why there were so many cars passing us in the middle of nowhere, plus the lady we talked to on the bus told us it was really good.

This was the first time I had ever taken a city bus to go hiking and it definitely won't be the last. Not having a car shouldn't limit your experiences!


We didn't actually ever walk on a trail for more than five minutes, but once I figure all that out, I will post bus stop information and directions to the trail from the bus stop.