Every Macs Adventure hiking trip is shaped by people you'll probably never meet. The local partners who know which café serves the best breakfast in town, which guesthouse owner will greet you like family, and which stretch of trail needs a little extra care after winter. In our People Behind the Scenery series, we introduce you to some of them. 

This time, we're in Galicia with Laura from Tee Travel - one of our trusted local partners for over 15 years, and part of the team behind our self-guided hiking vacations on the Camino Portuguese. 

Meet Tee Travel 

Tee Travel has worked with Macs Adventure for more than 15 years, helping build self-guided hiking trips across Spain and Portugal. They're the local, on-the-ground knowledge behind the seamless bits - the hand-picked accommodation, the luggage waiting in your room, the tip about which detour is worth the extra half hour. 

You walk independently. But you're never really walking alone. 

Time To Fall In Love With a Place 

Ask Laura what makes a walking trip different from any other kind of trip, and she doesn't talk about kilometers or castles. She talks about connection. 

"When you're doing the type of trips that Macs offers – walking and hiking – you really have time to get a connection with the place," she says. "Of course, with the landscape, but also with people, with locals, with the food." 

That's the quiet magic of traveling at three miles an hour. You're not ticking off cities from a coach window or racing between airports. You spend days in one region, moving through it slowly enough to notice things. 

"You’re not jumping from one place to another, but you spend some time in a region," Laura explains. "So, you really can fall in love with that place – because you really know the place." 

On the Camino Portuguese, that means mornings walking through eucalyptus woods and vineyards, lunchtimes lingering over pulpo and padrón peppers, and evenings chatting with hosts who've welcomed pilgrims for generations. It all adds up to something a beach vacation can't touch. 

Walking Vacations That Keep Villages Alive 

For Laura and the Tee Travel team, the Camino isn't just a route on a map. It's an economy, a community, and in many cases, the reason people can stay in the villages where they grew up. 

"The Camino Portuguese is actually very important in the region because it allows people to live and work in the places they were born," she says. "That's great for us." 

It's easy to think of sustainable travel purely in terms of carbon and plastic. Laura sees it more broadly. 

"Sustainability is not only about environmental sustainability. It's also about making sure people have good jobs in their own places," she says. "That's really good for the area – and it helps preserve many of the rural places, and the trails themselves." 

Every night you spend in a family-run guesthouse, every meal in a village restaurant, every luggage transfer handled by a local driver - it all feeds back into the communities along the way. Rural trails stay maintained because people walk them. Villages stay lived-in because walkers keep coming. It's a virtuous circle, and self-guided hikers are right at the heart of it. 

The community of the Camino 

If you've walked any Camino de Santiago route, you'll know the feeling Laura describes next. There's a camaraderie on the trail that's hard to explain until you've experienced it - the "buen Camino" greetings, the familiar faces reappearing at café stops, the shared sense of heading somewhere together. 

"It's really nice how people create that community on the Camino," Laura says. "And we're very proud to be part of it." 

Walk the Camino Portuguese with Macs Adventure 

The Camino Portuguese – both central and coastal routes - is one of the most rewarding ways to reach Santiago de Compostela - a gentler, quieter alternative to the Camino Francés, winding north from Portugal through Galicia's green river valleys and historic towns. 

With Macs Adventure, you'll walk it self-guided: accommodations booked, luggage transfers arranged, and daily routes in the app, with local partners like Tee Travel making sure everything runs smoothly on the ground. All you need to do is walk - and maybe fall in love with the place, just like Laura says. 

Watch the video to meet Laura and hear why the Camino Portuguese means so much to the people who call it home.

Ready to start planning? Explore our Camino Portuguese hiking vacations or browse the full range of Camino de Santiago routes to find the one that's calling you.