El Camino, (“the Way”) as everyone who has anything to do with it calls it, is the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostella. There are many routes from all over Europe and in Spain itself, but el Camino usually means the most popular route the Camino Frances, (“the French Way”) from Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees. We started, however, six years ago, in le Puy, in the middle of France, about 700 kilometres from the Pyrenees. This is one of the oldest established paths and now the most popular. It starts high in the Auvergne and goes up and down over the limestone plateaux and across the rivers of South West France, to the wet and wealthy Basque country; then over the Eastern end of the Pyrenees to Pamplona and Logrono and on East to Burgos and crossing the high plateau of central Spain to Leon where the route turns north-west to Galicia, the last Spanish province which one crosses.
The path itself is important to the walker and those who start it in France face a disappointment in Spain. In France the route is mostly agricultural tracks, sometimes paths through wood and sometimes along quiet country roads. Only on coming into a town does one follow a main road. Perhaps half of the route in France could be driven by a really determined 4-wheel driver and for long stretches we saw no cars at all. Spain is quite different; as a rule the path is parallel to a main road, and sometimes a motorway. In the Spanish mountains there are rocky paths (but with them the threat of being run down by a mountain bike on a downward slope). Special tunnels to take you under motorways; a less fortunate development is laying blocks of crazy paving on the path as it enters a village; the flat concrete is very hard on sore feet! However, with an increasing annual average of well over 100,000 pilgrims, it is understandable that management and conservation are important. The local ayuntamiento has sometimes also planted trees along the path, which will certainly be welcome in about 20-30 years. Rather less useful are the picnic areas with white concrete benches and barbeques but no shade, and usually positioned about half a kilometre outside the town. Any walker knows that the town will have bars with refrigerated drinks and restaurants with food you don’t have to cook or carry yourself , it was not surprising that we never saw a soul using these monuments to misplaced municipal enthusiasm, not even a child on a forlorn slide or swing.
The medieval guide books which describe the Way, but they only say you go from A to B and naturally pilgrims in the middle ages would not hesitate to take the main road to their destination. The idea of taking a pleasant walk through a wood or over hills would not have occurred to them So, unless it is passing some holy fountain or hermit’s chapel, the path you walk, especially in France, is probably not that which pilgrims trod a thousand years ago.
Nevertheless, there is a strong sense of history and even continuity and place and there are also many physical traces of the centuries of pilgrimage. Most obviously, numerous churches are dedicated to St James and have a chapel or at least a statue of him in his pilgrim mode, with hat and cape blazoned with scallop shells and staff with a water gourd. (This is not his only mode: he is also, rarely, shown as an apostle and fisherman, and much more often as a ‘Matamoros’ – the crusading knight, “killer of the moors”. In this mode he came to represent the force for good, with the unfortunate moor cowering beneath his rearing horse representing evil. In the pilgrimage museum in Santiago there is a fascinating twist to this: an 18th century silver statuette of Santiago Matamoros from Peru. Here Santiago is a native Peruvian and the wicked crouching figure about to be trampled is an evil Spanish colonialist!) Scallop shells are everywhere – sculpted in stone on walls, set in bronze in the pavement, mimicked in railings and on every signpost. They were, I suspect, the medieval equivalent of way marks; the red and white flash of the GR 65 in France, and the iconic yellow arrow pointing the way in Spain. Every pilgrim has a scallop shell hanging from his or her rucksack, and I had a little gourd too.
One is conscious that the pilgrim route in the Middle Ages was far from a provincial affair. The architecture, and especially the sculpture, which one sees in the cities, and surprisingly small towns, too, has a decidedly metropolitan feel. Many of the high points of Romanesque sculpture and architecture are to be found on the route: Moissac and Conques in France, the capitals of the destroyed cloisters at Pamplona and the sublime Puerta de la Gloria of Santiago itself. Burgos and Leon have Gothic cathedrals and monasteries of capital importance – they were indeed capital cities, but, wonderful as they are, they don’t owe their splendour to the pilgrim route. There is much fine, if sometimes slightly austere, baroque architecture, often in monastic foundations which clearly enjoyed prosperity in Spain in the 17th and 18th centuries. The austerity is possibly my ex post facto feeling after experiencing (merely seeing doesn’t do it justice) the facade of Santiago cathedral, where the outrageously exuberant baroque façade, encasing the pretty pure Romanesque interior, generates an excitement that only the inevitable shower of rain will quell.
The landscape is, as you would expect on a 1,400km walk, varied: on the whole we found France prettier and grander. There are no big cities on the French route; in Spain the urban sprawl of Burgos, Leon and Ponferrada would have been depressing had we walked through them; in fact we had no hesitation in taking a bus. Through Navarre it was generally wide open country with long vistas to distant mountains and the white windmills- in fact you are never out of sight of mountains in Spain, nor the white windmills generating electricity which cover them. Passing through La Rioja we saw surprisingly few vines (but plenty of wine!). Between Burgos and Leon one crosses the ‘meseta’, the high undulating plateau of central Spain that is now one vast wheat field (in pre-mechanised times it was famous for merino sheep, and its cheese, Manchego, is still traditionally made of ewe’s milk and very good.) As you get closer to Santiago there are two mountain ranges of about 5,000 feet to cross with a charming vine and fruit growing region, the Bierzo in between them. After the second range we seemed to come down much further than we had gone up – and indeed, Galicia is much lower than central Leon and Castile. It is green and wet and rolling country very like Wales or Cornwall and equally conscious of its Celtic origins.
We had snow on the mountains of Leon in April the day after the sun had burnt my nose; climbing up the Pyrenees in October we had glorious hot sunshine and views of blue mountains stretching out forever on the first day and freezing sleet the second. The extremes of heat and cold in the summer and winter are more predictable.
The majority of Pilgrims are walking, mostly carrying their own packs; as one gets nearer to Santiago the number of cyclists increases. In France once we met a delightful hippy-ish family coming back; the small children and a cat were riding a donkey; larger children and dogs followed with bearded and beaded mum and dad leading the donkey and bringing up the rear. In the hills before Burgos we fell in with an intrepid Belgian couple pushing – and sometimes carrying – a buggy, with an enchanting two-year-old, Manon, who was just learning to walk. It was tough for them not least because every time they stopped for a rest, out came Manon to start tottering back and forth.
The thing that puts most people off when we talk about the Camino is the accommodation. Most pilgrims, especially in Spain, stay in ‘Albergues’ or ‘Refugios’, hostels with dormitories of bunk beds. There are plenty of other options – hotels and rooms in cafes – and they are often not much more expensive than privately run hostels. Municipal hostels and those run by monasteries or associations of St James, foreign and Spanish, tend to charge about 5 or 6 euros or they are free, though a ‘donativo’ is expected. Private hostels are not necessarily more comfortable, nor as clean, charge twice as much.
Undeniably, there some snags with the hostels: the first is other people snoring and, perhaps worse, the fear that one is probably keeping others awake with one’s own snoring. They are also the only institutions in Spain which close early, by Spanish standards, in the evening, and throw you out by 7.30 or 8 in the morning, when for much of the year it’s still dark and nothing will open for another two hours, unless you are lucky and an enterprising cafe is serving breakfast to a captive market. This enforced early start does mean that one can have walked a good day’s stretch before lunch and relax for the afternoon. Worse than the enforced early start, however, is the early zeal of some pilgrims, especially those from the Far East (and so with possibly less time to spare). Occasionally, I would get in the night to find them cleaning their teeth ready to go in the small hours. There is little so irritating as listening to attempts to pack a rucksack quietly at 4am.
There are albergues which are fine architecture and no one should miss the experience, shared with around 200 others, of sleeping in the medieval dormitory of Roncesvalles, where thousands of pilgrims have slept for centuries before.
You do not, of course, have to stay in Albergues, but your options are fewer if you have to have a hotel with an en suite bathroom, and it might mean having to walk further than you intended. Having saved so much on accommodation we had no qualms about staying in the luxurious Hostal de los Reyes Catolicos in Satiago itself. This pilgrim hostel built by Ferdinand and Isabella (15th Century) is now a 5 star parador; its original architecture and contemporary furnishings make it worth everyone of the many euros it costs.
Most seriously, however, if you avoid albergues you will miss the company of other pilgrims. I can’t deny that sometimes, that would have been an advantage, but for the most part we found the company entertaining or interesting and often both. Company is a large part of the experience of Camino, perhaps more memorable than the physical characteristics, the landscape, the architecture where you stay and what you eat. Long distance walking is essentially a solitary activity: no one can walk up a hill for you, nor carry your pack. You are, however walking the Camino with many others engaged on the same endeavour experiencing daily a similar sense of achievement. And you meet the same people again and again, because by and large most people walk about the same distance and find themselves stopping in the same places. As Lucy remarked towards the end of one of our trips as we queued to register at a popular Albergue “It’s like a smart society party in the 70s; I mean, everyone I’ve ever slept with is here!”.
Perhaps because you are thrown together- quite closely so in some of the dormitories- and perhaps because, after a tiring day’s walk you are ready to relax socially and physically with people whom one is unlikely to meet again, conversations start easily and openly and you soon know your companions’ life stories, as they know yours. There were occasional couples who had formed along the way, but our experience was of quite intense but brief friendships. Someone said “The Camino can be a love affair, even a marriage, but a honeymoon it is not.”; and surprisingly often those life stories include having done the Camino one or more times. It is something of an addiction and while Santiago the city is no disappointment, I did experience a feeling of withdrawal once it was all over.
You meet some engaging cranks, none more so than the elderly homeopathic doctor travelling with his milliner protégée who explained how the spirit of the Camino flowed from the path itself as for them a life blood. They told us that to walk the Camino required “cabeza, corazon y cojones” (head, heart and balls); as for the last, it was seldom really arduous in our experience and intellectually interesting and stimulating rather than challenging. For those companions it was certainly a spiritual experience, their hearts and souls were fed by the Camino. They were far from unique but I suspect for most the spiritual element of the pilgrimage was rather harder to place until the end, although as I have mentioned a sense of history in the present and of the numinous is felt all along.
There were a few opportunities to attend the offices or Mass in monasteries and convents (some of which also ran a refugio) and there were special pilgrim services, notably at Roncesvalles and le Puy, and we sometimes we chanced to drop into the mass in a village church on Sunday morning. These services were not especially well attended so it was a surprise to find the daily midday Pilgrim Mass in Santiago cathedral itself completely packed. I can’t believe that many, even any, present believed their achievement would have much affect on their prospects in the after-life (and there was very little mention of indulgences, plenary or other, at any stage) but there was a clear spiritual component to that achievement expressed in that Mass. It was among the most palpable feelings I have had of being part of the body of Christ, among the rucksacks piled up against medieval pillars and a polyglot liturgy.
We did not see the great botafumeiro (the huge censer which swings across the transepts of the cathedral) in action, which was a slight disappointment. Talking to others who have seen it one could be forgiven for thinking it is the only noteworthy feature of that wonderful cathedral. In a way I’m glad we missed it because on the Sunday morning when we would have seen, it we actually went to another church instead in the outskirts of Santiago. It was famous for its Romanesque interior and dramatically outward sloping walls- quite as worrying as the leaning tower of Pisa. But it was not the engineering oddity which struck us so much as the fact that the church was packed with children, every pew full of the biggest Sunday School class in the world, led by an energetic and charismatic priest who had about 250 children eating out of his hand. It was a heart warming way to end a pilgrimage.
El Camino
Andrew Penny