This year, between May and June, I traversed northern Spain along the Camino de Santiago, an old pilgrimage route. I intended to write a piece about my trip and the Camino itself when I returned, but I soon realized that I had too much to write. Regarding my experience, I made a video in which I discuss it spontaneously; I’ve included the video below for anyone who are interested. In the interim, I made the decision to spend some time researching the Camino itself, including its historical significance and its role in the formation of modern-day Europe.
The Christian pilgrimage known as the Camino de Santiago began in the ninth century. Along with the journey to Rome and Jerusalem, it is one of the three major pilgrimages in medieval Christianity. The pilgrims of the Middle Ages loved their emblems. Those returning from Jerusalem were called “Palmers” because they carried palm leaves, those returning from Rome were called “Romers” because they wore the crossed keys of St. Peter, and those traveling the Camino were called “Jacquets” because they carried scallop shells that had been collected from the coast outside of Santiago (Jacques is the French name for Saint James). These shells are the Camino mascot and may be seen on every rucksack and waymarker if you walk the Camino today.
Rome and Jerusalem are fairly self-explanatory pilgrimage locations; this is not the case for this strange city in northwest Spain, but its name gives away that it is a pilgrimage place. The city of Santiago de Compostela bears the name of James the Greater, an apostle of Jesus whose remains were interred in the city’s cathedral.
Thus. Since these remains were discovered in the ninth century, pilgrims from all over Europe and, more recently, the world have been drawn to this location. Some pilgrims are seeking healing, others are seeking God, and others, as was customary in the Middle Ages, are being sentenced to walk the Camino in lieu of going to jail.
The Camino was an institution of the Middle Ages. Along the route are churches that have been gilded in gold (owing to pilgrim donations), a network of pilgrim hostels (known as albergues in Spanish), castles and cathedrals constructed by the Knights Templar, and the remains of numerous hospitals. The Camino’s popularity peaked in the 12th and 13th centuries, when pilgrimages were the hippest thing to do and the Crusades were in full force. The Camino offered the perfect excursion for the aspirant pilgrim because most people couldn’t bear to travel all the way to the Middle East, especially as it become more perilous in the latter 12th and 13th centuries.
The pilgrims used to arrive from a variety of Caminos, just as there are numerous roads that led to Rome. The Camino Francés, which begins in Saint Jean de Pied de Port on the French side of the Pyrenees mountain range and travels slowly but steadily across northern Spain to Santiago, is unquestionably the most well-known of all. The Irish and British Caminos land in northern Galicia at A Coruña, and pilgrims walk 75 km south to Santiago. The Camino Portugés travels north from Porto, and the Via de la Plata travels all the way from Sevilla. Along with hundreds of thousands of other pilgrims, I walked this journey this year.
After the long first day you’ve left France behind you and arrived at the Medieval monastery of Roncesvalles a place famous for seeing the legendary Charlemagne’s army given not just one but two beatings by the local Basque people in the 8th century (and later providing inspiration for the oldest epic of French literature The Song of Roland). From Roncesvalles it’s 790km/490mi to Santiago and another 85km/50mi to the edge of the world at Finisterre. The Camino Francés route passes through four different regions there’s the mountainous Navarre region for the first week; there are a few days in the famous La Rioja wine-producing region centred around Spain’s fastest-growing city Logrono and then we enter the massive Castille y Leon region for the next 300 or so kilometres and finally there is Galicia where we finally come to Santiago and beyond it to Finisterre. One of the most amazing things about the Camino is how it feels like four or five different hikes. There is such a dramatic difference between the different weeks. In the Navarre region there are a lot of hills and a lot of horses with bells around their necks; then in the Rioja there’s a sea of vineyards which gives way into Castille y Leon to the flat plains of the meseta with its oceans of wheat and oats and finally Galicia feels so much like Ireland with the dairy farming and small fields and that soft Galician rain (as it turns out the people who settled Ireland in the Iron Age came from Galicia and they must have felt right at home). At the end of this 500 mile walk you come to the cathedral on the hill in Santiago de Compostela (I doubt I’ll ever see more gold and silver in one place in my life). But Santiago isn’t the only endpoint. Apparently the old Celts used to have their own pilgrimage in the north of Spain where they would walk to the Atlantic coast for a spiritual encounter with the edge of the world; it was an archetypally powerful place of ritual and initiation. When the Romans came along here and along the way we walk along Roman roads commissioned and walked travelled by Augustus himself they built their roads all the way to what they called and is still called Finisterre which in Latin means the “end of the world”. The story of the Camino is as much myth as it is history and the most mythical element of all is of course how Saint James ended up here in the first place. The story goes that just before his death Jesus carved up the world among his apostles urging them to spread the Word as widely as possible. James was assigned the Iberian peninsula the peninsula today made up of Spain and Portugal. But at that time it was entirely under the rule of the Roman Empire (the conquering being completed by Augustus in 19 BC). James travelled as far as Galicia in the far north-western corner of Spain but he wasn’t having an awful lot of luck it seems since he only attracted seven disciples. At this time he had a vision from the Virgin Mary the first in a long Catholic tradition of apparitions by Mary and all the more notable since she was alive and well in the Holy Land. Mary (along with a host of angels) appeared to James and consoled him. According to some versions of the story this apparition was just about giving him a bit of a morale boost; according to others she recalled him to the Holy Land where four years later he became the first apostle to be martyred getting beheaded by King Herod. This last event is the only part of this myth that appears in the Bible. The later myths connecting James to Spain which began to appear after the 7th century had to explain how he could both have been in Spain and buried in Spain while also getting martyred in Jerusalem. And so the story goes that some good Christians snuck James’s body out of Jerusalem and put it on a boat that with no sails, oars or even sailors (except in some versions of the myth an angel steering the boat) traversed the length of the Mediterranean past the straits of Gibraltar and up along the Iberian coast until it came to Galicia in northwest Spain. After reaching Galicia, James’s disciples who somehow knew he was coming took his body off the boat and after many adventures they buried the body on a hill 80 kilometres from the coast. This burial place was forgotten for centuries until in 813 a man named Pelayo in some stories a hermit in others a shepherd heard supernatural music and saw a strange star and followed them to a place called Libredon (in some stories a mountain; in others is a forest). He came to the site and upon digging discovered bones and parchment. Realising he had discovered the remains of Saint James and two of his disciples Pelayo rushed off to tell the bishop who quickly came and confirmed Pelayo’s finding. The bishop went to the King of Asturias Alfonso II who made the first pilgrimage to the burial site from his capital at Oviedo. And this route that Alfonso II walked as the first pilgrim has become immortalised as the Camino Primitivo the original Camino route. Alfonso II confirmed the finding and ordered the building of a chapel on the site. Over the centuries this chapel evolved into the cathedral we have today and around this cathedral grew the city known today as Santiago de Compostela. It’s from these early legends that the “de Compostela” part of the city’s name Santiago de Compostela derives. According to some stories Compostela derives from the Latin for burial “componere” since there is evidence of a Roman cemetery on this spot which some date back to Pre-Roman Celtic times. The other popular etymology of Compostela is from the Latin “compus” meaning field and “stellae” meaning stars so: “field of stars”. This is often connected with the star that Pelayo followed but it should also be noted the Camino was also called the Via Lactea which is Latin for the Milky Way a reference to the fact that the Camino follows the line of the Milky Way to Santiago. As with just about everything to do with the Camino it’s something that’s shrouded in layers of history, legend, interpretation and counter-interpretation. It’s a perfect illustration of the mythic fog that the Camino stands in.
Be the first to comment