ON FOOT FOR SELECTED SECTIONS OF THE PILGRIMS’ WAY
- The last great pilgrimage route in Christendom which still attracts walkers; scenically wonderful.
- From the Pyrenees through northern Spain to Compostela, selected portions undertaken on foot.
- Small group: maximum 15 participants, with two back-up vans.
Europe made itself by taking the road to Santiago, wrote Goethe. With their goal the supposed tomb of the Apostle James, or Sant Iago, in north-western Spain, pilgrims walked from Paris, Antwerp, Krakow, Vienna, any mediaeval town you care to name, to flow in slowly coalescing rivers down through France and across the Pyrenees. (The English were allowed to travel to Corunna by sea.) By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the pilgrimage was at its height, perhaps half a million were making it each year.
The main entry into Spain was in the west by Roncesvalles, in Navarre. This was the start of what is now generally described as the Camino de Santiago, but was once known as the French Way or Camino Francés. Still one of the most splendid walking routes in Europe, it runs almost 500 miles across northern Spain. Normally, the journey takes a month on foot. We are setting out to walk the highlights in twelve days, taking in the most historically charged and beautiful sections.
For earlier pilgrims, the lure was a reduction of the soul’s time in Purgatory; for modern journeyers the motives are more usually historical and cultural, and sometimes also deeply personal, involving a life change like retirement or recovery from some unhappiness. Religious commitment is less in evidence. But for all who undertake the magnificent walk there is also a spiritual dimension.
Asceticism is not a necessary ingredient. Instead of staying in bunk beds in pilgrim hostels, we repose in hotels, some among Spain’s finest. Instead of carrying huge packs with all our necessities, we carry only our own day sacks while the luggage moves by road. Our vehicles intersect with walkers every two or three hours, allowing respite to anyone who needs to ride. We eat well, often picnicking in deep country, and try some of the fine wines grown along the route (many walkers stop after lunch).
But as with all pilgrimages this is a linear walk, involving a new hotel each night except on our two rest days.
The countryside is rich, varied and tempting – the gradual descent from the Pyrenees, the vivid greens of the vines in La Rioja, with limestone cliffs and crags always in view, the great wheat country of Castile, heaving skywards, alive with skylarks, and so into the green of rivery Galicia with its slate and granite. The towns are generally busy and beautiful (Burgos, León). Some of the villages are poor almost beyond belief in EU Europe. We walk through economic history as well as religious and cultural.
Art and architecture along the Camino is some of the most outstanding in Europe. The Spanish Pilgrims’ Way is profuse in simple but stately and good-humoured Romanesque, especially stone carving. There is fine Gothic (cathedrals of Burgos and León, for instance and the monastery church of San Juán de Ortega) and much notable Renaissance work, often featuring the shallow carving of the Plateresque style (our own hotels in León and Santiago).
We are like pilgrims here, rather than tourists, visiting what time and tiredness allow at the end of the day’s walking. There will be interpretative commentary by the lecturer and an introduction to the major buildings. But the experience of walking the Camino is what is essentially on offer, along a route which has for centuries compelled the imagination.