Adventure tourism is nothing new. Wild walks and wandering the globe have been with us for all time and in all parts of the world. Pilgrims have traveled to places of rapture since significant sites took on their special meaning. This is the universal and ancient historical legacy that drew me to walk the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in September 2024.
I could have taken a different pilgrimage route — perhaps as a secular pilgrim on the picturesque, 630-mile South West Coast Path, the longest marked trail in the United Kingdom. Here, the cathedral is nature, the history is one of smugglers and shipwrecks, and the exaltation is in the breathtaking beauty of seaside villages, jutting Jurassic cliffs and secluded beaches. Or I could have journeyed to one of the other important religious destinations — Rome via the Francigena, or Jerusalem, a holy city to three of the world’s great monotheistic religions.
But it was the Camino that set my mind on fire and the matter of relics that gripped my imagination and nagged at me during the COVID-19 pandemic, when New Zealand’s borders were shut to international flights from March 2020 to August 2021. By the time Kiwis were finally free to move and tickets vaguely affordable, I felt like a shaken bottle of sparkling wine ready to pop its cork. I had ruminated on all aspects of pilgrimage and was about to explode with curiosity and the need to escape.
An ancient walking path across the top of the Iberian Peninsula to its northwestern corner was the perfect place to abscond to. For over a thousand years, Christian pilgrims have traveled multitudinous miles to the town of Santiago de Compostela to worship at the shrine of St. James. Many began their journey outside Spain, in places such as France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Medieval pilgrims often followed the trail on foot for months, sometimes years. The dangers were myriad, and many never made it back home.
The huge commitment of time and resources, the risk — I was fascinated to know what propelled these pilgrims. I wanted to understand what these journeys meant to them, and why, in this world of virtual reality, people still travel in increasing numbers to sites of pilgrimage. Why do shrines and their relics, which should be anathema in modern times, still draw people? Why, when human experience is increasingly digitized, coded and uploaded, do people still feel the imperative to be present in a place and to walk?
So my partner Sue and I joined the throngs of pilgrims seeking answers on the Camino. While we were actually walking the trail, The Daily Telegraph published an article predicting that 2024 would see nearly half a million pilgrims journey to the shrine of Santiago (St. James), the greatest number ever. The article also pointed out the exponential increase in traffic between 1984, when just 423 pilgrims claimed the Compostela (certificate of completion), and 2023, when numbers hit a record 440,367 — a number that is about to be exceeded because 2024 figures are up 12.5%.
But, fortunately for those averse to crowds, the Camino is not just one pathway. The map to Santiago de Compostela looks like the crazy cracks a flicked stone creates on a car’s windshield. Every line radiates out in a jagged pattern from the central point of impact. In nearly a thousand years of pilgrimage, many routes have been traveled. From their end point of Santiago de Compostela, nestled in the far northwest of Spain, the routes spread out across the country — heading upward along the west coast of Portugal, hugging the northern border of Spain, or cutting straight across the country to the Mediterranean. Today, however, the Camino Frances — the one we chose — has emerged as the most popular. In the 1980s, the route was marked out by a local priest who made it his mission to reignite people’s passion for pilgrimage.
If you walk the whole thing, the Camino Frances is 497 miles long, starting in the French town of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, crossing the Pyrenees, and traveling in a westerly direction across the top of Spain. Constraints of time, money and our ability to walk that far meant our aspirations had to be more modest.
We embarked on the Camino Frances in Leon, a little over halfway along the route. Our fast train from Madrid arrived close to midnight, so it was hard to tell in the darkness what this ancient center, now a modern Spanish city, had to offer. We were up early the next day, and as the morning light began to flood the old town and the square in front of the cathedral, the majesty of the place revealed itself.
Leon’s Cathedral of Santa Maria de Regla, completed in the 13th century, is one of the Gothic gems of Europe. It rises vertically from the flagstones of the square to a height of nearly 100 feet. Its soaring walls support a tracery of magnificently carved stone and colored glass. The complicated Gothic design of thrust and counterthrust supports the cathedral’s fragile height, housing some of the most magnificent stained glass and crystal windows ever created. The vaulted ceilings are a pinnacle of the architectural brilliance that blossomed throughout Europe in the Gothic period. The cathedral captures that earth-movingly brilliant frenzy for God that must have captivated pilgrims.
The building takes your breath away, but the whimsy and fantastical imagination are what fascinate me. Medieval artists were acutely aware of death and damnation. And they were unfettered by secular or clerical propriety when they depicted it — raw and writhing. Hell was not just a state of mind but a place where you suffered every torture imaginable.
A pilgrimage to a holy shrine could mitigate some of the horrors of hell, and this motivated many medieval journeys. Pilgrimages were, in themselves, an expression of contrition, made as an act of penitence for sins committed. But they were also an opportunity to purchase an indulgence. An indulgence granted for walking the Camino removed all temporal punishment for sin. The church granted them to encourage good works and acts of charity. Initially, indulgences were not a “get out of jail free” card. They simply substituted for a penance (or punishment) imposed for a sin already forgiven by the church. But it was not long before scammers saw the loophole. As D. J. Hall writes in his 1965 book “English Mediaeval Pilgrimage,” indulgences became “fair game for rascals. In less than no time there were hordes of false pardoners, sometimes monks or friars, sometimes just travelling salesmen with the gift of the gab. They wandered the country producing rolls of parchment with impressive seals and declaring they had come from Rome and were ready to provide their customers with a pardon for anything.”
Then there were the miracles associated with relics at pilgrimage sites. According to a 12th-century French guidebook for pilgrims, a sick or disabled person or someone bitten by a snake could be healed, a person possessed by a devil could be delivered, a storm at sea could be stilled, a doe who was previously wild could be tamed and a dead person could be restored to life. There was seemingly nothing a powerful relic could not do to make a pilgrim’s life better. It was the promise of escape from the diseased and dangerous drudge of medieval life that kept the pilgrims coming.
And if these benefits were not enough, there was the added bonus that pilgrimage was a very attractive way of taking a holiday. According to B. C. Boulter in his 1928 book “The Pilgrim Shrines of England”: “The company was agreeable; the whole thing was undertaken with the sanction of the Church, at a time when Catholicism was intertwined with every aspect of normal life; [and] there was exemption from taxes and arrest for debt.” The splendor of Leon Cathedral was as much of a sight to behold for the medieval pilgrim as it is for tourists today. Its dark, moody interior activated by carving and sculptural programs, and its soaring walls punctuated by dazzling stained-glass windows, would have been, for many, the highlight of a lifetime.
Sue and I moved from the drama of the cathedral’s interior across a sun-flooded quadrangle to an adjoining museum, a contemporary addition for modern-day pilgrims and tourists. It houses a fabulous collection of medieval votive figures — Christ on the cross, the Virgin and Child, crucifixion groups, saints and martyrs — many of which would have been in place in their sacred settings, hanging off walls and occupying niches, when medieval pilgrims first saw them. Some were made of stone, others carved in painted wood. Many would have been objects of prayerful offering. For the medieval worshipper, these were not just objects rendered in wood and stone but symbolic representations infused with the spirit of their subject. And the veneration of a votive figure was magnified many times when it contained not just the essence of the individual represented but a relic fragment or the real-life remains of a sacred person.
In a corner cabinet of the cathedral museum, easily missed, is a delightful painted bust of St. Francis. The quiet demeanor of this sculptural figure is quite unlike the grander crucifixes that writhe in agony and drip with blood. His head tilts reverently to the right, and his raised hands (complete with stigmata) gesture to a small glass-fronted fissure in his chest that contains a small section of cord. (The cord is purported to be almost certainly part of the girdle that would have gone around St. Francis’ waist). The presence of the cord imbues this piece with special powers. When you stand in front of St. Francis and his carefully encased forensic remnant, the saint is actually present, if invisible, in the room — ready to work wonders and hear your prayers.
Relics were, and are, the cornerstones of Catholic churches. In 787, at the Seventh General Council of Nicaea, it was ruled that no church could be consecrated without a relic, and this regulation remains today. The consequence of this was a proliferation of relics and a rash of intermonastic feuds and theft. “There were countless girdles of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” writes D. J. Hall, “and at least 10 heads of John the Baptist; pieces from the True Cross and its Nails would have sufficed to build a ship; [and] the bones of the saints were distributed in their thousands all over Europe.”
The competition between monastic groups to own important religious relics was bitter and fiercely fought. It was an easy equation. Relics brought pilgrims, and pilgrims brought endowments and wealth. One of the most infamous instances of relic theft is recorded in Amelia Soth’s 2020 JSTOR Daily article, “When Monks Went Undercover To Steal Relics.” Here, she outlines a 12th-century theft committed by Bishop Hugh of Lincoln on a visit to the monks of the Abbey of Fecamp. When they showed him their most prized relic, the mummified hand of Mary Magdalene, he bent down and, feigning a kiss, bit off a piece of the relic with his teeth. When the horrified monks accused him of desecration, he defended himself, saying that “no relic was more holy than the Eucharist, which passed his lips every Sunday.” He could also have defended himself using the medieval world’s belief that “relics were infused with the living presence of the saint” and were capable of defending themselves. According to this logic, if a relic was moved or stolen, it chose to be.
The list of possible relics was seemingly endless. In its wilder moments, it included crumbs from the Last Supper and the Sudarium of Oviedo, a handkerchief-sized piece of linen cloth used to wipe away perspiration that covered Christ’s face in the tomb (both arriving in Spain, in a holy ark, in 1075); the feather that the Archangel Gabriel left behind at the Annunciation; and a vial containing the sound of King Solomon’s bells. Relics and miracles assumed an acceptance of signs and wonders and occasionally pushed things to the point of ridiculousness.
All the Camino trails are dotted with relics, but these are simply the chorus to the superstar remains of the Apostle St. James. According to our 12th-century pilgrim’s guide, the remains are sealed within a marble sarcophagus in a finely arched sepulchre and housed beneath the high altar of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. This relic is not a head, hand or morsel nibbled off, but the whole ultrapowerful body of one of Jesus Christ’s favorite apostles. The only two pilgrim destinations to match it are Rome, to visit the bones of St. Peter, and Jerusalem, to worship at the cradle of Christianity.
As so often happens, the story of the arrival in Spain of St. James’ remains is a mix of history and legend. According to the Pilgrimage Museum in Santiago de Compostela, the story goes that when St. James was martyred in Jerusalem in 44 CE, his disciples collected his body and carried it by ship to Spain, where he had previously preached. The journey was perilous, involving a jail escape assisted by an angel and the slaying of a dragon.
The bones were subsequently lost in northwest Spain, before being rediscovered in the ninth century. A hermit alerted Bishop Teodomiro of Iria to a mysterious light he saw in a wood. After a period of fasting and prayer, the bishop unearthed the sepulchre believed to be that of St. James. Teodomiro’s discovery was confirmed by Alfonso II, King of Asturias; a church was built on the site in 834; and the multitude of pilgrimages to visit the apostle’s shrine began.
St. James’ bones brought many strategic benefits. They helped connect the western regions of Spain to Europe, encouraged pilgrim traffic across the north of Spain and attracted wealth, benefactions and power to a remote church close to Finisterre (translated as “end of the earth”). St. James’ bones also had superpowers. They became renowned for performing miracles, and when some opportunistic thief tried to carry them away, they could not be moved.
With some of this history in mind and much yet to be discovered, we left Leon in chilling temperatures. Grasping walking poles, my hands tingled with cold as we left behind the light industrial outskirts of town and picked up the scallop-shell (the symbol of St. James) trail markers. By midday, the sun was in full blaze. The terrain we were walking through is called the Paramo Desert. In 86 F heat, it was breathless and blisteringly hot. In the sweltering haze, we saw a circle of low, stunted trees in the distance. Sue suggested we stop in the shade and have a drink.
It was a touching scene when we got there. Close to the trees was a thin, white-enamelled cross. Looped over it was a wooden rosary bleached by months or years of fierce sun. People’s buried bones line the trail in parts of the pilgrims’ way, their gravesites chosen so they can watch the procession of pilgrims wrestling with their earthly cares. What a heavenly irony, I thought, to be free to watch the worries of others for all eternity.
We walked for hours in blazing heat and, for days, through strange little rustic villages of thick mud-walled houses with wooden doors and window shutters that looked like they were hewn from an ancient forest. Why do things look so old here, we wondered, and people just go about their daily life oblivious to the fact that they are living in a museum?
Our first night was spent in a hostel in Villar de Mazarife. From there, we continued to Astorga and Rabanal del Camino, covering between 16 and 25 miles each day, and collapsing at night in our hostel or hotel. For several days, we walked through tall fields of fully ripened corn and large stretches of towering sunflowers and sunbaked grapes waiting to be harvested. The Camino winds its way through rich farmland, then makes its steep 4,890-foot ascent of Mount Irago, to the Iron Cross, then down again to Molinaseca and Villafranca.
The landscape is endlessly engaging, but it is the people you meet who are the unexpected treasure. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” was a flash of genius. In his fictional account from the 14th century, pilgrims share their stories to pass the time and to lighten their load on the way to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. And this sharing was exactly our experience. For some, the Camino was on a bucket list. Others were there to escape their humdrum lives, to exercise, to rehabilitate, to work through grief and loss or to find a spiritual touchstone in a world of increasing conflict and alienation.
We met Stuart from Yorkshire, who, just shy of his 60th birthday and having left his job of 28 years, was at a crossroads. Also, there was Mark, a U.S. citizen working for a charity in Budapest. His father had died recently, and he was grieving the death of his 17-year-old dog, Rufus. We met two delightful Australians, Maree and Laura, who were trekking in small chunks and out for a good time, and three amazing, 60-something Canadians — Susan, Courtney and Sharon — who were walking the entire Camino Frances to get closer to God.
And there were Liam and his mates Martin and Raymond from Ireland. “You’re a writer. You need to tell Liam’s story,” Martin told me. “It’s a terrible story. He’s had such tragedy in his life. He saw two of his brothers shot dead in front of his eyes at his sister’s 7th birthday party.” Liam’s current Camino journey marked the 30th anniversary of his brothers’ killing. Martin spoke rapidly like someone trying to convince himself: “It’s all over now. I spent years in jail for things I didn’t do. But it’s over now, that’s years ago … however, it’s not forgotten,” he said, pointing to a tattoo of a semiautomatic rifle on his lower leg. “But tell Liam’s story for me,” he exclaimed. “He has been through so much. We all did in that part of Belfast. All the bloodshed in our neighborhood. They just came in with their guns and shot people. It’s still too hard.” So here it is — Liam’s story as I promised Martin. Two lovely people that we encountered on the Camino, talking and walking with their grief and trauma to Santiago de Compostela to find solace.
We met some pilgrims numerous times as we climbed Mount O Cebreiro, and then moved on to Samos, Sarria, Portomarin, Palas de Rei, Arzua and Pedrouzo, reaching Santiago de Compostela in torrential rain. That afternoon we were struggling to move one sloshing foot in front of the other. I felt that the Camino was demanding something from us to the very end. Our last refuge before the final push was a marketplace of memorabilia stalls. As the rain and the wind picked up, they had to dismantle and pack everything away except for the outdoor cafe with minimal seating inside — where the throngs of pilgrims crammed.
As we staggered in, a middle-aged Chinese woman rushed across to us with a huge cheese and egg panini. “You have this. Please,” she said in broken English. “It’s free. For you! You have, please! We ordered too much.” At that point, the three of us broke down in tears. “I know,” she cried, “It’s very hard.”
And of course she’s right: It is hard. The Camino stretches you in every way. It is a microcosm of life lived with psychedelic intensity. And, often, your experiences play on a reel in front of your eyes. In medieval times, the pilgrimage to Santiago was walked out of pious devotion to achieve a state of perfection, as “atonement” to fulfill a promise, as a means of purification and an act of penance. It was seen as a path to knowledge. Some were forced to walk it as a punishment. Today, the ever-increasing number of people walking and cycling the Camino suggests that some or perhaps all of these reasons still stand: that modern pilgrims are seeking a similar mystical sense of physical and spiritual wholeness; that traveling to Holy places and seeing things that have been cherished for a millennium or more are important; that pilgrimage is a chance to meditate on life’s deeply felt experiences — on grief, regret and new beginnings — or simply, in a time-poor world, a rare opportunity for pure escapism.
We arrived in the main square of Santiago de Compostela battered and beaten (or almost!). Our religious experience was finding our hotel and peeling off our wet clothes. For us, the ecstasy of Santiago would have to wait until the next day. The cathedral was an awe-inspiring vision of filigree and spires that somehow did not quite match our journey. The enormous “botafumeiro” (incense holder) swung across the main altar during the Mass at death-defying speeds and the interior was dripping with gold, but the magic for me was in getting there, not arriving. Whether you are a medieval or contemporary wanderer, walking mindfully and with intention is transformative. And if I had any advice from the Camino to share, it would be to choose your own pilgrimage route — sacred or secular — and walk it until you find yourself.
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