The Camino de Santiago

The Camino de Santiago, known in English as the Way of St. James, is a network of pilgrimage routes across Spain, Portugal, France and the wider European continent that lead to one destination: the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, in Spain's northwest, where according to Christian tradition the apostle James lies buried. James was one of the twelve apostles, the closest followers of Jesus Christ, whom Christians regard as the son of God. Pilgrims have walked these roads since the Middle Ages. Hundreds of thousands of people complete the journey on foot each year.

The tomb of the apostle James

James, called the Greater to distinguish him from another apostle of the same name, was a fisherman from Galilee. According to Christian sources, he was executed in Jerusalem between the years 41 and 44, the first of the twelve apostles to be killed. Christian tradition holds that his followers carried his body by sea to the coast of Galicia and buried it inland.

According to tradition, the grave was found in the early ninth century. A hermit named Pelayo reported seeing unusual lights over a wooded hill. Theodomir, the bishop of the nearby town of Iria Flavia, investigated and identified the tomb as that of the apostle. Historical sources place the identification between the years 820 and 830. A tombstone bearing Theodomir's name was found beneath the cathedral in 1955.

King Alfonso II of Asturias is recorded as an early royal visitor to the site. His journey from Oviedo is remembered as the first documented pilgrimage to the tomb. A church was built over the grave. A town grew around the church, and the town became Santiago de Compostela. The cathedral that is located there today was begun in the eleventh century.

History of the Camino de Santiago

By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the pilgrimage to Santiago had become one of the three great journeys of medieval Christianity, alongside Jerusalem and Rome. Kingdoms along the route built bridges, hospitals and towns to serve the flow of pilgrims. Monastic orders ran hospices where pilgrims received a bed and care without payment. The word hospital, from the Latin hospes, meaning guest, survives along the route to this day in the names of these foundations.

The twelfth century also produced the earliest surviving guide to the route. The fifth book of the Codex Calixtinus, a Latin manuscript compiled around 1140, describes the roads, rivers, towns and peoples along the way to Santiago. It records four gathering routes through France, starting from Paris, Vézelay, Le Puy and Arles. Three of them meet before crossing the Pyrenees at the pass above Roncesvalles. The fourth crosses at the Somport pass further east. All four join at Puente la Reina, in Navarre, and continue to Santiago as a single road.

The scallop shell became the pilgrimage's emblem. Why it was chosen remains unclear. The shell was already a recognized sign of the journey by the start of the twelfth century. Scallops are abundant on the Galician coast, and one of the practical explanations is that pilgrims who reached the sea collected one and carried it home as proof of the completed journey. By the middle of the twelfth century the shells were sold at the cathedral entrance in Santiago. By around the year 1200 the trade was regulated, and roughly a hundred shell vendors held licences in the city. Shells have been found in medieval graves in Germany, Scandinavia, England and Ireland. Christian tradition attached its own reading to the emblem: the ribs of the shell are like the fingers of a hand, and the two halves stand for the two commandments of charity, to love God and to love one's neighbor.

The pilgrimage declined from the fourteenth century onward, and the decline deepened through the sixteenth. The Black Death, the Reformation's rejection of pilgrimage and of the veneration of relics, and repeated European wars all thinned the flow. In 1589 the archbishop of Santiago ordered the apostle's remains hidden against the threat of English raids on the Galician coast. Their location was then lost for nearly three centuries. The remains were found again in 1879, and Pope Leo XIII declared them authentic in 1884. Numbers stayed low well into the twentieth century, and in the mid-1980s the Pilgrim's Office recorded under 1,500 arrivals for a whole year.

The modern revival had several causes. Pope John Paul II travelled to Santiago in 1982. In addition, Elías Valiña Sampedro, the parish priest of the Galician village of O Cebreiro, began around 1984 to mark the old route with yellow painted arrows, working from the Pyrenees toward Santiago. The Council of Europe named the route its first European Cultural Route in 1987. Pilgrim associations formed across Europe and took on the marking and upkeep of the paths. Arrivals climbed from the hundreds into the hundreds of thousands. The yellow arrow remains the waymark of the Camino, followed today by pilgrims from every continent. The Camino Francés, the routes across northern Spain, and the routes through France are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Routes of the Camino de Santiago

The Camino is not a single path but a family of routes, each with its own name.

The Camino Francés, the French Way, is the most walked route of the network and carries close to half of all arriving pilgrims. It runs roughly 780 kilometers from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the French side of the Pyrenees, through Pamplona, Burgos and León, to Santiago.

The Camino Portugués approaches from the south, from Lisbon or Porto, with an inland and a coastal branch, and is the second most walked route. The Camino del Norte follows Spain's northern coast. The Camino Primitivo, the Original Way, runs from Oviedo through the mountains and is held to be the oldest route, following the path associated with Alfonso II. The short Camino Inglés, the English Way, begins at the ports of A Coruña and Ferrol, where pilgrims from England and northern Europe once arrived by ship. The Vía de la Plata crosses the length of Spain from Seville in the south.

One route continues past Santiago. Pilgrims have long walked three further days to Cape Fisterra on the Atlantic coast. The name comes from the Latin finis terrae, the end of the earth, and the headland was long regarded as the western limit of the known world. Many pilgrims end their journey there, at the ocean.

Documents and rituals of the pilgrimage

The Camino carries a set of practices that have grown with it over centuries. The walking is open to anyone. Two documents of the pilgrimage, the Credencial and the Compostela, are issued by the Catholic Church, and each carries a condition about the pilgrim's stated motivation.

The Credencial, the pilgrim's passport, descends from the letters that identified and protected medieval pilgrims. It is issued by parish churches, confraternities, pilgrim associations and other institutions authorized by the Church. Its printed conditions state that it is for those travelling on foot, by bicycle or on horseback who make the journey for Christian religious reasons, and they extend this to those who are still searching rather than settled in belief. The condition is a statement of intention, and pilgrims are not asked to prove it. Pilgrims have the Credencial stamped along the route at churches, hostels and cafés. The stamps grant access to the albergues, the pilgrim hostels of the way, and serve as the record of the journey.

The Compostela is the certificate of completed pilgrimage, issued by the Pilgrim's Office in Santiago. Pilgrims state their motivation when they register. Those who state a religious or partly religious motivation receive the Compostela, written in Latin. Those who state a non-religious motivation receive a different certificate, written in Spanish. Either way, pilgrims must cover at least the final 100 kilometers on foot or on horseback, or the final 200 by bicycle, on a route the Cathedral recognizes. The stamps in the Credencial are the evidence. Pilgrims walking only the minimum distance have the Credencial stamped at the start and end of each stage, with the date. The Compostela descends from the evidentiary letters that Santiago issued from the thirteenth century onward, which replaced the shell badges that had proved too easy to counterfeit.

Along the way, pilgrims greet one another with two words, Buen Camino, good way, exchanged between strangers in every language. At the Cruz de Ferro, an iron cross on a wooden post at a pass in the Montes de León, tradition holds that pilgrims lay down a stone carried from home, and with it what they no longer wish to carry. The mound of stones beneath the cross has been growing for generations.

Arrival in Santiago has its own sequence, shaped by centuries of practice. Pilgrims enter the cathedral square, the Praza do Obradoiro, where many sit or lie on the stones before going further. Inside the cathedral, pilgrims may climb the stairs behind the high altar to embrace the thirteenth-century statue of the apostle, and descend to the crypt that holds the silver reliquary of his remains. The cathedral is a living church, and Mass is celebrated daily, including a Pilgrim's Mass. At the cathedral's main solemnities the Botafumeiro, a censer weighing 53 kilograms and standing 1.5 meters tall, is swung across the transept. It hangs from a pulley system 20 meters below the dome. Eight men, the Tiraboleiros, work the ropes.

Pilgrim motivations

The Pilgrim's Office registers arriving pilgrims and their stated motivation in three categories: 1) religious, 2) religious and other, and 3) non-religious. All three groups walk the same paths and sleep in the same albergues. Many walk the full route in four to six weeks. Many others walk a section, returning across several years to continue where they stopped.

The Holy Year

Whenever the feast of St. James, the 25th of July, falls on a Sunday, the year is an Año Santo, a Jacobean Holy Year. The cathedral opens its Holy Door, which is sealed in ordinary years, and the number of pilgrims rises sharply. The cycle has structured the pilgrimage's calendar since the Middle Ages.