Camino Francés – July/August 2021
Why Santiago?
I could walk anywhere
But Santiago is not anywhere.
It is a notion, nothing more, borne across Spain by the feet of centuries
Each leaving its ghostly print
Leaving mine in turn.
My every footfall
Lands on others placed in hope
In prayer
In joy
In pain
Each touching that magnificent emptiness
Through which we pass
Guarded by angels
Buoyed by companions
Become nothing but who we are.
To start seeking an answer, perhaps,
Only to discover that all along the problem was the question.
To know that it truly is possible to live every day of my life
Needing nothing that I cannot carry
To live like a distant, distant ancestor,
Yes, exactly like that, today,
And be content.
The Camino de Santiago de Compostela, or the Way of St James, is a network of radiating pilgrimage routes all culminating at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain. The ultimate objective is to touch the reliquary containing the bones of the apostle James, who was executed in Jerusalem and whose headless body was supposedly taken back to Spain where he had been preaching. For more than a thousand years devout Christians have walked or ridden on horseback from their homes to Santiago for various reasons, usually atonement, and pilgrims’ hostels, or albergués, have provided them with basic shelter for the night along various routes. The most well-known, the French Way, was described in the 12th C. Codex Calixtinus and this book could still be used as a guide. However none is necessary as virtually every single turn along the way is marked by means ranging from a simple painted yellow arrow or a scallop shell to elaborate sculptures.
After falling into disuse following the Reformation – the reformers were particularly averse to pilgrimages as not only useless but wasteful and dangerous – the Camino has become popular again and the infrastructure is now highly developed, with privately-owned albergués located every few kilometres along the way starting from St Jean Pied de Port in the Pyrenees, more than 800km from Santiago.
I walked my first Camino in March 2014. I was at a very low ebb in my life and entertaining thoughts of ending it all when I remembered someone talking about the Camino. I looked it up on the Web and thought it sounded better than jumping from the Clifton Bridge. I read how one should prepare carefully, exercising for weeks to achieve the necessary fitness and carefully breaking in a pair of high-quality walking shoes.
The next day I pulled on my old leather work boots, took a train to Southampton, embarked on the ferry to Santander, took a bus to Burgos and started walking. I have never looked back.
Municipal albergué, or simply ‘the municipal’ refers to the public albergué owned and run by the local authority. They are usually the cheapest and therefore the most sought-after. A ‘donativo’ is an albergué where payment is by donation. Most albergués charge between €8 and €12 a night for a bunk, a shower and often rudimentary cooking and washing facilities.
I started my fourth Camino with a stumble, turned back at Bristol Airport on July 7 because my vaccination was too recent. Entirely my fault – I had not bothered to read the pages of detail on the airline’s website about travelling to Spain. I finally left on July 20; the ferries weren’t running and flights were still sparse so I had to go via Menorca in the Mediterranean, then all the way back to Bilbao in the north. After a night at the excellent Metropolitan Hostel in Bilbao I caught the bus to Pamplona, intending to bus on to Logroño and start there, a 500 km walk.
I disembarked to discover that I had caught the wrong bus and was actually in San Sebastian. I had noticed there was something odd about the place – far too mountainous. I didn’t really care that I was in the wrong town, basking in the simple fact of being once more in a proper, elegant Spanish town, which Bilbao is not. I wandered around for an hour, drew some euros from a cash machine then sat playing music on a bench by the grand and lovely bridge across the Urumea River, home to a school of large fish swimming in the transparent waters.
Then a bus to Pamplona which I decided on the spot to make my starting point, adding 100km to the journey. I stayed as before at the Jésus y Maria, the municipal albergué. Thrilled to be back, I enjoyed a stroll about the familiar town, ate an absolutely foul burger at Burger King and did some washing. My clothes dried in about a quarter of an hour thanks to a temperature in the high 30s. I started to feel a bit lonely – there didn’t seem to be much of a social vibe, which worried me somewhat. I had the afternoon to myself and enjoyed exploring the enormous walls and fortifications so abundant in the city. So literally crucial was the city because of its location that it was fought over for centuries, the only Spanish city I know of to still preserve the remains of internal walls originally sealing off the Christians from the Moors and the Jews from both.
I left the next morning very early, having read that most albergués were closed due to Covid, making it important to be among the first arrivals. However I wasted some time walking the wrong way and no, it did not escape my attention that this was my third false start. If some one up there was trying to tell me something I was remaining steadfastly deaf. By the time I sorted it out I was in the vanguard of a cohort. I walked some distance with a French couple, glad of the chance to talk to someone and practise my French. But I was keen to experience the first rush of being back on the Camino on a solitary walk and soon picked up the pace and left them behind. It was a beautiful morning for a walk, with a light overcast and the sun about to rise on endless fields of wheat and sunflowers. The latter were all in flower and thousands stood in great armies, devotionally facing the east, as still as statues awaiting their shining god.
The gloss on my first morning was slightly tarnished by an hour or so of leapfrog with a mother and daughter making more or less the same pace as I, the daughter carrying a Bluetooth speaker dangling from her waist blaring Spanish and American pop music. I allowed that if that was what it took to get the girl walking the Camino then fine, but it was a price her mother could pay, not I.
I was concerned about tackling the ascent of Alto de Perdón on my first day and indeed as the incline increased I was steadily passed by one pilgrim after another, including the Bluetooth Kid. It was not just a question of fitness – after two hours walking I was experiencing a burning pain in my left thigh, something entirely new which would continue to bother me throughout my Camino, on occasion so severely that it literally felt as if I had a hot iron inside my leg. I was starting to worry about my ability to complete the climb when I turned a corner and discovered I was almost there, the famous cut-outs right in front of me. A crowd that included my French companions was wandering around the summit, exulting in the views. We took photos of each other and chatted. Isabelle and Jean-Pierre came from Bordeaux where he was – what else? – in the wine business, although now retired.
There is a new monument at the top. Apparently the Francoists used the summit as an execution site; the skeletons of almost a hundred people had been excavated there, with signage saying that there were more whose remains would never be found. I found this very moving and shed a couple of tears, but most pilgrims went right past without giving the spiral of stone pillars a second glance.
This walk was my first Camino using Norwegian poles instead of the traditional baston and I was glad of them on the ascent and even more so on the very stony and rugged descent.
I walked into Puente la Reina very hot and tired to a scramble at the first, municipal albergué. Lots of people for too few spaces and apparently only one functional shower, thanks to Covid. The French couple and I were buttonholed by a talkative little guy, one of those always-multi-lingual and likewise always somewhat disturbed perpetual pilgrims (he claimed to be on his 30th). He urged us to come to his friend’s albergué which he praised continuously as we made our way into the town – good, or so I thought – and then out again – not so good – across the town’s eponymous bridge and up a fierce, dusty hill to a huge, modern albergué which turned out to be almost empty.
Back into town later for an enormous meal – I ordered a cutlet with a mixed salad, forgetting that in Spain ensalata mista is a full meal in itself, with a whole tin of tuna. The Spanish eat tuna in vast quantities, which is a bit depressing to think about. I suppose it has supplanted the now scarce, expensive cod.
Although there are various versions of the Camino, the route currently considered ‘doing the whole Camino Francés’ involves starting at St Jean Pied de Port in the French Pyrenees, or a longer version starting at the cathedral in Le-Puy-en-Velay, but historically the place where at least four historic French tributaries to the Francés come together is here in Puente la Reina. From now on we are on the one and only Camino Francés. Isabelle and Jean-Pierre had started in Le Puy, walking a 1400km Camino – twice as long as the walk I would make. They had attended a pilgrim’s Mass there that finished with the opening of double doors in the floor of the cathedral; they walked down the steps and that was the start of the Camino. Talk about doing it in style! One day, perhaps, although accommodation in France is too expensive for me to contemplate unless I win the lottery.
I set off in the dark the next morning for the relatively easy walk to Estella well ahead of the mob, or so I thought. I found a welcoming committee of locals trying to sort out accommodation for the many pilgrims already there. Mysteriously the place was already booked solid! Where had they all come from? I found out much later that Estella is a big tourist town and the albergués were full of Spanish tourists. July/August is the holiday period and thousands like to walk a section of the Camino for recreation, clogging the albergués which are already handling reduced numbers because of social distancing. A lovely couple, a Spanish guy and his English wife, were finishing their walk at Estella, where they had parked their car. On their way to Logroño they took me to Los Arcos, which Rubén found after several phone calls to be the first albergué with free beds. We stopped off at Monte Irache because Rubén was determined to drink from the renowned free wine fountain. I told them I had sampled it on an earlier Camino and the wine had been rubbish only to find that this time it was actually excellent, which amused us all. I was very worried by this point. Having to be driven 20km on my second day was hardly the walk I was planning. A lonely night followed, with a whole bunkroom to myself. No-one came to Txotchi’s place (Casa Alberdi) except for four school-age cyclists who kept to themselves. This would set a pattern – one day a scramble, the next day no problem at all. It would not be the last time I had a bunkroom to myself. Los Arcos, although small, boasts a cavernous but beautiful historic church, thanks to (IIRC) Sancho III who headquartered himself in the town at some point.
Next day I walked to Sansol. I had always walked in spring, when the wheat was just starting to sprout, but now in high summer the grain was nearly ready to harvest. Only in this state can one grasp the enormity of the harvest in northern Spain, walking day after day by fields of drooping ears in their billions stretching in every direction over the rolling hills as far as the eye can see. I stayed at the grand and luxurious Palacio Sansol, owned, operated and worked on by the lovely old Jésus, who drove me the 1 km to Torres del Rio to the cash machine because he didn’t have a card reader. I found and fixed a problem with the gas supply to the fully equipped hotel kitchen, which we were free to use, then cooked a meal with Isabelle and Jean-Pierre who arrived shortly after me. We were the only guests. This issue of overcrowded albergués was obviously not as severe as feared. Nevertheless I did book ahead occasionally, and almost as a rule after Léon.
Next morning, walking (again in the near dark) through Torres del Rio, I met Leanne, sitting on the doorstep of her accommodation. A tall dark-haired Kiwi in her early 40s, Leanne and I quickly became close friends. She was travelling in the company of Alberto (Albi), an exuberant cook who had walked all the way from his home in Milan, shedding several kilos. Leanne was a real social hooker-up, someone who would invite anyone to join her at a table. She was also a member of a French group who were walking to raise funds, a group of which I also became a somewhat peripheral member.
Although I’m a fast walker I was no match for the 6’+ triathlete so we walked some way together and some apart which suited me as I prefer a solitary pilgrimage. A short walk today, only 10km, crossing from Navarre into the Rioja wine district and the city of Logroño where I had booked into Albergué Albas, near the river but disappointingly not in the old town. I badly wanted to buy a sleeping bag because Covid meant that few places were supplying blankets. I was getting by using my silk sleeping bag liner with a big microfibre towel as an extra covering but had nevertheless suffered chilly nights, even though the temperature at the peak of the day hit the high 30s. I had figured Logroño to be a big enough town to have the right kind of shop but it was Sunday and everything was closed. Curses. I spent a fair bit of time ambling around aimlessly until I ran into Leanne and our French friends for a cold beer. Amusing oddity: near the albergué stood a large public building in a scenic location on the river that was part sports centre, part tanatorio, or communal crypt. I wondered if the sports and fitness centre had signs on the walls saying, “Keep pumping if you don’t want to end up next door.” The tanatorio looked like a modern office building. Most odd.
I set off on my own out of Logroño, through the national park and past the reservoir, leaving later than I should have and as a result slogging along by midday in roasting heat. I took the short detour to Ventosa because signage touted it as an arts community. I didn’t find any sign of that but did find a bar offering smoothies so I bought a piña colada smoothie that came ice cold in a huge goblet. In that heat, and with my bare feet resting comfortably, I swear it was one of the most delicious things I have ever put into my mouth!
Bridge over the Najerilla in Nájera
Then on to Nájera, a strange but picturesque location nestled into huge cliffs that overhang the town. There I found myself sharing with Leanne’s French friends, including the petite English Rachel, walking the Camino to research a paper on the Camino as tourism enterprise or some such. She had one of those smiles, rarely absent from her face, that light up a room so of course when she asked to interview me for her project I agreed. Predictably I went into a minor rant against the Camino as tourism but she didn’t seem to mind in the least.
The road to Santo Domingo
At lunchtime next day I caught up with Leanne in the rather elegant Santo Domingo de la Calzada. We checked out the Camino Interpretation centre, with some attractive watercolours of places we recognised having just walked past or through them.
That night in Grañon I was greeted enthusiastically once more by the French group at a donativo called La Casa de Sonrisas (House of Smiles) on the Calle Mayor. Really lovely, funky old building, all low-beamed ceilings and nooks and crannies. No shops were open but it didn’t matter because the shared meal was part of the deal. It is always such a pleasure to stay at an albergué hosted by idealistic volunteers who still believe in the Camino as a spiritual exercise and give their time generously to support pilgrims. I took a bed next to the quiet, shy and somewhat distant Ya Wan from China, who was missing his boyfriend in the States.
The following day I left La Rioja province for Burgos, a commune in the larger collective of Castilla y León. This arrangement seems to be controversial – the egotistical bureaucrats have heavily peppered the Camino with signage reminding us that we can thank ‘Castilla y León’ for something, or everything, possibly the state of the tracks. On most of the signs rebellious hands have blacked out the ‘Castilla’. I never found out why.
First stop Villafranca Montes de Oca, which I remembered fondly from the first night when I had shared a room with Bridget on my second Camino. As I approached Villafranca I was trying to recall exactly how it was we came together there. I knew we had walked in together but try as I might I could not remember where I had met up with her that day. Then I came over a hill and saw a small ruin in a field just off the road and instantly had a photographic recall of seeing Bridget standing there, looking at what turned out to be the supposed tomb of Count Diego R. Porcelos, the founder of the city of Burgos.
Entering the town I saw a bar over to the right at the bottom of the hill with a couple of pilgrims already at a table so I gratefully sloped over and ordered a beer. A cañon, or large beer, cost only €2. Surprised, I asked the price of a generous portion of tortilla. €1.50. I, and others who turned up, spent the next hour or so eating and drinking at this astonishingly cheap bar, which was constantly busy with locals as well. Pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap seems to be a universally successful formula.
The only place to stay was the albergué attached to the big flash hotel where I had shared a room with Bridget because at that time the albergué section had been full. Not any more – we were shown to the capacious and almost empty bunkrooms in the back section. The hotel was clearly struggling to stay afloat through Covid. The porter was also the barman and the whole place seemed to be running on about three staff, a far fall from its previous thriving state.
Adrien, Nic, Ya Wan, Rachel, Me, Leanne
I wasn’t looking forward to the steep ascent out of Villafranca up Monte de la Pedraja and indeed it was if anything even harder than I remembered. But once on the heights it rewarded the climb with luminous purple heather glowing in a cool mist into which the towering trees vanished on either side of the level, soft track. The joy of the walk was instantly extinguished by a monument to what had been another Francoist execution site, an even worse one – in 1936 Franco’s thugs executed about three hundred people there. I found it moving and distressing to picture those brutes, so thoroughly and hatefully captured in art and literature, pulling up in their trucks, violently manhandling the men (and women), lining them up and shooting them. Those brave people, idealists to the last, destroyed by men scarcely worth the name.
The Francoist shadow still hangs over the Guardia Civil, whose logo, incredibly, still includes the fasces. This symbolic bundle of sticks was carried in Rome by lictors, bodyguards to those of consular rank and is the origin of the word fascist. I find it disgusting that the organisation continues to use an explicitly fascist symbol as its identity and I’m not alone; the Guardia Civil is not popular, with many Spaniards sharing the view that the friendly and helpful policia locale provide all the policing the country needs and regard the Guardia largely as an instrument of political oversight and occasionally repression.
We stopped in Agès where I let myself be talked into a meal that the voluble hostess praised to the heavens but which, when served, was entirely mediocre, made worse by Leanne’s incorrigible hospitality. A handsome English cyclist in his 40s joined us at her invitation and proceeded to bore and slightly embarrass us with his conspiracy theories. He talked of going ‘off grid’ in a cave somewhere down south. Of course I knew from my Granadan gypsy friends’ experience that living in a cave would only encourage the curiosity of the local policia but didn’t see the point in sharing that info, or indeed anything at all, with him.
The long lunch at Agès had tough consequences. I set off late and alone for the next stop in ever-rising afternoon heat, climbing a hot and stony mountain to an incredible vista but running frighteningly low on water with neither sight nor sign of the next town. Down the other side, the tendonitis in my thigh blazing like a fire, taking tiny sips of water and praying for relief, I rummaged in the day pack I carried on my chest and found to my joy that I was still carrying the large apple I had bought days ago and forgotten. That was enough to slake my thirst until I finally walked into Cardañuela de Rio Pico and Albergué Villalval, with everything one could want including a swimming pool and a catered meal that was both cheap and good. The French group were all there and Adrien played (and I videoed) Autumn Leaves on my guitar. He sang the English words, which I didn’t know, while I sang the French ones, which, ironically, he didn’t.
And so to Burgos, the beloved starting point of my first Camino. For the first time, and not without difficulty, we found the alternate route into town along the river and avoided the long and dreary trek through the industrial outer suburbs.
Unlike the Covid over-reaction we would later encounter in Galicia, the rule for municipals in Burgos allowed for packing in more pilgrims by grouping together people who had already lodged and travelled with each other elsewhere. So I, being first, became the nominal co-ordinator of the French group and others in that category and the municipal was able to achieve something like 75% occupancy. I had a touching conversation with Vincent, a sweet-natured first-generation Vietnamese French who told me, sadly, that his parents were ‘in the stars’. He had a serious foot problem and was worried that he had put off his study for a year to walk with the group. He had changed his mind and was leaving the Camino, a decision he would later regret. I met up with Leanne and the friend she was staying with (Victoria?) and enjoyed a fabulous meal guided by her knowledge of the local cuisine. Leanne was spending a few days here on work but would catch up with me later.
Burgos Cathedral
Several of our group went to a special Mass at the cathedral, which finished with a procession of an itinerant image of the virgin around the cathedral to the accompaniment of hymns and the incredible organ. The bishop and several priests presided over the grand affair after which the pilgrims were gathered for a photo op with his Eminence. He asked us questions the answers to which his glazed-over eyes told us he would forget milliseconds after they reached his ears. But it gave us, gratis, the grand tour of one of the finest cathedrals in Europe, a small price to pay.
Just my luck: it was Sunday, again, but the Camino is still looking after me. The temperature had plummeted to 14º just when I was in a town where I could buy a warm top, which I did, and next day a sleeping bag. Of course Decathlon is open on Sunday but thanks to misdirection from the tourist office I wasted two hours on a long round bus trip to nowhere. The next morning I used the map app and hiked to the big Decathlon out of town and bought a sleeping bag, a large drink bottle, a pair of polarised sunglasses and a few energy bars for good measure, which I would put into my pack and rediscover two weeks later.
In the afternoon I explored the Museum of Human Evolution, built to display the extraordinary paleological finds from Atapuerca. A huge, spacious building where probably the best curated timeline of human evolution I have ever seen was on display in a grand circle, with a skull from every known hominid species, artefacts, illustrations, all the information you could possibly want.
On to Hontanas, down in a valley, where the first and only drops of rain of my whole Camino fell, and on to Hornillos del Camino, a tiny town with a hostile female barkeep in the town bar offset by a very friendly shopkeeper who gave me a small scallop shell with the huge and tasty sandwich I bought and gratefully devoured. Children rushed up and sold us odd slivers of transparent quartz from the local hill and paper scallop shells they had made and coloured in.
That evening I was sitting outside the albergué playing when a Spaniard with markedly Arabic features started singing along with a soleares. Of course, not knowing how, I couldn’t follow his changes and he gave up. I felt bad, but he was very encouraging. He spoke very clear Spanish and we had quite a long conversation – he is from Rocio in Andalusia and it turns out his brother worked as a barman in Auckland. Rafael said I played beautifully and clearly had music in my soul, but I had just never learned to follow singers. Calling me Tomatito, not entirely ironically although the comparison is outrageously generous, he grew quite eloquent, declaring that he could tell that I was really a gypsy at heart, with a gypsy’s connection with the music, and encouraged me to go back to Andalusia and work with singers. I felt inspired and decided that was exactly what I would do. From that point I planned to go on to Seville or Cádiz and find some way of learning to follow the singer.
Leaving town I passed a huge mural depicting Einstein, Gandhi and Martin Luther King behind two pilgrims pointing to a star-studded universe.
Actually the best mural on the Camino was that of an old woman, in a town I can’t remember, a huge thing on a wall facing west so pilgrims would not normally see it. But a small sign on the previous east-facing wall declared, “Take fifteen steps and turn around.” I cynically remarked that someone had been trying for epigrammatic profundity and failed, but my more literal-minded companion of the moment followed the instruction, turned around and saw the artwork. The laugh was on me – again.
Next stop, the stunning Castrojeriz. A classic hill town with a ruined castle at the summit, surrounded by cave houses, some derelict, some occupied and well maintained. Karin, the Dutch woman whom I was now encountering regularly, and I climbed to the top and took in the sunset from the ruin’s walls. From there we could see at least fifteen miles in every direction. A gobsmacking view of a magnificent sunset turning the endless acres of wheat a lambent gold.
One of the Finest Views in Spain
But the Albergué Vierge de Monserrat … oh dear. First sign of trouble – the signs everywhere giving the price of everything, labelled as a donation. This is my review in Gronze:
A dark, not very clean place with a *crazy* hospitalero, totally spooked by Covid. There were only two other pilgrims there but he followed me around, checking on whether I was wearing a mask. I was on my own in the kitchen, not wearing one, and I turned around to find him standing there staring at me, bug-eyed. He pointed to his face and shouted “Respect for Covid!!” I told him he was loco and put on my mask because he looked like he was about to lose it. Avoid!
I genuinely think he had a screw loose, and not in a nice way.
The next day cast light, perhaps, on a mystery. On my second Camino I had lingered in Castrojeriz and set off well behind all the other pilgrims. Bridget was ahead of me at the rest stop on the rise, watching me through her monocular as I crossed the plain leading to Itero del Castillo. After taking her rest she went on ahead of me where I found her waiting at the bar in the village. We chatted for a bit, then she asked me who was the tall pilgrim I had been walking behind and why did I not catch up with him as he was walking just a few paces ahead of me? Of course I had been conspicuously alone and told her so. She did not believe me at first, and then became quite disturbed and simply clammed up. Bridget is a red-headed Irishwoman with piercing green eyes and a conflicted history of Catholicism. I have always wondered who or what she had seen with her spooky Celtic second sight.
This time, as I came down the ridge at the point where it levels out on the plain, I found this:
It tells of Manuel Picasso, a devout native of Málaga, who died at this spot, probably from the fierce exertion of scaling the ridge in 2008 when the path up and down was much more rigorous than the curated path of today. I cannot help wondering if it was the ghost of Manuel whom Bridget saw that day, walking as guardian to pilgrims.
What else am I to think? She saw what she saw, telling me a couple of days later that she had felt no sense that there was anything unreal about it. Just a tall pilgrim in red, walking in front of me, seen quite clearly at least three times.
Angels on the Camino. Or ghosts.
Next stop was the Hospital de Puente Fitero, a tiny albergué in a church just before the bridge over the Pisuerga River, maintained by a society of Italians. The aroma of fresh coffee drew me in to a warm welcome and a demi-tasse of very fine Italian espresso. Buzzing from the caffeine I marched across the beautiful old bridge and on to Boadilla del Camino, a small town in the middle of nowhere with no shops but an albergué attached to a modern hotel. A good one, too, with a swimming pool where we spent the afternoon resting from our labours. But if you wanted to eat or even use the WiFi you had to go to the hotel so it turned out to be one of the more expensive days. A very pleasant one, though, very sociable with a lively discussion that meandered through the afternoon. I recall taking my shoes off and reflecting with great satisfaction that I had now walked almost 200 kliks without a blister, the shoes and feet holding up perfectly. Especially pleased because I had broken the golden rule and set off in brand new pair, but they had fit so well and were so robust, waterproof and comfortable that I backed them. Of course, I was now in the heart of the Meseta, day after day walking easily across flat or gently rolling plains, all bone dry. But my blister day would come, and soon.
Rafael from Rocio was staying in the hotel section and we had another chat after I played some blues, which he said was basically Flamenco. This of course is simply not the case but I chose not to contradict him, wondering what he would say if I played Bach. He repeated his assertion that I was a true gypsy. “Not quite,” I replied. “Because if you walked away and left your wallet behind, I, and it, would still be here when you returned.” He laughed ruefully because we both know it was unfortunately true.
This is not, whatever you might think, a racist thing to say. I spent several months in Granada studying guitar with a gypsy; he and his family remain my good friends. From him I learned, rarely and always in a whisper, of the appalling oppression his Kalo people, their actual proper name, have suffered and to a degree continue to suffer. And insult is heaped on injury by the massive cultural appropriation of their art of flamenco as emblematic of Castilian Spain. Inevitably and justly almost all simply regard the giri as fair game. Whatever they can transfer to their own side is a miniscule ounce against the tons of what they are owed.
Next morning I set off for Carrion de los Condes. I don’t know why pilgrims so often skip this stage. The walking is easy. The huge skies and endless acres of wheat and sunflowers, now all in magnificent full bloom, make a perfect setting for the empty-minded connection with the simple self that is one of the most enriching aspects of walking the Camino. Nothing happens. There is nothing to see. You just walk. Perfect. We are pilgrims, not tourists.
At Carrion I checked in to the Convent of Santa Clara, a nunnery with a small office where, as I waited, an elderly couple came to buy a box of the cakes and sweets by which the nuns make their living. In the corner of the office stood a semi-circular cupboard. The nun behind the counter opened it and revealed a revolving structure that enabled the sequestered nuns on the other side to pass through the products of their labour without risking exposure to the corrupting world.
I had to wait until the strange little man who managed the albergué had a group of us, to spare himself the effort of repetition. What an amusing fellow! He displayed the most world-weary air, with slumped shoulders and shuffling feet, as if having to deal with the tedious public was the most burdensome task on earth. I began to ask a question but he held up a hand to silence me. “Espera,” he commanded. Wait. After two more pilgrims arrived, making a number he judged worthy of his attentions, he first took my walking poles and placed them in the corner. But he didn’t just lean them there in their normal orientation. He turned them upside down, placing the heavy handles on the ground – a much more stable position – and I realised he was no simpleton. Then he took our money, stamped our credenciales, and took us on the tour, again dragging himself along and wasting not a word. “Botas.“ Servicios.” “Cocina”. “Limpiar ropa.” I learned something from him and thenceforth always placed my walking poles upside down, putting an end to their annoying habit of falling down.
After check-in I set off for a stroll to the main square, modern but elegant, with a big supermarket just down the road. In spite of always wearing my steadily disintegrating Panama hat my face was getting sunburnt, so I succumbed to common sense and bought a tube of sunscreen. That evening I sat in a corner of the big courtyard and played music, satisfied to note that, as always, I was playing out of my skin. I don’t know why it happens but I seem to play at my best on the Camino.
Next day, one of the most famous, and dreaded, stages of the walk – 17.5 km of nothing, straight along a perfectly flat road through a landscape devoid of human habitation, with not a village, shop or even a simple fuente all the way to Calzadilla de la Cueza. This is an intact section of the Via Aquitana, built by the Romans in 118 BC, an embankment built half a metre above the surrounding marshy plains and estimated to contain 150,000 tons of small stones and mortar, dry in all weathers and still in perfect condition after two millennia. There is no natural rock for miles around; they carted it all there. The road used to go further past Calzadilla but the Spanish enthusiasm for road-building has destroyed the rest of the original Roman earthworks. The history alone is enough to make it worth the trek, but today it was a delight.
The Via Aquitana
The first half of the walk took me through a mist-obscured landscape, the dead straight road vanishing in the fog while the sun rose behind me, slowly burning its way to clear the land and the sky. Seventeen uninterrupted kliks is a long walk and when I made out a church ahead I hoped I had reached Calzadilla, but as I drew closer I saw nothing but the church some way off to the right, with outbuildings suggesting a monastery. Disappointed, I trudged on. Ahead lay a low range of hills and I felt quite dispirited to think that Calzadilla must lie on the other side. Then, joy. As I approached a dip in the road I saw that I had indeed arrived but the small town, or rather village, lay entirely obscured in a depression, out of the winds that so often make life uncomfortable for plains dwellers. As I entered it occurred to me that this would have been a place where robbers lurked, hidden from the surrounding country. If you did not know it was there you would never find it. But for the Roman road, I suppose.
The excellent albergué, well kept by a genial Italian, had a spacious garden with a sizeable and clean swimming pool. A young Italian couple were among the guests, the wife a voluptuous and beautiful young woman in a disturbingly brief bikini. Will age never free me? My monastic soul despairs! They were on an episodic Camino – every year they took their holiday by walking another section. Lovely people, so warm and friendly. I went down the road to the bar where I witnessed the arrival of a Spanish family on bikes, the father a ridiculous and unpleasant figure, his large gut spectacular in skin-tight lycra emblazoned with the slogan, “I am KING so cool”. I thought him so memorably ugly that I sneaked a photo, but he turned to me just as I pressed the button, caught me at it and made a hostile face.
Later, as I was at the albergué practising a slow exercise he walked past me and sneered, “Es no flamenco!” so I immediately snapped off three bars of a fast bulerias and laughed. Actually machismo is no joke in Spain. I saw posters publicising anti-machismo and giving the head count of women killed by men this year in Spain, at that point already in the high hundreds. I noticed that his daughter seemed thoroughly cowed. Over the several times I saw the group she seemed timid and never spoke. Unpleasant thoughts crowded in. Later someone told me he had been entertaining himself running down pilgrims so my assessment of his character based on his appearance was entirely accurate.
Next stop: Sahagún. A large town where I met up with well-known pilgrims whom I now can’t recall for a lunch I can’t recall in a café/panaderia I remember well because it was at the pinnacle of a triangle formed by three busy streets. Walking tip: after two hours, take your shoes off and raise your feet above your heart for at least twenty minutes in what I call the Camino Recovery Position. You will be astonished at the complete rejuvenation of your walking equipment. I did this, somewhat to the disapproval of the other customers, and bade farewell to the others who left before me. Actually I do recall one of the pilgrims who I lunched with – Julie, the South African who had met her now-husband on the Camino del Norte. He was back in Belgium, shadowing her phone and sending her hints and directions as she progressed; this could have been creepy but wasn’t because she found it ‘sweet’. Julie was one of those people who are convinced that the art of conversation consists of exchanging minute trivia about one’s daily existence, something I usually find intensely irritating. Why would anyone imagine I might be interested in how they planned to arrive at some time at some point along their journey but were prevented from doing so by some tedious non-event which they also insist on relating in mind-numbing detail? Who cares? And then … And then … But I recognise that the chatter arises from the wholesome and entirely commendable desire to make a connection and Julie is so clearly good-hearted I just can’t take against her. She is noticeably over-weight and I was touched by her constant optimism and courage in pressing on, ruefully admitting that she isn’t up to the pace kept by most other pilgrims.
Next day I walked a personal record: 34km. I just kept going, to Bercianos del Real Camino, memorable for almost nothing. I went for a walk, had a couple of glasses of wine in an agreeably rough and almost deserted bar, appropriately for a town that struck me as windswept and empty. And that was that. Next day off to Mansilla de las Mulas, checking in to the huge and well-appointed Jardin del Camino, with the dormitories above a large restaurant specialising in the regional delicacy cecina, rather like jamon iberico but made from beef. I didn’t try it but theirs must have been good because every table in the restaurant and garden bar were taken. Leanne had finished her business in Burgos and cracked on, turning up with Albi and their new companion Wolfgang on their way to the next stop further down the line. Once again Leanne and I were parting company because she had to push ahead to be in Santiago by the 18th for work; I mistakenly thought this would be the last time I saw Alberto, and my last chance to get him to play the Beatle’s ‘Blackbird’ so I could video and learn it. Leanne was champing at the bit to reach León Cathedral before it closed but I insisted, handing her my camera on which she recorded a lovely short video of Albi and me singing together. Leanne had never heard the song, which astonished me. I thought everyone in the world knew it. Albi and I hugged and wished each other Buen Camino and they were off.
I had been keeping in touch with Eliza, as of a month ago once again my ex-partner but still close friend, and it was on this day that she gave me the awful news that an old friend, whom I had met and very much liked, had just lost her son in an industrial accident. He had been working in Hawaii while she was at home in Portugal; there was no way the US would let her in because of Covid. Harry had been 30 years old when his life was snuffed out in an instant. Perhaps because I had so much mind time I was very moved by this, easily imagining the utter devastation that would befall me if Bodhi, Rose or Holly were to be suddenly killed, a literally unbearable loss. I resolved to light candles wherever I could, and to pray in my own peculiar way for the relief of the suffering family left behind. It served a purpose for myself, as I well understood – to focus my attention on the vexed question of my beliefs, my effort to unpick a supportable spirituality from the dogma, superstition and of course the distortions of the tortured St Paul that have made such a mess of modern Christianity.
I walked into León in the company of my new friend Rubén, whom I had caught up with, not for the first time, in Mansilla. Rubén was a real character and I regret not taking his contact details because we became firm mates. He worked as an account manager for an electric motor repair company in Barcelona, a position he found so stressful that he over-medicated with cocaine, which he considered less harmful than the years he had spent wasted on weed. I pointed out to him the pointlessness of working to earn money to buy drugs to take so you could keep working. He laughed and confessed that it was not as bad as that because he was exceptionally good at his job and they paid him so handsomely that he could not bring himself to quit.
Rubén was a true pilgrim on a healing journey with no patience for the hordes of tourists clogging up the albergués, having their baggage transported and in other ways quenching his true Camino vibe. He refused to book albergués – not the Camino way, which I agree with in principle – and was emphatic that because there would be so many more tourists after León that he had decided to finish his Camino there.
On the main drag up to Cathedral Square we ran into Julie and some others who told Rubén of one remaining vacancy at their albergué, which he raced off to secure. I headed for my reservation at the Franciscan albergué and cursed when it came into sight, remembering it immediately as the huge, modern and perfectly soulless place I had stayed in last time. Glumly I stepped into the glass lift that took me to the spotless third floor where I found I had a four-bunk room to myself, with a window that looked out onto an empty concrete yard. Dreary. Daily chores seen to I set off for the cathedral in time for early evening Sunday Mass. Wonderful and famous cathedral, dull and uninspiring Mass. I went to light a candle for Harry but they were all those bogus electric things. I spent 50 cents anyway; better than nothing.
The town was popping – León is a popular holiday destination and every bar and the streets outside were packed and noisy. Everyone, as usual in festive Spain, was tipsy but not drunk, and happy. No signs of aggression, no shouted arguments about politics or sport, no edge of danger that accompanies mass drunkenness in the Anglosphere. This is helped by the practice of serving tapas, literally ‘lids’, a small serving of free food originally served in a saucer on the top of the glass. Although the practice varies more or less by region the Spanish never drink without eating, and not just crisps but real delicacies. I was wandering around, carrying my guitar as usual, hoping to bump into some pilgrim friends, when I heard someone zipping up the scale of one of those plastic pan pipes. Hearing it a second time I turned to see the player laughing and gesturing me to join him and his friends. “Toca! Toca!” he called. “Play!” I took my guitar out as he ordered me a tinto de verano – a delicious, potent one with plenty of Vermouth – and played a couple of pieces as they clapped skilfully along, Andalusians all. Happily no-one tried to sing. They were in a riotous mood and I spent a most jolly half hour in their company, then made my way back to the Franciscans to find someone in the room who spoke not a word to me nor I to him. There really is something about that place …
Next morning, anticipating that at some point I would be sleeping rough, I waited outside the pilgrim shop in Calle Ancha till it opened at 9.30 and bought a roll-up mat. The salesman showed me how to strap it to the bottom of my pack where it stayed all the way back to the UK because as it turned out I managed to score a bed at every stop along the Way.
Next day I climbed out of León, past the underground bodegas where locals have dug into the hillside and constructed or utilised existing caves for aging wine, and reached La Virgen del Camino before midday.
Descending the hill from La Virgen I found and took the dirt track off to the left. On my first Francés I had missed the turn and paid for it by walking all the way to Hospital de Orbigo beside the highway. The detour adds 3 km, making it almost 30 km to Orbigo, not that I would walk it in one go – I was already booked in to Albergué Jésus in Vilar de Mazarife. In the distance I could see the mountains I would be among in a couple of days, ascending to the highest point on the Camino Francés. I didn’t see a single pilgrim after the turn-off but found a few already installed at the albergué when I arrived.
Just outside Vilar I saw a shepherd seated under an umbrella on his large donkey, herding his small, beautifully well-kept flock with two border collies.
“Lovely animal,” I called out to him. “Si. Collies. Los perros mejores!” He assumed I was talking about the dogs, so I agreed and told him that also in my country, where we have many sheep, the border collie is the shepherd’s much preferred breed. He showed me how he had trained one of them to jump up and lick the donkey’s nose – it was tall for a donkey and the dog had to give a slight hop to reach. I laughed and bade him good evening, reflecting as I walked away that I had just seen a dog kiss his master’s ass.
Albergué Jésus was a lot of fun because it seemed like it was the only place in town that was open for food and drinks, consequently the spacious garden was full of locals, many sitting at tables playing cards and chatting enthusiastically. Among the albergué’s many amenities was a well-equipped kitchen so I followed the signs to the only shop in town and bought some spuds, a tin of peas and some pesto. And one of those excellent bottles of local wine found throughout Spain, marked only with a small generic label placed near the bottom, never costing more than €1.50 and invariably stowed inconspicuously on the lowest shelf of the wine section. There is no excise tax on wine and beer in Spain and wine is often literally cheaper than milk. From the shop I followed a sign to the supposedly baroque church of the Apostle James, surprisingly well set up for visitors with a church warden ready to point out the features and a leaflet in all the main languages – only one copy of each, to be read and returned. The church was neither lovely or exceptional so I soon left, only to discover that in this very small town I was lost! I wandered around for a good quarter of an hour until I saw a familiar road and retraced my steps to the albergué and cooked my meal of the three P’s. It was … palatable. I have not kept the recipe. Later, the albergué being situated on the edge of town, we were treated to a glorious sunset over the vega. I liked Vilar very much. It was just one of those places with a special, warm vibe, in fact I found myself thinking, “I could live here.” But of course I couldn’t. I’d be off to León for stimulation every other day.
The climb out of León to La Virgen had taken me onto the paramo Leónes, or the high plain of León defined as the alluvial flats bordered by the Esla and Órbigo rivers, which stretches a long way north to south but is unfortunately quite narrow east to west. The next day I was nearing its western edge and dealing with more hills and valleys, about six kilometres from Astorga, when I came across the abandoned finca which a guy from Barcelona has turned into a rather special rest stop, offering all sorts of free food and drink, piles of fruit and other goodies, all on a donativo basis. It has been going for seven years now and I remembered it well. Sadly Sue, the loud, gregarious Australian woman who had been a partner to the host had moved on and he did seem a little lonely and more subdued than the enthusiast I recalled from my last walk. But he still espoused the anti-mercenary spirit that motivated people to give generously, as evidenced by the sprawling pile of coins, at least two hundred euros strewn and seemingly disregarded on one of the tables. The precisely tended gardens had put on considerable growth, the building had been repaired and the place now functioned as an open-air albergué. Karin, my Dutch friend, decided to stay the night and put quite an effort into trying to persuade me to join her in sleeping in the open air. I would have, but for the absence of cold beer. After a long hike in the hot sun nothing comes between me and that ice-cold cañon.
I needed one more than ever when the paramo came to a harsh and abrupt end at the steep climb into historic Astorga; leaning heavily on my poles I zig-zagged painfully up the precipitous streets into the town centre atop the hill.
In the cool lobby of the Albergué Siervas de Maria I witnessed at first hand the necessity of booking ahead as I waited while they apologetically but firmly turned away a pilgrim without a reservation. After the usual settling-in chores I descended the front steps and ran straight into Rubén. We were delighted to see each other and I ribbed him about not having quit the Camino, to which he replied that when the time came he couldn’t do it, even though he had strained a muscle in his leg and was limping quite badly. I urged him to join me for a beer but he declined, announcing that after stuffing himself full of fine cecina and exhausted after his struggle to get here he was off for a siesta.
Astorga is a major historical centre, a crossing of two Roman roads and the point where the Camino de la Plata from Seville joins the Francés. It is a beautiful town – most of the massive original walls with their semi-circular buttresses still encircle the hilltop, and at the south-western end stretches a long tree-filled park where one can stroll in the evenings and enjoy a commanding view of the countryside in the setting sun. The cathedral is exceptional, even by Spanish standards; I could fill pages describing its unique works of art and splendid architecture. In one corner, before a chapel of the Virgin, it also gave me my first chance to light a real candle for poor Harry Evans, which I did. The coin-in-a-slot electric candles have become distressingly common in Spanish churches and this was the only rack in the cathedral that offered real candles.
Poor devil…
I was delighted to spot one of those stonecarvers’ little jokes on a relief above a south entrance – peeking through a window looking out over a scene from Jesus’ life, a malignant mediaeval jester. I love those little mason’s notes, so easily missed; sometimes a mouse eating an apple, or a dog scratching fleas, inserted into some holy biblical scene. I reflected that this one scene in haut relief, one of dozens throughout the cathedral, inside and out, would have been at least a year’s work for four men, and also on the strong likelihood that in carving the figures they may have well been making portraits of each other as the faces were clearly modelled from life.
Astorga also boasts an early Gaudi building, now a Camino museum. Both outside and in it is a more conventional structure than someone familiar with Sagrada Familia might expect, basically a neo-gothic mansion in keeping with the cathedral it stands near although certainly not lacking in Gaudi’s daring and original flourishes.
After consuming my usual thrifty but satisfying meal of tinned seafood, bread and wine al fresco in the park I ran into Rubén and we headed off in search of a drink. He told me that the guy who had set up the donativo just outside Astorga had been a friend of his, a fellow weed-head and roué back in Barcelona whom he had enjoyed catching up with. I expressed my regret at his loss of Sue but he just laughed, saying that Michael had never lacked for female company and he doubted that this had changed. We came across a group of pilgrims who urged us to join them in what turned out to be a trek looking for a spot in one restaurant after another, unsuccessful because most of the boisterous crowd wanted a meal and there seemed not to be a free table in the entire old town. Eventually, tired and not wanting to eat anyway I bailed and took myself off to bed.
The next day I passed the milestone marking 300 kliks to Santiago, which marked the midpoint of my Camino from Pamplona to Santiago, although since I was now committed to walking on to the coast with Leanne I really still had 400 kliks ahead of me.
Walking now through hillier country, still covered in wheat and occasionally maize, I passed a couple of many examples of the beautiful water towers that epitomise why I so love Spain. When Kiwis need to store water they throw up an entirely utilitarian and usually brutally plain concrete tub. Not the Spanish. They understand that a water tower is going to become a conspicuous part of their beloved landscape and invariably erect something at least interesting and often a thing of beauty.
The tower in the picture stands at the approaches to the historic Hospital de Órbigo, famous for its 19-arched mediaeval bridge. The present structure dates back to the Middle Ages but there has been a bridge here over the Órbigo River since Roman times. It has seen countless battles, many between the Moors and Christians, as well as the Peninsular War, which the Spanish call the War of Independence when with the aid of the British and Portuguese they pushed Napoleon out of Spain. During that war the British destroyed a couple of the central arches to stop the French advance. It was last extensively rebuilt in 1946. The ‘Hospital’ part refers to the refuge at which the Knights of St John of Jerusalem cared for pilgrims for the best part of a thousand years.
The numerous arches running through the cultivated fields aren’t there for show – I first saw the bridge during the spring rains when those fields were under a torrent of water.
From Hospital I bit into what I knew would be the hardest part of the whole Camino: the journey to the Cruz de Hierro and beyond, scaling and descending the first of two mountain ranges.
This is the part of the walk that passes through El Ganso (The Goose), a rough little village famous for what they call the Cowboy Bar, a hostelry decorated with a crazed assortment of American western imagery and memorabilia in a picturesquely ramshackle semi-abandoned town that I remembered for its moss-and-lichen-covered crumbling walls and rough tracks. No more! Thanks to the funding to tart up the Camino all the roads are now pristine concrete, most of the walls repaired. Why do they imagine they are doing pilgrims a favour by concreting walkways? Concrete is the worst surface to walk on. I was so disappointed I scarcely glanced into the Cowboy Bar and kept going.
I had planned to walk the 25 kliks to Foncebadón but climbing through the heat into Rabanal I was pretty much out of steam, with the blister that I had finally acquired on my left heel causing me a good deal of pain. Stopping at the little shop for supplies I asked if the shopkeeper knew of an albergué with free beds. He pointed across the road to a large garden with a row of tents. This was the Green Garden Albergué, his own place, with no buildings beyond frontier-type shower and toilets, a few rather well-crafted shade areas and a row of single tents for a bunk-room. The Burgos cold spell had passed, with daytime temperatures back into the high 20s and low 30s, so I seized my chance to sleep under the stars at least once on the walk.
As I dumped my baggage in my allotted tent I saw Rubén limping past and called out to him, urging him to stay, but he was determined to make it Foncébadon, just below the Cruz at the summit. He declared himself refreshed, having just eaten what he declared to be the best hamburger in Spain at the bar I passed on my way into the village. Although of average height for a Spaniard and not particularly chubby Rubén, I thought, appears to be something of a gourmand. Then I noted that I had already taken my belt in a notch and without that reserve of fat to keep me going I would probably have been spending far more on food than was the case. Weighing myself before and after the Camino I would be able to calculate that I burned off about a kilo a week, although this was not the source of unalloyed joy – some much lard having been lost so quickly I now sported such hideous stretch marks across the now-loose skin of my belly that I vowed never to appear shirtless in public again. Happily as I write this a couple of months later the skin has slowly shrunk back to normal and thanks to a rigorous schedule of daily walks I have not yet started to put the weight on again.
After showering and washing my usual T-shirt and underpants I was lounging in the shade when the shaggy-headed and ever-smiling Belgian Mariken turned up, dropped her pack and took a place beside me. I asked her if she was planning to stay.
“No. Just taking a rest.”
“Where will you stay tonight?”
“I’ll find somewhere. I have some problem with my card and have run out of money. I have called the bank – it will be fixed soon. It’s OK. I’ve been without money before.” She did seem genuinely unconcerned.
“You can’t be entirely without money,” I said, and handed her €20. “Pay me back when you can.” I was happy to do it although it did cross my mind that perhaps I was being played.
She thanked me fulsomely and declared that now she could go and eat one of those amazing hamburgers she had seen someone, probably Rubén, devouring back down the road. I must admit I was dismayed at her improvidence – a hamburger in Spain is always served as a full meal and it couldn’t cost less than ten euros – but just let it all go. Mariken is a true child of the universe and I felt ashamed of my suspicion. In the event she didn’t get around to it anyway.
Not for the first time I heard about my supposed fame. A couple of days earlier a pilgrim whom I had not before met had greeted me with, “You must be Christopher.” “Yes, but how do you know?” “You’re famous, man!” Mariken told me that people were talking about me in her albergué in Astorga. Apparently I stand out for being from NZ, the country it seems that literally everyone on earth would like to live in, for being mad enough to carry a guitar on the Camino (although I always point out that as a flamenco guitar it’s exceptionally light), for secretly being incredibly ancient and for making nice music.
Enough already. I’m as vain as the next man and can’t say I hate it but I also understand what is really going on. One of my favourite films of all time is the greatly underrated Plenty, starring Meryl Streep and just about everyone else of the day, from a play by David Hare. In it, one of the characters laments the end of WWII as the passing of a time when everyone was at their exceptional best. In a different way the Camino is like that. While we walk we are outside the prosaic constraints of our normal lives, all committed to the same goal and doing little else but achieving it. We are free, energetic, focused, our best selves seeing other through that lens of exceptionality. Of course I know how ordinary I actually am and after four Caminos understand how we all glow in each others’ eyes. Is it an illusion? Not at all. People really are wonderful, the crown of creation, and it is the blessing of the Camino to connect on these terms. However my fellow pilgrims see me I also delight in them, every one. I truly believe that on our pilgrimage we are in a state of grace, shepherded by angels. It will all go away soon but if there is a lesson, a perception, to be taken from the Camino, this is it.
About that “Christopher.” I’ve found that if I introduce myself as Chris the Spanish tend to ask, “What?” and immediately forget. There isn’t enough of it to quite grasp, and if they do they only know Chris as an abbreviation of Cristina, so probably doubt that they have correctly heard. But Christopher they immediately catch and seem always to remember.
In the evening I went to the old Santa Maria de la Asuncion, where German Benedictine priests used to sing Vespers in Gregorian chant every evening, in fact another of my reasons for stopping in Rabanal. I was expecting to hear it again but sat through a vernacular Mass instead. The priest gave a sermon in accented Spanish containing every Camino cliché imaginable. Outside the church I translated a Latin inscription on the wall and asked the priest if I had it correct. I was astonished to discover that neither he nor his colleague knew a word of Latin. I have to say I expected more from an ecclesiastical German education.
Later, having carefully examined the seams for signs of bedbugs, I dragged the mattress out under the stars and lay there for an hour without seeing a single meteor – a disappointment, although the great sweep of the Milky Way and the various constellations lit up the night in a brilliant display such as I had not since I left NZ. I fell asleep with stars in my eyes, although at one in the morning a chilling wind woke me and drove me into the tent.
And so, next morning, to the Cruz de Hierro, the iron cross which marks the highest point on the Camino. The climb from Rabanal through Foncebadon isn’t that long or hard since the Way had been ascending in stages all the way from León. The walk was enlivened by crowds of bright butterflies that fluttered around my legs, literally dozens if not hundreds of them. I was happy to arrive well before the tourist buses that would start to plague the place later in the day. The Cruz is a simple iron cross atop a 15 metre pole and is attended by various legends, some of which say it has been there since Roman days. It is undoubtedly true that its original purpose would have been to mark the path through the heavy snows of winter. There has certainly been an iron cross here for a thousand years, and throughout this time the tradition has persisted of carrying a stone on your pilgrimage to place at its base. Reasons given vary but the persistent thread is of a penance for yourself or another, so I had carried one of the slivers of quartz the children were selling in Hornillos which I inscribed with Harry’s name and placed on what is now a sizeable hill, every piece of it left here by centuries of pilgrims.
My last Camino Francés was marred by hordes of Germans brought there following the great success of a book by a German comedian that described the Camino as a jolly tourist romp. At the Cruz, as I had been waiting my turn to place a stone, a taxi turned up and disgorged a group of Teutons who proceeded to run up and down the hill hurling the stones at each other, hooting. This time my Camino has been almost entirely German-free, with the exception of the delightful Wolfgang, so I had no difficulty passing a quarter hour of quiet contemplation before placing Harry’s stone.
Leaving the Cruz I began the long and brutal descent, or rather traverse and descent, to Molinaseca. I was now in the peaks of the Leónese Mountains and the path through spectacular mountainous vistas was harsh, hot, stony and seemingly endless. It was on this section that I had fallen and smashed my guitar on my first Camino, but that traverse at least was in cool, misty conditions, with drifts of snow in shaded spots. The difficulty I faced now was not so much the stony nature of the surface but its extreme unevenness, with pits and rocky obstructions which as two hours turned into three were giving my tin knee a hell of a battering, not helped by the persistent sting of the blister on the other foot. I had not even reached the first village, the picturesque El Acebo de San Miguel, and stood in desperate need of a break when, miraculously, I turned a corner and saw a taxi van pulled over at the roadside with a family of four in the process of loading their packs into the back. A portly American gent waved to me and asked if I had seen his wife, whom he described. I had in fact passed her less than half an hour earlier and assured him she was fine and enjoying the walk. He asked if I needed a lift; I could have kissed him. Determination to walk every step of the way is all very well but I was clearly heading for a medical emergency had I insisted on pressing on. As I experienced on my first Camino, pushed too far the knee swells up like a watermelon and pretty much immobilises me – not good in these mountains.
I cannot describe the bliss of sitting back in an air-conditioned van and watching that savage trail rolling by. The Italian family and I shared a conspiratorial jollity, cheating together and delighted to be doing so. We went through El Acebo and reached what appeared to be the easier and final stages of the walk so we thanked our American friend, who declined reimbursement, and disembarked. I winked at the others and said, “Lips sealed, OK? This never happened.” “It never happened,” replied the father, beaming, and we set off on what turned out to still be another hour of hard descent, although softened by green valleys and tumbling streams. On the way I recognised the long, side-sloping sheet of slippery rock where I had fallen onto my guitar seven years earlier.
Entering Molinaseca was like walking into paradise. We followed the road down a kilometre-long hill to the ancient Romanesque bridge and crossed the Rio Meruelo into the lovely, perfectly preserved old town. Beside the bridge the river widens into a broad, slow-moving pool where a dozen townspeople and pilgrims were bathing. Forgetting that the 20-odd kilometres from Rabanal to Molinaseca would be such slow, hard travelling I had planned to carry on the next seven kliks to Ponferrada but there was no way I was leaving this heavenly spot for that rather dull town. I went off and took the first albergué I saw where the Italians that I had never shared a taxi with were already installed. We greeted each other warmly, I washed my daily T-shirt and underpants, took my guitar and went straight back to the communal swimming pool, picking up a couple of ice-cold cans of San Miguel Especial on the way.
Because all my previous Caminos had been made in the cooler, wetter months it had never occurred to me to pack a pair of togs but I was damned if I was going to miss out on a swim. I simply shed my t-shirt and boots and plunged into the exquisitely cool, crystal-clear water. I was still swimming when I looked up at the bridge and saw the irrepressible Rubén limping into town. I couldn’t believe he had managed that harsh section of the Way but he was all smiles when he turned up on the reserve and joined the party half an hour later. In the baking mountain heat my shorts dried on me in less than an hour. I had an interesting conversation with a highly educated if somewhat mouthy young American guy, who also played my guitar as if he were trying to tear the thing apart. I’ve never seen such a savage hand on an instrument.
As the afternoon wore on more and more locals, mostly the younger set, turned up for a swim, most of the girls in bikinis whose lower sections were virtually what the French call a cache-sex. At one point I noticed a couple of particularly pretty girls in microkinis and as they drew closer I realised that, although well developed, they could not have been more than twelve years old. It shocked me – what mother, I wondered, would let her girl child offer so very much of her naked body for public display? I suspect social media pressure, that evil of our age.
Clockwise from the sandals: the American, can’t remember, Dave, Mariken, Karin, Rubén.
Next day began with an easy and entirely solitary walk to Ponferrada, where the Camino took me past the spectacular castle of the Knights Templar. The road became distinctly up and down and I accepted the fact that hills were going to be part of my life for the next couple of days as I still had the murderous climb to O Cebreiro ahead of me. Although my blister had not broken it had bothered me so much over the previous couple of days that I had burst and drained it, disinfected with the ubiquitous anti-Covid hand cleaner and sealed it with a Compeed. Now it hurt worse than ever so I made up my mind to have my pack couriered next day to the summit. I was also very tired, not just from the exertion but from not having slept well or long over the last couple of nights.
In spite of this I had to keep going to make my appointment with Leanne on the 21st in Santiago, having twice now fallen short of the schedule I had made to achieve that. Notwithstanding the pain, and wondering why I was doing this to myself, I pushed myself hard through the hills and it was with great relief that I staggered under the roasting sun into the municipal in picturesque Villafranca del Bierzo. 31kms, not a record but a bloody long walk in those conditions. Villafranca is all up and down, hanging off the slopes of a steep-sided river valley, and although Leanne, now a couple of days ahead of me, had urged me to stay at Albergué Leo, which she praised as the best in town, I was not going to take one more unnecessary step down or up any hill and collapsed on the front lawn of the municipal. Leanne, as we chatted constantly on WhatsApp, chivvied me for not having followed a single one of her recommendations but then I had not stopped in many of the same towns and rarely ate in restaurants so the opportunity did not often arise. After a long rest I made my way down to the bottom of the valley and up the other side to the town centre. I met one of my friends from yesterday (I forget which one) in the main square who told me that some of the others were swimming at the river. I ambled off to find them but failed, passing by Albergué Leo, clearly a much more attractive option than the barren and almost empty municipal but I consoled myself with the fact that what I wanted more than anything else this night was a long rest. I bought a baguette, a small salad and a tin of sardines from the supermarket and made my meal by the riverside, then back to the albergué and abed while it was still light.
Next morning I was off before dawn because O Cebreiro, sitting on a small summit as it does, is short on accommodation and only the municipal was open. Municipals don’t take bookings so the only way to have a good chance of a bed was to arrive early. I found a flyer for the local backpack courier service, called Juan and told him where I was and where I wanted my mochilla taken. No problem. I filled the details on the envelope/flyer, put €5 in it and set off carrying only my guitar and what was usually my front pack.
The first half of the walk runs level beside the Valcarce river and, refreshed, with the Compeed working its magic and the pain now minimal, I kept up the pace, passing the few pilgrims out so early. It was a beautiful morning and very quiet since the old highway is now superseded by one of the astounding skyways that have levelled so many of the mountainous parts of Spain, so high above that I could not even hear the traffic.
The landscape here is most beautiful, with surely uneconomic tiny farms and half-deserted villages dotted among the wooded hills, in fact the distinction between village and farm is vague at best.
I reached Herrerias, the last village before the ascent, at about ten o’clock. Here it is possible to join a horse trek to the top – the idea tempted me but I saw no sign anywhere advertising the service and in any case, not carrying my pack I felt quite relaxed about the climb so I set off up the hill. Initially a pretty walk on an easy surface through woodlands besides gurgling streams, the inclines seemed to get steeper with every turn in the road. I began to really struggle, particularly since in many sections the track was not wide enough to allow for my usual tactic of zig-zagging back and forth. For once I felt my age with some regret as the younger pilgrims strode past me, often in conversation, and I began to worry about nailing a place for the night.
My mood was not helped by this:
The late Mr O’Connor was certainly younger and even looked fitter than I and for a fleeting moment my thoughts turned to my irregular heartbeat, risk of stroke, yada yada. Then I gave myself a good notional kick in the pants and returned to the climb.
Finally I sweated my way into La Faba, which my memory told me grimly was only half way up. But the path levelled out considerably after La Faba and as I passed the large and ornate milestone telling me I was leaving Castilla y León for Galicia I wondered how accurate my recollection was because I knew that the border was quite close to the summit. I couldn’t help but stop occasionally to appreciate the spectacular views across deep valleys. There is nothing quite like one mountaintop after another stretching into the distance on a clear day in a foreign country.
Feeling a second wind I was ready to deal with a few more kilometres when I rounded a bend and discovered that I had arrived. The drama was over; I lived to walk another day.
I threaded my way through the crowds of tourists and quaint thatched souvenir shops and restaurants to the municipal albergué where a crowd of perhaps twenty pilgrims sat waiting for it to open at one o’clock. There was much speculation about capacity. Apparently the Galician commune had mandated a 30% loading for public albergués during the pandemic; someone calculated that this meant 32 beds out of the 104 capacity but the sign in the window informed us that 28 beds would be available.
A headcount told me that I was number 25 – supposedly safe but close enough to make me nervous. Soon the hospitalera arrived in her little white Fiat, a short plump woman in heavy make-up and large spectacles and very obviously a council employee, quite unlike the traditional volunteers who usually staff albergués.
We lined up and she slowly checked us in one by one. After she stamped my credencial and handed me the usual packet containing a paper fitted sheet and a paper pillowcase she left her cubicle, counted a few pilgrims behind me and told the rest they would not be admitted, a cue for a minor confrontation over the 30% tally. But this was a council functionary in the classic mould and the protestors quickly assessed her perfect indifference and sloped off. I first felt relief and then, when I entered my assigned bunkroom, indignation on behalf of the rejects.
What a bureaucratic absurdity! My first impulse was to protest but realised that by physically removing the bunks the commune had eliminated any discretion. But I would have my revenge in Palas de Rei.
It was now two in the afternoon and there was no sign of my backpack, provoking severe anxiety. Since it was only a 20 km drive it should have arrived hours ago. I found the functionary outside dragging heavily on a fag and asked if she had seen it. She informed me that the couriers left all the packs at the Hotel Cebreiro and to my relief I found it sitting in the lobby. I felt my exertions, frustrations and worries had earned me a decent meal and ordered the pilgrim’s menu in the restaurant, not expecting much for my €10. To my gratified surprise it turned out to be a very tasty and well-cooked pork loin and veg with a piquant sauce on the side, accompanied by a whole bottle of the cold and perfectly palatable house white wine.
By four in the afternoon the day-trippers had departed in their cars and coaches leaving the spectacular 360º view to the few pilgrims. I spotted a very small hand-painted sign pointing to a tienda (shop) and descended a set of iron stairs to a thatched building sited on one of the only locations in the village with no view at all. A few people hung about in a small courtyard drinking and chatting. I took a stubby of Heineken from a shelf and asked the shopkeeper if she had any of those cold. She smiled, dipped into an out-of-view chest chiller and handed me a one-litre bottle of Mahou lager, price €1.50. She must have liked the cut of my jib because I had found the locals’ spot and was being included. 
I sat outside with the drinkers who were indeed all locals, played a bit of music and was duly plied with drinks. I had a chat with a man in his 20s who lived in León but had come back home to visit family and hang out with his mates. We had an entirely (if I had thought about it) predictable exchange.
“It must have been wonderful to grow up in these mountains.”
“Yeah. But there’s nothing to do.”
The next morning’s walk was a joy. A pleasant chill in the air, a well-formed track that stayed among the peaks for the first couple of hours, every turn presenting another gorgeous vista bathed in golden light, often looking down on hamlets far below.
I took breakfast at the first village, just past the giant pilgrim statue on Alto San Roque, and began the long descent to Triacastela where I spent a pleasant if uneventful night before setting out on what I knew would be the last experience of the ‘normal’ Camino. From the next stop, Sarria, the population would explode. The cathedral at Santiago issues an ornate certificate called the Compostela to anyone with a credencial containing stamps proving that they have walked more than 100km of the Camino. Sarria is 110 km from Santiago, and we were still in the Spanish summer holiday period. I had been trying for some days to nail a booking for every stop along the way, successfully except for Palas de Rei where I fully expected to sleep on the streets; many stories were circulating of dozens and even hundreds doing so. Actually I was not at all concerned – I had the equipment and would have been happy to share the safety and congeniality of sleeping in a group.
I walked for a while in the company of a young couple with signs on their back offering free pain relief, acupuncture and shiatsu massage. They described themselves as alternative doctors; he, French, had trained in Chinese acupuncture and she, from Argentina, was an herbalist and masseuse. We talked about Covid and he advanced his theory that illness came from a state of being out of balance with the earth and, oddly, the sun, assuring me that if your body was correctly in alignment you had nothing to fear from a virus. We were on common ground in the conviction that a great deal of walking was powerfully protective against affliction. They were both, I must say, poised and radiantly healthy so I had to give his theories their due consideration. Do we really know? After all, ten percent of the population carry the bacteria that cause meningitis in their nose and throat and never contract that serious illness. The common cold virus is virtually omnipresent but I, for one, cannot remember ever having a cold.
On this section of the Camino many people take the detour to the spectacular monastery at Samos but I had seen it and found its magnificence somewhat off-putting, so I took the short route and walked into Sarria before lunchtime. The madness begins and it was visible immediately. The place was heaving with what we would soon dub tourigrinos, peregrino being Spanish for pilgrim. I walked past a hotel where a guy was loading a pile of suitcases into his mochilla courier van. Suitcases! On the Camino!
First stop, as usual, was at a bar for the daily Coke Zero to which I had become addicted. Reluctant as I am to support that embodiment of American imperialism, when tired, thirsty and hot there is nothing to match it, served on ice with a slice of lemon. I plonked myself down next to four young women I had been seeing intermittently since Burgos. One of them, an American Chinese who talked a blue streak had been complimentary back in Rabanal about my correct pronunciation of my Cantonese joke nickname Chi Sin Gwai Loa (crazy foreigner); she was as usual regaling the others with a story about herself. Opening my bag I discovered to my dismay that my Decathlon water bottle had leaked all over my credencial, to the ruin of some of its stamps. Unfolding it caused it to separate along one of the folds, which everyone saw.
“Oh bugger!” I exclaimed. “Look what’s …” The talker gave me a lightning glance, decided she didn’t care and kept on with her story. We would not be friends. More agreeably the woman sitting next to me expressed her sympathies and hoped it would be fine after it dried out, which I proceeded to manage by laying it out on a warm stone bench in the sun. Successfully, I am happy to say. In twenty minutes it was bone dry and repaired with the tape I always carry, with only a couple of the stamps now partly legible.
I set off among a flock of tourigrinos to Vilei, three kilometres along the Way, but on arrival I could find no sign of Albergué Matias Locanda. I enquired at the only albergué in sight and after I drew a puzzled blank from the hospitalero the owner appeared and told me that Matias’ albergué was back in Sarria, on the main street. And no, they were fully booked here so there was nothing for it but to return. I still don’t know how I mixed it up.
The albergué turned out to be a huge dark hall behind a pizzeria with one of those awful showers where you have to continuously hold your hand on a button to make the water flow. It was a family business managed by a young man who plainly lived in terror of his harpie of a mother. In the evening I decided it was time to replace the strings on my guitar and while doing so over my pizza the young guy begged me to re-string his completely mis-strung instrument. I used the set I had taken from mine and earned a couple of beers. He was almost embarrassingly grateful.
Next morning, Portomarin. Walking among a crowd of strangers was different but the weather was perfect, the way easy and picturesque and I simply and successfully decided not to let the crowds bother me. My first sight of Portomarin puzzled me – previously I had entered the town across a bridge over a lake. The bridge came into sight but no lake. As I drew closer I saw it now crossed a river at a height of perhaps fifteen metres. The signage before the bridge cleared up the mystery. The lake was in fact a reservoir, one that had drowned the mediaeval village on the river’s shores back in the 1960s. The historically worthwhile buildings had been moved to the top of the hill to become the centre of the new town. The floodgates were open for the summer and below the bridge remnants of the old village were clearly visible, including odd V-shaped lines of stones that I recognised as ancient fish traps.
Because I had not been able to get a bed in Portomarin I had another nine kliks to go, making it a long, 30 km day, so I stopped for a rest and lunch. My walk on to the tiny hamlet of Castromaior was pleasantly solitary until I caught up with two friendly young Spanish girls who, as I discovered, had met while studying English in Australia. They were the best of company. We guessed each others’ ages and got them equally wrong. No-one guesses my real age so that was a sure thing but I made the same mistake, placing them in their late teens; both surprised me by being in their mid-20s. I asked them what they thought of Australian men. Tactfully, they said it was difficult for them because they differed so much from the Spanish boys they were used to. “You mean they drink too much?” They laughed, tact abandoned. “And take lots of drugs. We are used to boys who are serious, studying for their careers. Australian boys leave school too early, have far too much money when they are young and spend it all on drink and drugs. All they care about is that, and surfing and sport.”
“Doesn’t sound like much fun for you.”
“It was boring, and sometimes we did not feel safe.”
Yep. Those girls had definitely been to Australia. Both gorgeous, I could imagine the hassles they would have faced from drunk Queensland surfers.
Albergué Ortiz was a clean modern building in the middle of nowhere. Tired after a long slog it suited me perfectly and I saw no sign of the owner’s rudeness as featured in some pilgrims’ comments on the app. I set off next morning in the dark, very early since at the next stop, Palas de Rei, I still had not been able to find a bed and was counting on being among the first to arrive, which, since I had a nine kilometre head start, I thought to be a reasonably safe bet. I kept up a good pace and arrived early. Only one pilgrim was waiting at the big Albergué Os Chacotes, one of two municipals in Palas, but this was a kilometre outside of town and I thought I stood a good chance of a place at the other municipal in town. There appeared to be no more than a dozen pilgrims waiting in a scattered bunch. A French pilgrim had noted that the sign in the window allowed for 18 beds, incredibly frustrating for an albergué that, but for Covid, would have taken 60. He had us line up our packs in order; I saw that one guy was placing an extra pack for a friend who he claimed had gone off for breakfast.
The French pilgrim counted off; I was number 19. “Hang on,” I objected. “The deal is if you’re here you’re here and if you’re not you’re not. I don’t agree with this.” Our volunteer organiser took me aside.
“I think these guys are honest. They walked through the night to get here at 8.30.”
I gave in. “Fair enough.”
Then a group of three said that they had a possible booking somewhere else and might leave.
“I think you should stay,” said my new friend. “I have a feeling you’ll get in.”
A dilemma. But I wasn’t up for the risk and legged it back to Os Chacotes, arriving in time to be sure of a place. Once checked in I headed back into town for a meal. A crowd of pilgrims were queuing outside a restaurant two doors up from the municipal, my French mate among them. Laughing I declared, “I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me.”
“You wouldn’t have got in. You did the right thing.” But then another pilgrim started crowing delightedly. “You would have got in! You shouldn’t have left.”
“Stop talking,” I yelled over him. “I really don’t want to know.”
But he was having none of it, intent on rubbing it in.
“Haha! You lost! Five people left. You should have stayed.” As he kept baying away I just walked off. This, I thought, is the last 100km. This is what you get. Assholes.
He wasn’t the only one. At the next town I bumped into the French guy who told me that he had seen the ‘pilgrims’ who had ‘walked through the night’ – in their car.
I simply don’t get it. What is the possible value of a Compostela gained by driving from town to town, depriving of a bed tired pilgrims who had walked hundreds of miles?
That night I stopped in for a drink at the restaurant next to Os Chacotes where I found Mariken with a group of eight or nine others. They were hoeing in to a proper feast, the table strewn with dishes piled high. She greeted me joyfully.
“You can have anything you want,” she offered, and told everyone that I had given her money when she had none. Actually, I thought I had loaned it to her and would rather have had the money, but as it turned out I ended up stuffing my face. They had ordered a large plate of pulpo, the prized Galician specialty of octopus, but it seemed no-one much cared for the taste or more likely the slightly slimy texture. It sat there until I decided that I was not going to have such a fine creature lose its life just to end up in a rubbish tin. I would never order it, but I don’t mind the taste; it’s seafood, after all, and I slowly munched my way through the lot. Given the cost of pulpo I’m sure I consumed every cent of my €20.
They had formed a group and were committed to travelling together to Santiago, apparently headed up by a blonde French guy who seemed to be the group’s social theorist. Agreeing to stick together in that situation pretty much guaranteed that they would not find beds and indeed they had slept out for the last three nights. I saw my chance for my revenge on the idiot bureaucrats of the Galican authorities, and to help them out.
“Come and stay at the albergué. The hospitalero has gone home, I have the door code and there is a huge, totally empty room downstairs.”
A discussion followed. The French intellectual didn’t care for the idea; it seemed ‘sneaky’, he wasn’t sure of the ethics and it had to be all or none. But the nights were now cold and they had not showered for three days. Common sense prevailed; we all trooped back to the albergué.
On the road to Arzúa
After an easy and enjoyable 20km walk to Boente, a few kliks past Melide, I checked into the expensive but luxurious Albergué Aleman. I was most impressed at the generous serving of vino verde the barman poured me until I raised it to my mouth; it was unmistakeably heavily watered. Although it calls itself the German albergué the only German present seemed to be a most gregarious bloke in glasses who insisted I join his group at their table. I had been sitting alone when he came over and declared, “No, no. This not the Camino way. You cannot be alone.” I had been feeling a little isolated and was grateful for the company.
Next morning I found it difficult to get out of bed – I had been walking for 29 days with only one break and averaging longer daily distances than I had ever done in the past. The fatigue was so overwhelming I decided to use the backpack courier service again. I rummaged around in the drawers of a desk downstairs and found an envelope, called the courier and left my pack beside one other and a couple of suitcases by the front door. This was the last night before Santiago and perhaps due to the fatigue I remember little of the walk to O Pino and Albergué Andaina, above a large restaurant. The barman took me up a flight of outside stairs to the dormitory entrance where I saw a couple of packs with courier tags. Neither was mine. I immediately thought back to the fact that the envelopes had not been in view on top of the desk but in a drawer. Was there a reason for that? Had the hospitalero withdrawn them because of some problem? I dialled the number from my recent calls. No answer. Not good. I called the albergué and was relieved to hear that my pack was gone. Perhaps he was still driving, running late. I went downstairs and stood at the roadside looking anxiously back down the road, then decided to go ask the staff. As I turned I saw the barman bringing me my pack, which I took and gratefully went upstairs for a shower.
I sat at a table and ordered a drink. At the next table a lone man in his 50s was eating a meal that looked irresistible in my hungry condition so I called the waiter and asked for the same. Ten minutes later I was tucking into one of the best simple meals I have ever eaten – beef on the bone, slow-cooked in a rich broth. The meat fell off the bone at the touch of the fork, the boiled potatoes perfectly firm under their coat of butter. The man invited me to join him and we enjoyed our meal and a conversation that wandered through the subject of Europe, the economy and especially Spanish history since he turned out to be a history teacher. He had not enjoyed his Camino. He was a lover of the mountains and the endless wheatfields had bored him so much that he almost quit the walk. After the Camino he was heading for the mountains of Asturia for some proper solitary hiking. We got onto the subject of Franco and the monuments to the murdered Basques.
“A Spanish friend told me,” I said, “that the whole ETA thing was not fundamentally about Basque separatism but a continuation of the Civil War in the 30s, which my friend claimed didn’t end at all in ’39, as Franco claimed, but actually went on with armed militias still shooting at the Francoists up to the 70s.”
“That’s true to a point,” he replied, “but it would be more accurate to describe it as a continuation of the Carlist wars of the 19th century. The conflict was based on an old law called the Salic Law.” My eyes just about bugged out my head as I recognised what he was talking about. Wars fought in Spain in the 18th C. were the result of the very same Salic law that Henry’s advisers use to support his claim to France in Shakespeare’s Henry V.
In terram salicam mulieres ne succedant. Henry V, Act 1, Sc. 2
i.e. In Salic land no woman may succeed (to the throne, in this case). Apparently the conservative monarchists used this in 1833 to try to stop the infanta Isabella, whose regent mother was a liberal, succeeding in favour of the conservative Carlos, the dead king Ferdinand’s brother. This same liberal vs conservative strain, with the liberals strongest in Catalonia and the Basque country, continued through the three Carlist Wars and the Civil War.
We parted affectionately and he informed me that I had inspired him. I did not have to ask why; it was not the first time I had heard such remarks on this, and for that matter, previous Caminos. It is not difficult to be inspiring, especially to the young, at 73. All that is required is to keep living a normal life and not do all those unnecessary things many septuagenarians do such as walk slowly, whistle your ‘s’s (purely the result of slack-mouthed laziness) and grunt when you sit or stand, all of these in most cases the sorry pay-off from telling yourself repeatedly that you’re ‘getting on a bit’ and letting yourself slide into idle senescence. I count myself incredibly fortunate to have discovered the Camino and through that the love of walking which keeps me fit and well. I’m also lucky to have lived such a varied life and most of all to be still engaged in the limitless challenge of learning whatever I can about music and the many other subjects that engage my curiosity. If someone looks at me and thinks that old age needn’t be so awful, that has to be good.
I still felt fatigued as I set out next day for Santiago with my guitar and pack, on the road at 5.30am to maximise my time in the city of the Apostle. No courier today; there was no way I was going to arrive at the Plaza Obradoiro looking like a day tripper. Yes, vanity. Whatever. Having a coffee just after dawn I got into a conversation with a young woman who worked for something called the Ashok Foundation, which put people with great ideas together with older mentors. She asked me a few questions and then suggested that I would be a good mentor and was I interested? Of course I assented and we set off together – I was most interested and wanted to hear more. What I heard instead was an interminable monologue about how she expressed herself through dance. She literally talked on this single subject non-stop for forty-five minutes until I simply could not bear to hear another word. I excused myself, saying that I always liked to walk alone into Santiago (which was true) and we parted company, exchanging WhatsApp contacts. I followed up a couple of days later and noticed that my messages were not received.
Two hours later I walked through the dark tunnel with its perpetual bagpiper (they do shifts) and onto the square. Leanne came skipping over waving her arms and we embraced. Then as I posed before the cathedral for the obligatory photo the delightful Mariken came running up and inserted herself joyfully into the shot.
It was done. Although we would walk on to Fisterra, the pilgrimage proper ends at Santiago Cathedral. It is such a special moment, the feelings so mixed that it is essential to take some time to absorb the experience. I wandered about, greeting familiar faces. They had not all just arrived; it’s part of the fun to stay for two or three days and go to the Plaza to watch friends having their moment of apotheosis. It always strikes me how one can instantly distinguish at their moment of arrival between those who have walked (or driven!) from Sarria and the others who have come from Navarre, France or even further afield. The real pilgrims.
I basked in the joy of a difficult undertaking completed while sensing the beginning of regret, for the moment I stepped onto the plaza I ceased to be a pilgrim – a distinctive identity, now gone. In the space of a few weeks that long road across Spain had become my home, the daily walk my work, and I had just lost both. On my first Camino I remembered a documentary about Australian aboriginal hunter-gatherers made in the 1960s which made me realise why the Camino engendered such a state of physical and psychological well-being. The pilgrim experiences man’s most natural state, that of the hunter-gatherer. This was how our ancestors lived, carrying their few, essential possessions and walking all day every day, something we did for at least three hundred thousand years. We began to farm only ten thousand years ago, not long enough for any significant evolutionary change, so essentially we are still walking machines, and tribal. This is why everyone on the Camino is cheerful and sociable. We have been a tribe, but now the tribe will go their different ways, back to a far less natural way of life, all of us, regardless of nation or livelihood. Which is not to say we return unchanged. I became a committed walker and have remained so ever since, walking about a hundred and fifty miles a month in all weathers. For me, returning to the Camino every couple of years is to take part in the gathering of the tribe. The faces change but the tribe is always the same. It has given my life extra purpose and meaning, and I am certainly not unusual in this. Leanne, Albi, Wolfgang, Julie, Rubén, myself and many others were all returning members of the people of the Camino.
Epilogue: To the Coast
Leanne was treating herself to the luxury of the Seminario Mayor, the grand former seminary one block from the cathedral, but I had opted for the albergué of the Seminario Menor a kilometre away. Although it is called the minor seminary it is huge, even larger than its senior counterpart, and gives a striking picture of the long ascendancy of the Catholic Church in Spain, for these are just two of the many seminaries where they trained the nominally celibate army that for centuries held the social and political life of Spain in its corrupt iron grip. Between them they must have contained more than a thousand beds – the Menor was much bigger than any hotel I had ever seen, the dormitories and corridors and single rooms going on forever, the different classes of accommodation reflecting the Spanish class system. The sons of the poor slept in long dormitories, the middle class boys had one of the individual rooms I occupied and I don’t doubt there were apartments with servants’ quarters for the sons of grandees. Although the Church still has vast real estate holdings it has lost the people, paying heavily for its scandalous support of the dictator Franco. Masses are never full except on very high holidays, and old, bitter-faced women very much dominate the small congregations rattling around in vast, empty churches.
My single room was comfortable and good value and I wasted no time showering, doing my wash and heading back into town for some shopping. I needed to replace a lost T-shirt but most importantly the cloth wallet in which I had been carrying my passports and credencial, now filthy from sharing space in my daypack with random bits of food in varying states of disintegration and an embarrassment every time I had to produce my credencial. A fruitless search – I suppose the beginning of the Camino is the place to buy such an item and none of the half-dozen shops I tried had anything suitable. Later I caught up with Leanne and – surprise – Albi for a noisy meal with a crowd of other pilgrims. I didn’t linger as we were up early next morning for the morning Mass in the cathedral, where I was able to light another real candle for Harry and one for my mother before setting off for Fisterra.
The way to Fisterra seemed to be entirely hilly and I made tough going of it. I normally take a medication to correct an endocrine malfunction and was beginning to learn what life without it was like – hard. By adding the 100 kliks to my journey at the beginning I had run out of the topical gel a few days before reaching Santiago. Eliza had posted me a top-up from England but it had not been awaiting me at Seminario Menor as I had hoped. Checking the tracking number I saw it had been diverted for customs inspection and immediately knew I would never see it since Brexit has made it illegal to post medications to the EU. Which meant that much of the next few days would be walked with gritted teeth, groaning with dread at the numerous hills. However it was not without its joys – around the middle of day one we wandered into Ames, an astonishingly beautiful village around an old Roman bridge, a sun-soaked refuge with a sweet river threading its way between ancient stone embankments.
Leanne on the Ponte Maceira in Ames
Our first stop was at a hilltop albergué, Alto de Pena. Having to climb to a mountaintop bunk was, suffice to say, not my most wished-for day’s end. Lovely views though, and quiet and restful until the invasion of kids on a school trip. The second day was somewhat easier, finishing in Olveiroa, a destination Wonder Woman had originally intended to reach in a single thirty-three km stage, which would have killed me on those hills. At Olveiroa a funny little Frenchman asked if he could borrow my guitar and proceeded to spin out hot café jazz that put me to shame, beautifully fluid and perfectly on beat. He would pop up along the next stages, with his funny gurgling giggle. He was a mystery – he had walked from Paris but still possessed a wobbly paunch. When I asked him how it was possible he laughed and said, “It’s because I’m a pig!”
Finally, the great day: our first sight of the sea, after easier walking. We had intended to reach Corcubión across the bay but after the precipitous descent into Cee my knee had had enough so we stopped in the little port. The weather was now cool but a few hardy souls were still swimming off the sandy beach. Leanne and I wandered around the little town, both delighted to be by the ocean again after the long cross-country trek. We had intended to walk first to Muxia but again that would have been another long hilly trek and I was definitely running out of steam so we plumped for the closer Fisterra.
Although I had always viewed the Cathedral as the end of the pilgrimage there is a host of traditions around the walk to Fisterra, principally a reverence for the place where the apostle’s headless body was said to have washed ashore protectively covered with scallops, a ridiculous proposition since scallops have no means of attaching themselves to anything. But then again, St James was also supposed to have appeared on a white horse at the head of a Christian army and driven back the Moors, a scene often depicted in iconography in the image known as Matamoros – Moor killer. Those mediaeval Christians could put Alice, with her ability to believe three impossible things before breakfast, to shame. So the walk to Fisterra certainly felt like a pilgrimage and it was an emotional moment when we left the wooded road and stepped onto Playa Lagosteira, the firm sandy beach that stretches more than a mile to the town of Fisterra.
In the thick sea mist we could sea the outlines of other pilgrims, a couple wading into the water but no-one that we could see performing the traditional end-of-pilgrimage ritual of burning clothes and swimming naked in the sea. We walked along the beach and into the pretty seaside town. After checking into the albergué I wandered around for a while – Leanne was back at work on her laptop – then went to the tourist office to get my certificate for having walked to Finisterre, having missed my opportunity to collect a Compostella back in Santiago. No big deal – I already have three of those sitting in cardboard tubes back home.
Leanne had found me a candle in a red protective transparent tube, Harry’s last candle, which I left burning concealed in a niche in a rocky headland. I sat for some time while it burned, meditating about life, the gift that we have for an unknown length of time, about my kids and friends so far away and finally just sat absorbing the vastness of the ocean a few metres away.
A couple of miles further on, the lighthouse at Cape Finisterre, recognised by the Romans as the westernmost point on the continent and hence finis terra – the end of the earth. (Actually they were wrong, technically – Caba de Roca in Portugal is a few inches further west.) Comically, this is where we found one of the two 0.000 km Camino milestones. Muxia, at the other end of the Coast of Death as they like to call it, has also taken to calling itself the end of the Camino and has an identical milestone which certainly wasn’t in place when Bridget and I were there a few years ago. Sigh. The exploitation of the Camino continues its relentless march.
And that was that. We took a bus to Muxia, a particularly lovely seaside town on such a narrow peninsula that some places had sea views fore and aft, and famed for its seafood. We took in the sights – an ancient church, dramatic seascapes, the other zero km milestone – and then, next morning, a bus to Santiago.
There we parted company, Leanne to return to negotiating professional sports disputes and teaching law, me on to Portugal and Andalusia. But not to study flamenco accompaniment. I have decided to return to New Zealand and continue to play solo. I know that I’m deficient in certain aspects of technical timing but I do make a pretty good noise that only the purists could fault and there are precious few of those in NZ. I’m happy.
This has probably been my last Camino. Not because of my age – as soon as I returned my endocrine system to normal all my vigour returned – but because I can’t justify the insult to the planet that flying to Europe to go for a walk would embody. However, and I pondered this repeatedly on the journey, if the Cop26 conference at the Last Chance Saloon fails to decisively grasp the climate challenge I will reconsider. I feel there’s no point in putting myself through deprivation if the impotence of the big players condemns us inevitably to a future of catastrophic environmental degradation.
We’ll just have to see …
Bristol, November 1st, 2021
The Camino de Santiago de Compostela, or the Way of St James, is a network of radiating pilgrimage routes all culminating at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain. The ultimate objective is to touch the reliquary containing the bones of the apostle James, who was executed in Jerusalem and whose headless body was supposedly taken back to Spain where he had been preaching. For more than a thousand years devout Christians have walked or ridden on horseback from their homes to Santiago for various reasons, usually atonement, and pilgrims’ hostels, or albergués, have provided them with basic shelter for the night along various routes. The most well-known, the French Way, was described in the 12th C. Codex Calixtinus and this book could still be used a guide. However none is necessary as virtually every single turn along the way is marked by means ranging from a simple painted yellow arrow or a scallop shell to elaborate sculptures.
After falling into disuse following the Reformation – the reformers were particularly averse to pilgrimages as not only useless but wasteful and dangerous – the Camino has become popular again and the infrastructure is now highly developed, with many privately-owned albergués now located every few kilometres along the way starting from St Jean Pied de Port in the Pyrenees, more than 800km from Santiago.
I walked my first Camino in March 2014. I was at a very low ebb in my life and entertaining thoughts of ending it all when I remembered someone talking about the Camino. I looked it up on the Web and thought it sounded better than jumping from the Clifton Bridge. I read how one should prepare carefully, exercising for weeks to achieve the necessary fitness and carefully breaking in a pair of high-quality walking shoes.
The next day I pulled on my old leather work boots, took a train to Southampton, embarked on the ferry to Santander, took a bus to Burgos and started walking. I have never looked back.
Municipal albergué, or simply ‘the municipal’ refers to the public albergué owned and run by the local authority. They are usually the cheapest and therefore the most sought-after. A ‘donativo’ is an albergué where payment is by donation. Most charge between €8 and €12 a night for a bunk, a shower and often rudimentary cooking and washing facilities.
I started my fourth Camino with a stumble, turned back at Bristol Airport on July 7 because my vaccination was too recent. Entirely my fault – I had not bothered to read the pages of detail on the airline’s website about travelling to Spain. I finally left on July 20; flights being still sparse I had to go via Menorca in the Mediterranean, then all the way back to Bilbao in the north. After a night at the excellent Metropolitan Hostel in Bilbao I caught the bus to Pamplona, intending to bus on to Logroño and start there, a 500 km walk.
I disembarked to discover that I had caught the wrong bus and was actually in San Sebastian. I had noticed there was something odd about the place – far too mountainous. I didn’t really care that I was in the wrong town, basking in the simple fact of being once more in a proper, elegant Spanish town, which Bilbao is not. I wandered around for an hour, drew some euros from a cash machine then sat playing music on a bench by the grand and lovely bridge across the Urumea River, home to a school of large fish swimming in the transparent waters.
Then a bus to Pamplona which I decided on the spot to make my starting point, adding 100km to the journey. I stayed as before at the Jésus y Maria, the municipal albergué. Thrilled to be back, I enjoyed a stroll about the familiar town, ate an absolutely foul burger at Burger King and did some washing. My clothes dried in about a quarter of an hour thanks to a temperature in the high 30s. I started to feel a bit lonely – there didn’t seem to be much of a social vibe, which worried me somewhat. I had the afternoon to myself and enjoyed exploring the enormous walls and fortifications so abundant in the city. So literally crucial was the city because of its location that it was fought over for centuries, the only Spanish city I know of to still preserve the remains of internal walls originally sealing off the Christians from the Moors and the Jews from both.
I left the next morning very early, having read that most albergués were closed due to Covid, making it important to be among the first arrivals. However I wasted some time walking the wrong way and no, it did not escape my attention that this was my third false start. If some one up there was trying to tell me something I was remaining steadfastly deaf. By the time I sorted it out I was in the vanguard of a cohort. I walked some distance with a French couple, glad of the chance to talk to someone and practise my French. But I was keen to experience the first rush of being back on the Camino on a solitary walk and soon picked up the pace and left them behind. It was a beautiful morning for a walk, with a light overcast and the sun about to rise on endless fields of wheat and sunflowers. The latter were all in flower and thousands stood in great armies, devotionally facing the east, as still as statues awaiting their shining god.
The gloss on my first morning was slightly tarnished by an hour or so of leapfrog with a mother and daughter making more or less the same pace as I, the daughter carrying a Bluetooth speaker dangling from her waist blaring Spanish and American pop music. I allowed that if that was what it took to get the girl walking the Camino then fine, but it was a price her mother could pay, not I.
I was concerned about tackling the ascent of Alto de Perdón on my first day and indeed as the incline increased I was steadily passed by one pilgrim after another, including the Bluetooth Kid. I was gasping and starting to worry about my ability to complete the climb when I turned a corner and discovered I was almost there, the famous cut-outs right in front of me. A crowd that included my French companions was wandering around the summit, exulting in the views. We took photos of each other and chatted. Isabelle and Jean-Pierre came from Bordeaux where he was – what else? – in the wine business, although now retired.
There is a new monument at the top. Apparently the Francoists used the summit as an execution site; the skeletons of almost a hundred people had been excavated there, with signage saying that there were more whose remains would never be found. I found this very moving and shed a couple of tears, but most pilgrims went right past without giving the spiral of stone pillars a second glance.
This walk was my first Camino using Norwegian poles instead of the traditional baston and I was glad of them on the ascent and even more so on the very stony and rugged descent.
I walked into Puente la Reina very hot and tired to a scramble at the first, municipal albergué. Lots of people for too few spaces and apparently only one functional shower, thanks to Covid. The French couple and I were buttonholed by a talkative little guy, one of those always-multi-lingual and likewise always somewhat disturbed perpetual pilgrims (he claimed to be on his 30th). He urged us to come to his friend’s albergué which he praised continuously as we made our way into the town – good, or so I thought – and then out again – not so good – across the town’s eponymous bridge and up a fierce, dusty hill to a huge, modern albergué which turned out to be almost empty.
Back into town later for a enormous meal – I ordered a cutlet with a mixed salad, forgetting that in Spain ensalata mista is a full meal in itself, with a whole tin of tuna. The Spanish eat tuna in vast quantities, which is a bit depressing to think about. I suppose it has supplanted the now scarce, expensive cod.
Although there are various versions of the Camino, the route currently considered ‘doing the whole Camino Francés involves starting at St Jean Pied de Port in the French Pyrenees, or a longer version starting at the cathedral in Le-Puy-en-Velay, but historically the place where at least four historic French tributaries to the Francés come together is here in Puente la Reina. From now on we are on the one and only Camino Francés. Isabelle and Jean-Pierre had started in Le Puy, walking a 1400km Camino – twice as long as the walk I would make. They had attended a pilgrim’s Mass there that finished with the opening of double doors in the floor of the cathedral; they walked down the steps and that was the start of the Camino. Talk about doing it in style! One day, perhaps, although accommodation in France is too expensive for me to contemplate unless I win the lottery.
I set off in the dark the next morning for the relatively easy walk to Estella well ahead of the mob, or so I thought. I found a welcoming committee of locals trying to sort out accommodation for the many pilgrims already there. Mysteriously the place was already booked solid! Where had they all come from? I found out much later that Estella is a big tourist town and the albergués were full of Spanish tourists. July/August is the holiday period and thousands like to walk a section of the Camino for recreation, clogging the albergués which are already handling reduced numbers because of social distancing. A lovely couple, a Spanish guy and his English wife, were finishing their walk at Estella, where they had parked their car. On their way to Logroño they took me to Los Arcos, which Rubén found after several phone calls to be the first albergué with free beds. We stopped off at Monte Irache because Rubén was determined to drink from the renowned free wine fountain. I told them I had sampled it on an earlier Camino and the wine had been rubbish only to find that this time it was actually excellent, which amused us all. I was very worried by this point. Having to be driven 20km on my second day was hardly the walk I was planning. A lonely night followed, with a whole bunkroom to myself. No-one came to Txotchi’s place (Casa Alberdi) except for four school-age cyclists who kept to themselves. This would set a pattern – one day a scramble, the next day no problem at all. It would not be the last time I had a bunkroom to myself. Los Arcos, although small, boasts a cavernous but beautiful historic church, thanks to (IIRC) Sancho III who headquartered himself in the town at some point.
Next day I walked to Sansol. I had always walked in spring, when the wheat was just starting to sprout, but now in high summer the grain was nearly ready to harvest. Only in this state can one grasp the enormity of the harvest in northern Spain, walking day after day by fields of drooping ears in their billions stretching in every direction over the rolling hills as far as the eye can see. I stayed at the grand and luxurious Palacio Sansol, owned, operated and worked on by the lovely old Jésus, who drove me the 1 km to Torres del Rio to the cash machine because he didn’t have a card reader. I found and fixed a problem with the gas supply to the fully equipped hotel kitchen, which we were free to use, then cooked a meal with Isabelle and Jean-Pierre who arrived shortly after me. We were the only guests. This issue of overcrowded albergués was obviously not as severe as feared. Nevertheless I did book ahead occasionally, and almost as a rule after Léon.
Next morning, walking (again in the near dark) through Torres del Rio, I met Leanne, sitting on the doorstep of her accommodation. A tall dark-haired Kiwi in her early 40s, Leanne and I quickly became close friends. She was travelling in the company of Alberto (Albi), an exuberant cook who had walked all the way from his home in Milan, shedding several kilos. Leanne was a real social hooker-up, someone who would invite anyone to join her at a table. She was also a member of a French group who were walking to raise funds, a group of which I also became a somewhat peripheral member.
Although I’m a fast walker I was no match for the 6’+ triathlete so we walked some way together and some apart which suited me as I prefer a solitary pilgrimage. A short walk today, only 10km, crossing from Navarre into the Rioja wine district and the city of Logroño where I had booked into Albergué Albas, near the river but disappointingly not in the old town. I badly wanted to buy a sleeping bag because Covid meant that few places were supplying blankets. I was getting by using my silk sleeping bag liner with a big microfibre towel as an extra covering but had nevertheless suffered chilly nights, even though the temperature at the peak of the day hit the high 30s. I had figured Logroño to be a big enough town to have the right kind of shop but it was Sunday and everything was closed. Curses. I spent a fair bit of time ambling around aimlessly until I ran into Leanne and our French friends for a cold beer. Amusing oddity: near the albergué stood a large public building in a scenic location on the river that was part sports centre, part tanatorio, or communal crypt. I wondered if the sports and fitness centre had signs on the walls saying, “Keep pumping if you don’t want to end up next door.” The tanatorio looked like a modern office building. Most odd.
I set off on my own out of Logroño, through the national park and past the reservoir, leaving later than I should have and as a result slogging along by midday in roasting heat. I took the short detour to Ventosa because signage touted it as an arts community. I didn’t find any sign of that but did find a bar offering smoothies so I bought a piña colada smoothie that came ice cold in a huge goblet. In that heat, and with my bare feet resting comfortably, I swear it was one of the most delicious things I have ever put into my mouth!
Bridge over the Najerilla in Nájera
Then on to Nájera, a strange but picturesque location nestled into huge cliffs that overhang the town. There I found myself sharing with Leanne’s French friends, including the petite English Rachel, walking the Camino to research a paper on the Camino as tourism enterprise or some such. She had one of those smiles, rarely absent from her face, that light up a room so of course when she asked to interview me for her project I agreed. Predictably I went into a minor rant against the Camino as tourism but she didn’t seem to mind in the least.
The road to Santo Domingo
At lunchtime next day I caught up with Leanne in the rather elegant Santo Domingo de la Calzada. We checked out the Camino Interpretation centre, with some attractive watercolours of places we recognised having just walked past or through them.
That night in Grañon I was greeted enthusiastically once more by the French group at a donativo called La Casa de Sonrisas (House of Smiles) on the Calle Mayor. Really lovely, funky old building, all low-beamed ceilings and nooks and crannies. No shops were open but it didn’t matter because the shared meal was part of the deal. It is always such a pleasure to stay at an albergué hosted by idealistic volunteers who still believe in the Camino as a spiritual exercise and give their time generously to support pilgrims. I took a bed next to the quiet, shy and strangely cold Ya Wan from China, who was missing his boyfriend in the States.
The following day I left La Rioja province for Burgos, a commune in the larger collective of Castilla y Léon. This arrangement seems to be controversial – the egotistical bureaucrats have heavily peppered the Camino with signage reminding us that we can thank ‘Castilla y León’ for something, or everything, possibly the state of the tracks. On most of the signs rebellious hands have blacked out the ‘Castilla’. I never found out why.
First stop Villafranca Montes de Oca, which I remembered fondly from the first night when I had shared a room with Bridget on my second Camino. As I approached Villafranca I was trying to recall exactly how it was we came together there. I knew we had walked in together but try as I might I could not remember where I had met up with her that day. Then I came over a hill and saw a small ruin in a field just off the road and instantly had a photographic recall of seeing Bridget standing there, looking at what turned out to be the supposed tomb of Count Diego R. Porcelos, the founder of the city of Burgos.
Entering the town I saw a bar over to the right at the bottom of the hill with a couple of pilgrims already at a table so I gratefully sloped over and ordered a beer. A cañon, or large beer, cost only €2. Surprised, I asked the price of a generous portion of tortilla. €1.50. I, and others who turned up, spent the next hour or so eating and drinking at this astonishingly cheap bar, which was constantly busy with locals as well. Pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap seems to be a universally successful formula.
The only place to stay was the albergué attached to the big flash hotel where I had shared a room with Bridget because at that time the albergué section had been full. Not any more – we were shown to the capacious and almost empty bunkrooms in the back section. The hotel was clearly struggling to stay afloat through Covid. The porter was also the barman and the whole place seemed to be running on about three staff, a far fall from its previous thriving state.
Adrien, ??, Ya Wan, Rachel, Me, Leanne
I wasn’t looking forward to the steep ascent out of Villafranca up Monte de la Pedraja and indeed it was if anything even harder than I remembered. But once on the heights it rewarded the climb with luminous purple heather glowing in a cool mist into which the towering trees vanished on either side of the level, soft track. The joy of the walk was instantly extinguished by a monument to what had been another Francoist execution site, an even worse one – in 1936 Franco’s thugs executed about three hundred people there. I found it moving and distressing to picture those brutes, so thoroughly and hatefully captured in art and literature, pulling up in their trucks, violently manhandling the men (and women), lining them up and shooting them. Those brave people, idealists to the last, destroyed by men scarcely worth the name.
The Francoist shadow still hangs over the Guardia Civil, whose logo, incredibly, still includes the fasces. This symbolic bundle of sticks was carried in Rome by lictors, bodyguards to those of consular rank and is the origin of the word fascist. I find it disgusting that the organisation continues to use an explicitly fascist symbol as its identity and I’m not alone; the Guardia Civil is not popular, with many Spaniards sharing the view that the friendly and helpful policia locale provide all the policing the country needs and regard the Guardia largely as an instrument of political oversight and occasionally repression.
We stopped in Agès where I let myself be talked into a meal that the voluble hostess praised to the heavens but which, when served, was entirely mediocre, made worse by Leanne’s incorrigible hospitality. A handsome English cyclist in his 40s joined us at her invitation and proceeded to bore and slightly embarrass us with his conspiracy theories. He talked of going ‘off grid’ in a cave somewhere down south. Of course I knew from my Granadan gypsy friends’ experience that living in a cave would only encourage the curiosity of the local policia but didn’t see the point in sharing that info, or indeed anything at all, with him.
The long lunch at Agès had tough consequences. I set off late and alone for the next stop in ever-rising afternoon heat, climbing a hot and stony mountain to an incredible vista but running frighteningly low on water with neither sight nor sign of the next town. Down the other side, my legs in some pain, taking tiny sips of water and praying for relief, I rummaged in the day pack I carried on my chest and found to my joy that I was still carrying the large apple I had bought days ago and forgotten. That was enough to slake my thirst until I finally walked into Cardañuela de Rio Pico and Albergué Villalval, with everything one could want including a swimming pool and a catered meal that was both cheap and good. The French group were all there and Adrien played (and I videoed) Autumn Leaves on my guitar. He sang the English words, which I didn’t know, while I sang the French ones, which, ironically, he didn’t.
And so to Burgos, the beloved starting point of my first Camino. For the first time, and not without difficulty, we found the alternate route into town along the river and avoided the long and dreary trek through the industrial outer suburbs.
Unlike the Covid over-reaction we would later encounter in Galicia, the rule for municipals in Burgos allowed for packing in more pilgrims by grouping together people who had already lodged and travelled with each other elsewhere. So I, being first, became the nominal co-ordinator of the French group and others in that category and the municipal was able to achieve something like 75% occupancy. I had a touching conversation with Vincent, a sweet-natured first-generation Vietnamese French who told me, sadly, that his parents were ‘in the stars’. He had a serious foot problem and was worried that he had put off his study for a year to walk with the group. He had changed his mind and was leaving the Camino, a decision he would later regret. I met up with Leanne and the friend she was staying with (Victoria?) and enjoyed a fabulous meal guided by her knowledge of the local cuisine. Leanne was spending a few days here on work but would catch up with me later.
Burgos Cathedral
Several of our group went to a special Mass at the cathedral, which finished with a procession of an itinerant image of the virgin around the cathedral to the accompaniment of hymns and the incredible organ. The bishop and several priests presided over the grand affair after which the pilgrims were gathered for a photo op with his Eminence. He asked us questions the answers to which his glazed-over eyes told us he would forget milliseconds after they reached his ears. But it gave us, gratis, the grand tour of one of the finest cathedrals in Europe, a small price to pay.
Just my luck: it was Sunday, again, but the Camino is still looking after me. The temperature had plummeted to 14º just when I was in a town where I could buy a warm top, which I did, and next day a sleeping bag. Of course Decathlon is open on Sunday but thanks to misdirection from the tourist office I wasted two hours on a long round bus trip to nowhere. The next morning I used the map app and hiked to the big Decathlon out of town and bought a sleeping bag, a large drink bottle, a pair of polarised sunglasses and a few energy bars for good measure, which I would put into my pack and rediscover two weeks later.
In the afternoon I explored the Museum of Human Evolution, built to display the extraordinary paleological finds from Atapuerca. A huge, spacious building where probably the best curated timeline of human evolution I have ever seen was on display in a grand circle, with a skull from every known hominid species, artefacts, illustrations, all the information you could possibly want.
On to Hontanas, down in a valley, where the first and only drops of rain of my whole Camino fell, and on to Hornillos del Camino, a tiny town with a hostile female barkeep in the town bar offset by a very friendly shopkeeper who gave me a small scallop shell with the huge and tasty sandwich I bought and gratefully devoured. Children rushed up and sold us odd slivers of transparent quartz from the local hill and paper scallop shells they had made and coloured in.
That evening I was sitting outside the albergué playing when a Spaniard with markedly Arabic features started singing along with a soleares. Of course, not knowing how, I couldn’t follow his changes and he gave up. I felt bad, but he was very encouraging. He spoke very clear Spanish and we had quite a long conversation – he is from Rocio in Andalusia and it turns out his brother worked as a barman in Auckland. Rafael said I played beautifully and clearly had music in my soul, but I had just never learned to follow singers. Calling me Tomatito, not entirely ironically although the comparison is outrageously generous, he grew quite eloquent, declaring that he could tell that I was really a gypsy at heart, with a gypsy’s connection with the music, and encouraged me to go back to Andalusia and work with singers. I felt inspired and decided that was exactly what I would do. From that point I planned to go on to Seville or Cádiz and find some way of learning to follow the singer.
Leaving town I passed a huge mural depicting Einstein, Ghandi and Martin Luther King behind two pilgrims pointing to a star-studded universe.
Actually the best mural on the Camino was that of an old woman, in a town I can’t remember, a huge thing on a wall facing west so pilgrims would not normally see it. But a small sign on the previous east-facing wall declared, “Take fifteen steps and turn around.” I cynically remarked that someone had been trying for epigrammatic profundity and failed, but my more literal-minded companion of the moment followed the instruction, turned around and saw the artwork. The laugh was on me – again.
Next stop, the stunning Castrojeriz. A classic hill town with a ruined castle at the summit, surrounded by cave houses, some derelict, some occupied and well maintained. Karin, the Dutch woman whom I was now encountering regularly, and I climbed to the top and took in the sunset from the ruin’s walls. From there we could see at least fifteen miles in every direction. A gobsmacking view of a magnificent sunset turning the endless acres of wheat a lambent gold.
One of the Finest Views in Spain
But the Albergué Vierge de Monserrat … oh dear. First sign of trouble – the signs everywhere giving the price of everything, labelled as a donation. This is my review in Gronze:
A dark, not very clean place with a *crazy* hospitalero, totally spooked by Covid. There were only two other pilgrims there but he followed me around, checking on whether I was wearing a mask. I was on my own in the kitchen, not wearing one, and I turned around to find him standing there staring at me, bug-eyed. He pointed to his face and shouted “Respect for Covid!!” I told him he was loco and put on my mask because he looked like he was about to lose it. Avoid!
I genuinely think he had a screw loose, and not in a nice way.
The next day cast light, perhaps, on a mystery. On my second Camino I had lingered in Castrojeriz and set off well behind all the other pilgrims. Bridget was ahead of me at the rest stop on the rise, watching me through her monocular as I crossed the plain leading to Itero del Castillo. After taking her rest she went on ahead of me where I found her waiting at the bar in the village. We chatted for a bit, then she asked me who was the tall pilgrim I had been walking behind and why did I not catch up with him as he was walking just a few paces ahead of me? Of course I had been conspicuously alone and told her so. She did not believe me at first, and then became quite disturbed and simply clammed up. Bridget is a red-headed Irishwoman with piercing green eyes and a conflicted history of Catholicism. I have always wondered who or what she had seen with her spooky Celtic second sight.
This time, as I came down the ridge at the point where it levels out on the plain, I found this:
It tells of Manuel Picasso, a devout native of Málaga, who died at this spot, probably from the fierce exertion of scaling the ridge in 2008 when the path up and down was much more rigorous than the curated path of today. I cannot help wondering if it was the ghost of Manuel whom Bridget saw that day, walking as guardian to pilgrims.
What else am I to think? She saw what she saw, telling me a couple of days later that she had felt no sense that there was anything unreal about it. Just a tall pilgrim in red, walking in front of me, seen quite clearly at least three times.
Angels on the Camino. Or ghosts.
Next stop was the Hospital de Puente Fitero, a tiny albergué in a church just before the bridge over the Pisuerga River, maintained by a society of Italians. The aroma of fresh coffee drew me in to a warm welcome and a demi-tasse of very fine Italian espresso. Buzzing from the caffeine I marched across the beautiful old bridge and on to Boadilla del Camino, a small town in the middle of nowhere with no shops but an albergué attached to a modern hotel. A good one, too, with a swimming pool where we spent the afternoon resting from our labours. But if you wanted to eat or even use the WiFi you had to go to the hotel so it turned out to be one of the more expensive days. A very pleasant one, though, very sociable with a lively discussion that meandered through the afternoon. I recall taking my shoes off and reflecting with great satisfaction that I had now walked almost 200 kliks without a blister, the shoes and feet holding up perfectly. Especially pleased because I had broken the golden rule and set off in brand new pair, but they had fit so well and were so robust, waterproof and comfortable that I backed them. Of course, I was now in the heart of the Meseta, day after day walking easily across flat or gently rolling plains, all bone dry. But my blister day would come, and soon.
Rafael from Rocio was staying in the hotel section and we had another chat after I played some blues, which he said was basically Flamenco. This is of course is simply not the case but I chose not to contradict him, wondering what he would say if I played Bach. He repeated his assertion that I was a true gypsy. “Not quite,” I replied. “Because if you walked away and left your wallet behind, I, and it, would still be here when you returned.” He laughed ruefully because we both know it was unfortunately true.
This is not, whatever you might think, a racist thing to say. I spent months in Granda studying guitar with a gypsy; he and his family remain my good friends. From him I learned, rarely and always in a whisper, of the appalling oppression his Kalo people, their actual proper name, have suffered and to a degree continue to suffer, to the point that almost all simply regard the giri as fair game. Whatever they can transfer to their own side is a miniscule ounce against the tons of what they are owed.
Next morning I set off for Carrion de los Condes. I don’t know why pilgrims so often skip this stage. The walking is easy. The huge skies and endless acres of wheat and sunflowers, now all in magnificent full bloom, make a perfect setting for the empty-minded connection with the simple self that is one of the most enriching aspects of walking the Camino. Nothing happens. There is nothing to see. You just walk. Perfect. We are pilgrims, not tourists.
At Carrion I checked in to the Convent of Santa Clara, a nunnery with a small office where, as I waited, an elderly couple came to buy a box of the cakes and sweets by which the nuns make their living. In the corner of the office stood a semi-circular cupboard. The nun behind the counter opened it and revealed a revolving structure that enabled the sequestered nuns on the other side to pass through the products of their labour without risking exposure to the corrupting world.
I had to wait until the strange little man who managed the albergué had a group of us, to spare himself the effort of repetition. What an amusing fellow! He displayed the most world-weary air, with slumped shoulders and shuffling feet, as if having to deal with the tedious public was the most burdensome task on earth. I began to ask a question but he held up a hand to silence me. “Espera,” he commanded. Wait. After two more pilgrims arrived, making a number he judged worthy of his attentions, he first took my walking poles and placed them in the corner. But he didn’t just lean them there in their normal orientation. He turned them upside down, placing the heavy handles on the ground – a much more stable position – and I realised he was no simpleton. Then he took our money, stamped our credenciales, and took us on the tour, again dragging himself along and wasting not a word. “Botas.“ Servicios.” “Cocina”. “Limpiar ropa.” I learned something from him and thenceforth always placed my walking poles upside down, putting an end to their annoying habit of falling down.
After check-in I set off for a stroll to the main square, modern but elegant, with a big supermarket just down the road. In spite of always wearing my steadily disintegrating Panama hat my face was getting sunburnt, so I succumbed to common sense and bought a tube of sunscreen. That evening I sat in a corner of the big courtyard and played music, satisfied to note that, as always, I was playing out of my skin. I don’t know why it happens but I seem to play at my best on the Camino.
Next day, one of the most famous, and dreaded, stages of the walk – 17.5 km of nothing, straight along a perfectly flat road through a landscape devoid of human habitation, with not a village, shop or even a simple fuente all the way to Calzadilla de la Cueza. This is an intact section of the Via Aquitana, built by the Romans in 118 BC, an embankment built half a metre above the surrounding marshy plains and estimated to contain 150,000 tons of small stones and mortar, dry in all weathers and still in perfect condition after two millennia. There is no natural rock for miles around; they carted it all there. The road used to go further past Calzadilla but the Spanish enthusiasm for road-building has destroyed the rest of the original Roman earthworks. The history alone is enough to make it worth the trek, but today it was a delight.
The first half of the walk took me through a mist-obscured landscape, the dead straight road vanishing in the fog while the sun rose behind me, slowly burning its way to clear the land and the sky. Seventeen uninterrupted kliks is a long walk and when I made out a church ahead I hoped I had reached Calzadilla, but as I drew closer I saw nothing but the church some way off to the right, with outbuildings suggesting a monastery. Disappointed, I trudged on. Ahead lay a low range of hills and I felt quite dispirited to think that Calzadilla must lie on the other side. Then, joy. As I approached a dip in the road I saw that I had indeed arrived but the small town, or rather village, lay entirely obscured in a depression, out of the winds that so often make life uncomfortable for plains dwellers. As I entered it occurred to me that this would have been a place where robbers lurked, hidden from the surrounding country. If you did not know it was there you would never find it. But for the Roman road, I suppose.
The excellent albergué, well kept by a genial Italian, had a spacious garden with a sizeable and clean swimming pool. A young Italian couple were among the guests, the wife a voluptuous and beautiful young woman in a disturbingly brief bikini. Will age never free me? My monastic soul despairs! They were on an episodic Camino – every year they took their holiday by walking another section. Lovely people, so warm and friendly. I went down the road to the bar where I witnessed the arrival of a Spanish family on bikes, the father a ridiculous and unpleasant figure, his large gut spectacular in skin-tight lycra emblazoned with the slogan, “I am KING so cool”. I thought him so memorably ugly that I sneaked a photo, but he turned to me just as I pressed the button, caught me at it and made a hostile face.
Later, as I was at the albergué practising a slow exercise he walked past me and sneered, “Es no flamenco!” so I immediately snapped off three bars of a fast bulerias and laughed. Actually machismo is no joke in Spain. I saw posters publicising anti-machismo and giving the head count of women killed by men this year in Spain, at that point already in the high hundreds. I noticed that his daughter seemed thoroughly cowed. Over the several times I saw the group she seemed timid and never spoke. Unpleasant thoughts crowded in. Later someone told me he had been entertaining himself running down pilgrims so my assessment of his character based on his appearance was entirely accurate.
Next stop: Sahagún. A large town where I met up with well-known pilgrims whom I now can’t recall for a lunch I can’t recall in a café/panaderia I remember well because it was at the pinnacle of a triangle formed by three busy streets. I took my shoes off and put them up in the Camino Recovery Position, somewhat to the disapproval of the other customers, and bade farewell to the others who left before me. No! I do recall one of the pilgrims – Alice, the Australian who had met her now-husband Ingo on the Camino del Norte. He was back in Germany, shadowing her phone and sending her hints and directions as she progressed; this could have been creepy but wasn’t because she found it ‘sweet’. Alice was one of those people who are convinced that the art of conversation consists of exchanging minute trivia about one’s daily existence, something I usually find intensely irritating. Why would anyone imagine I might be interested in how they planned to arrive at some time at some point along their journey but were prevented from doing so by some tedious non-event which they also insist on relating in mind-numbing detail? Who cares? And then … And then … But Alice is so clearly good-hearted I just can’t take against her, no matter how many reasons she offers me. She is severely over-weight and I can’t help being touched by her constant optimism and courage in pressing on, ruefully admitting that she isn’t up to the pace kept by most other pilgrims.
Next day I walked a record for me: 34km. I just kept going, to Bercianos del Real Camino, memorable for almost nothing. I went for a walk, had a couple of glasses of wine in an agreeably rough and almost deserted bar, appropriately for a town that struck me as windswept and empty. And that was that. Next day off to Mansilla de las Mulas, checking in to the huge and well-appointed Jardin del Camino, with the dormitories above a large restaurant specialising in the regional delicacy cecina, rather like jamon iberico but made from beef. I didn’t try it but theirs must have been good because every table in the restaurant and garden bar were taken. Leanne had finished her business in Burgos and cracked on, turning up with Albi and their new companion Wolfgang on their way to the next stop further down the line. Down the line we would discover that Wolfgang and Alice both lived in Stuttgart, where he practised dentistry. Once again Leanne and I were parting company because she had to push ahead to be in Santiago by the 18th for work; I mistakenly thought this would be the last time I saw Alberto, and my last chance to get him to play the Beatle’s ‘Blackbird’ so I could video and learn it. Leanne was champing at the bit to reach León Cathedral before it closed but I insisted, handing her my camera on which she recorded a lovely short video of Albi and me singing together. Leanne had never heard the song, which astonished me. I thought everyone in the world knew it. Albi and I hugged and wished each other Buen Camino and they were off.
I had been keeping in touch with Eliza, as of a month ago once again my ex-partner but still close friend, and it was on this day that she gave me the awful news that an old friend, whom I had met and very much liked, had just lost her son in an industrial accident. He had been working in Hawaii while she was at home in Portugal; there was no way the US would let her in because of Covid. Harry had been 30 years old when his life was snuffed out in an instant. Perhaps because I had so much mind time I was very moved by this, easily imagining the utter devastation that would befall me if Bodhi, Rose or Holly were to be suddenly killed, a literally unbearable loss. I resolved to light candles wherever I could, and to pray in my own peculiar way for the relief of the suffering family left behind. It served a purpose for myself, as I well understood – to focus my attention on the vexed question of my beliefs, my effort to unpick a supportable spirituality from the dogma and superstition that have made such a mess of modern Christianity.
I walked into León in the company of my new friend Rubén, whom I had caught up with, not for the first time, in Mansilla. Rubén was a real character and I regret not taking his contact details because we became firm mates. He worked as an account manager for an electric motor repair company in Barcelona, a position he found so stressful that he over-medicated with cocaine, which he considered less harmful than the years he had spent wasted on weed. I pointed out to him the pointlessness of working to earn money to buy drugs to take so you could keep working. He laughed and confessed that it was not as bad as that because he was exceptionally good at his job and they paid him so handsomely that he could not bring himself to quit.
Rubén was a true pilgrim on a healing journey with no patience for the hordes of tourists clogging up the albergués, having their baggage transported and in other ways quenching his true Camino vibe. He refused to book albergués – not the Camino way, which I agree with in principle – and was emphatic that because there would be so many more tourists after León that he had decided to finish his Camino there.
On the main drag up to Cathedral Square we ran into Alice and some others who told Rubén that there was one vacancy left at their albergué, which he raced off to secure. I headed for my reservation at the Franciscan albergué and cursed when it came into sight, remembering it immediately as the huge, modern and perfectly soulless place I had stayed in last time. Glumly I stepped into the glass lift that took me to the spotless third floor where I found I had a four-bunk room to myself, with a window that looked out onto an empty concrete yard. Dreary. Daily chores seen to I set off for the cathedral in time for early evening Sunday Mass. Wonderful and famous cathedral, dull and uninspiring Mass. I went to light a candle for Harry but they were all those bogus electric things. I spent 50 cents anyway; better than nothing.
The town was popping –León is a popular holiday destination and every bar and the streets outside were packed and noisy. Everyone, as usual in festive Spain, was tipsy but not drunk, and happy. No signs of aggression, no shouted arguments about politics or sport, no edge of danger that accompanies mass drunkenness in the Anglosphere. I was wandering around, carrying my guitar as usual, hoping to bump into some pilgrim friends, when I heard someone zipping up the scale of one of those plastic pan pipes. Heard it a second time and turned to see the player laughing and gesturing me to join him and his friends. “Toca! Toca!” he called. “Play!” I took my guitar out as he ordered me a tinto de verano – a delicious, potent one with plenty of Vermouth – and played a couple of pieces as they clapped skilfully along, Andalusians all. Happily no-one tried to sing. They were in a riotous mood and I spent a most jolly half hour in their company, then made my way back to the Franciscans to find someone in the room who spoke not a word to me nor I to him. There really is something about that place …
Next morning, anticipating that at some point I would be sleeping rough, I waited outside the pilgrim shop in Calle Ancha till it opened at 9.30 and bought a roll-up mat. The salesman showed me how to strap it to the bottom of my pack where it stayed all the way back to the UK because as it turned out I managed to score a bed at every stop along the Way.
Next day I climbed out of León, past the underground bodegas where locals have dug into the hillside and constructed or utilised existing caves for aging wine, and reached La Virgen del Camino before midday.
Descending the hill from La Virgen I found and took the dirt track off to the left. On my first Francés I had missed the turn and paid for it by walking all the way to Hospital de Orbigo beside the highway. The detour adds 3 km, making it almost 30 km to Orbigo, not that I would walk it in one go – I was already booked in to Albergué Jesus in Vilar de Mazarife. In the distance I could see the mountains I would be among in a couple of days, ascending to the highest point on the Camino Francés. I didn’t see a single pilgrim after the turn-off but found a few already installed at the albergué when I arrived.
Just outside Vilar I saw a shepherd seated under an umbrella on his large donkey, herding his small, beautifully well-kept flock with two border collies.
“Lovely animal,” I called out to him. “Si. Collies. Los perros mejores!” He assumed I was talking about the dogs, so I agreed and told him that also in my country, where we have many sheep, the border collie is the shepherd’s much preferred breed. He showed me how he had trained one of them to jump up and lick the donkey’s nose – it was tall for a donkey and the dog had to give a slight hop to reach. I laughed and bade him good evening, reflecting as I walked away that I had just seen a dog kiss his master’s ass.
Albergué Jesus was a lot of fun because it seemed like it was the only place in town that was open for food and drinks, consequently the spacious garden was full of locals, many sitting at tables playing cards and chatting enthusiastically. Among the albergué’s many amenities was a well-equipped kitchen so I followed the signs to the only shop in town and bought some spuds, a tin of peas and some pesto. And one of those excellent bottles of local wine found throughout Spain, marked only with a small generic label placed near the bottom, never costing more than €1.50 and invariably stowed inconspicuously on the lowest shelf of the wine section. There is no excise tax on wine and beer in Spain and wine is often literally cheaper than milk. From the shop I followed a sign to the supposedly baroque church of the Apostle James, surprisingly well set up for visitors with a church warden ready to point out the features and a leaflet in all the main languages – only one copy of each, to be read and returned. The church was neither lovely or exceptional so I soon left, only to discover that in this very small town I was lost! I wandered around for a good quarter of an hour until I saw a familiar road and retraced my steps to the albergué and cooked my meal of the three P’s. It was … palatable. I have not kept the recipe. Later, the albergué being situated on the edge of town we were treated to a glorious sunset over the vega. I liked Vilar very much. It was just one of those places with a special, warm vibe, in fact I found myself thinking, “I could live here.” But of course I couldn’t. I’d be off to León for stimulation every other day.
The climb out of León to La Virgen had taken me onto the paramo Leónes, or the high plain of León defined as the alluvial flats bordered by the Esla and Órbigo rivers, which stretches a long way north to south but is unfortunately quite narrow east to west. The next day I was nearing its western edge and dealing with more hills and valleys, about six kilometres from Astorga, when I came across the abandoned finca which a guy from Barcelona has turned into a rather special rest stop, offering all sorts of free food and drink, piles of fruit and other goodies, all on a donativo basis. It has been going for seven years now and I remembered it well. Sadly Sue, the loud, gregarious Australian woman who had been a partner to the host had moved on and he did seem a little lonely and more subdued than the enthusiast I recalled from my last walk. But he still espoused the anti-mercenary spirit that motivated people to give generously, as evidenced by the sprawling pile of coins, at least two hundred euros strewn and seemingly disregarded on one of the tables. The precisely tended gardens had put on considerable growth, the building had been repaired and the place now functioned as an open-air albergué. Karin, my Dutch friend, decided to stay the night and put quite an effort into trying to persuade me to join her in sleeping in the open air. I would have, but for the absence of cold beer. After a long hike in the hot sun nothing comes between me and that ice-cold cañon.
I needed one more than ever when the paramo came to a harsh and abrupt end at the steep climb into historic Astorga; leaning heavily on my poles I zig-zagged painfully up the precipitous streets into the town centre atop the hill.
In the cool lobby of the Albergué Siervas de Maria I witnessed at first hand the necessity of booking ahead as I waited while they apologetically but firmly turned away a pilgrim without a reservation. After the usual settling-in chores I descended the front steps and ran straight into Rubén. We were delighted to see each other and I ribbed him about not having quit the Camino, to which he replied that when the time came he couldn’t do it, even though he had strained a muscle in his leg and was limping quite badly. I urged him to join me for a beer but he declined, announcing that after stuffing himself full of fine cecina and exhausted after his struggle to get here he was off for a siesta.
Astorga is a major historical centre, a crossing of two Roman roads and the point where the Camino de la Plata from Seville joins the Francés. It is a beautiful town – most of the massive original walls with their semi-circular buttresses still encircle the hilltop, and at the south-western end stretches a long tree-filled park where one can stroll in the evenings and enjoy a commanding view of the countryside in the setting sun. The cathedral is exceptional, even by Spanish standards; I could fill pages describing its unique works of art and splendid architecture. In one corner, before a chapel of the Virgin, it also gave me my first chance to light a real candle for poor Harry Evans, which I did.
I was delighted to spot one of those stonecarvers’ little jokes on a relief above a south entrance – peeking through a window looking out over a scene from Jesus’ life, a malignant mediaeval jester. I love those little mason’s notes, so easily missed; sometimes a mouse eating an apple, or a dog scratching fleas, inserted into some holy biblical scene. I reflected that this one scene in haut relief, one of dozens throughout the cathedral, inside and out, would have been at least a year’s work for four men, and also on the strong likelihood that in carving the figures they may have well been making portraits of each other as the faces were clearly modelled from life.
Astorga also boasts an early Gaudi building, now a Camino museum. Both outside and in it is a more conventional structure than someone familiar with Sagrada Familia might expect, basically a neo-gothic mansion in keeping with the cathedral it stands near although certainly not lacking in Gaudi’s daring and original flourishes.
After consuming my usual thrifty but satisfying meal of tinned seafood, bread and wine al fresco in the park I ran into Rubén and we headed off in search of a drink. He told me that the guy who had set up the donativo just outside Astorga had been a friend of his, a fellow weed-head and roué back in Barcelona whom he had enjoyed catching up with. I expressed my regret at his loss of Sue but he just laughed, saying that Michael had never lacked for female company and he doubted that this had changed. We came across a group of pilgrims who urged us to join them in what turned out to be a trek looking for a spot in one restaurant after another, unsuccessful because most of the boisterous crowd wanted a meal and there seemed not to be a free table in the entire old town. Eventually, tired and not wanting to eat anyway I bailed and took myself off to bed.
The next day I passed the milestone marking 300 kliks to Santiago, which marked the midpoint of my Camino from Pamplona to Santiago, although since I was now committed to walking on to the coast with Leanne I really still had 400 kliks ahead of me.
Walking once more across vast plains of wheat and maize I passed a couple of many examples of the beautiful watertowers that epitomise why I so love Spain. When Kiwis need to store water they throw up an entirely utilitarian and usually brutally plain concrete tub. Not the Spanish. They understand that a water tower is going to become a conspicuous part of their beloved landscape and invariably erect something at least interesting and often a thing of beauty.
The second tower stands at the approaches to the historic Hospital de Orbigo, famous for its 19-arched mediaeval bridge. The present structure dates back to the Middle Ages but there has been a bridge here over the Orbigo River since Roman times. It has seen countless battles, many between the Moors and Christians, as well as the Peninsular War, which the Spanish call the War of Independence when with the aid of the British and Portuguese they pushed Napoleon out of Spain. During that war the British destroyed a couple of the central arches to stop the French advance. It was last extensively rebuilt in 1946. The ‘Hospital’ part refers to the refuge at which the Knights of St John of Jerusalem cared for pilgrims for the best part of a thousand years.
The numerous arches running through the cultivated fields aren’t there for show – I first saw the bridge during the spring rains when those fields were under a torrent of water.
From Hospital I bit into what I knew would be the hardest part of the whole Camino: the journey to the Cruz de Hierro and beyond, scaling and descending the first of two mountain ranges.
This is the part of the walk that passes through El Ganso (The Goose), a rough little village famous for what they call the Cowboy Bar, a hostelry decorated with a crazed assortment of American western imagery and memorabilia in a picturesquely ramshackle semi-abandoned town that I remembered for its moss-and-lichen-covered crumbling walls and rough tracks. No more! Thanks to the funding to tart up the Camino all the roads are now pristine concrete, most of the walls repaired. Why do they imagine they are doing pilgrims a favour by concreting walkways? Concrete is the worst surface to walk on. I was so disappointed I scarcely glanced into the cowboy bar and kept going.
I had planned to walk the 25 kliks to Foncebadón but climbing through the heat into Rabanal I was pretty much out of steam, with the blister that I had finally acquired on my left heel causing me a good deal of pain. Stopping at the little shop for supplies I asked if the shopkeeper knew of an albergué with free beds. He pointed across the road to a large garden with a row of tents. This was the Green Garden Albergué, his own place, with no buildings beyond frontier-type shower and toilets, a few rather well-crafted shade areas and a row of single tents for a bunk-room. The Burgos cold spell had passed, with daytime temperatures back into the high 20s and low 30s, so I seized my chance to sleep under the stars at least once on the walk.
As I dumped my baggage in my allotted tent I saw Rubén limping past and called out to him, urging him to stay, but he was determined to make it Foncébadon, just below the Cruz at the summit. He declared himself refreshed, having just eaten what he declared to be the best hamburger in Spain at the bar I passed on my way into the village. Although of average height for a Spaniard and not particularly chubby Rubén, I thought, appears to be something of a gourmand. Then I noted that I had already taken my belt in a notch and without that reserve of fat to keep me going I would probably have been spending far more on food than was the case. Weighing myself before and after the Camino I would be able to calculate that I burned off about a kilo a week, although this was not the source of unalloyed joy – some much lard having been lost so quickly I discovered such hideous stretch marks across the now-loose skin of my belly that I vowed never to appear shirtless in public again. Happily as I write this a couple of months later the skin has slowly shrunk back to normal and even more happily I have not yet started to put the weight on again.
After showering and washing my usual T-shirt and underpants I was lounging in the shade when the shaggy-headed and ever-smiling Belgian Mariken turned up, dropped her pack and took a place beside me. I asked her if she was planning to stay.
“No. Just taking a rest.”
“Where will you stay tonight?”
“I’ll find somewhere. I have some problem with my card and have run out of money. I have called the bank – it will be fixed soon. It’s OK. I’ve been without money before.” She did seem genuinely unconcerned.
“You can’t be entirely without money,” I said, and handed her €20. “Pay me back when you can.” I was happy to do it although it did cross my mind that perhaps I was being played.
She thanked me fulsomely and declared that now she could go and eat one of those amazing hamburgers she had seen someone, probably Rubén, devouring back down the road. I must admit I was dismayed at her improvidence – a hamburger in Spain is always served as a full meal and it couldn’t cost less than ten euros – but just let it all go. Mariken is a genuine child of the universe and I felt ashamed of my suspicion. In the event she didn’t get around to it anyway.
Not for the first time I heard about my supposed fame. A couple of days earlier a pilgrim whom I had not before met had greeted me with, “You must be Christopher.” “Yes, but how do you know?” “You’re famous, man!” Mariken told me that people were talking about me in her albergué in Astorga. Apparently I stand out for being from NZ, the country it seems that literally everyone on earth would like to live in, for being mad enough to carry a guitar on the Camino (although I always point out that as a flamenco guitar it’s exceptionally light), for secretly being incredibly ancient and for making nice music. All right, I might as well say it all. Apparently I had lived an amazing life and was consequently wise. And spoke four languages, although that’s no big deal on the Continent.
Enough already. I’m as vain as the next man and can’t say I hate it but I also wish it wasn’t happening. I know how ordinary I actually am and at this stage in my life very much do not wish to acquire delusions of being something I’m not. But of course the pilgrims at any moment in time are a temporary community so it will all go away soon, and just as well.
About that “Christopher.” I’ve found that if I introduce myself as Chris the Spanish tend to ask, “What?” and immediately forget. There isn’t enough of it to quite grasp, and if they do they only know Chris as an abbreviation of Cristina, so probably doubt that they have correctly heard. But Christopher they immediately catch and seem always to remember.
In the evening I went to the old Santa Maria de la Asuncion, where German Benedictine priests used to sing Vespers in Gregorian chant every evening, in fact another of my reasons for stopping in Rabanal. I was expecting to hear it again but sat through a vernacular Mass instead. The priest gave a sermon in accented Spanish containing every Camino cliché imaginable. Outside the church I translated a Latin inscription on the wall and asked the priest if I had it correct. I was astonished to discover that neither he nor his colleague knew a word of Latin. I have to say I expected more from an ecclesiastical German education.
Later, having carefully examined the seams for signs of bedbugs, I dragged the mattress out under the stars and lay there for an hour without seeing a single meteor – a disappointment, although the great sweep of the Milky Way and the various constellations lit up the night in a brilliant display such as I had not since I left NZ. I fell asleep with stars in my eyes, although at one in the morning a chilling wind woke me and drove me into the tent.
And so, next morning, to the Cruz de Hierro, the iron cross which marks the highest point on the Camino. The climb from Rabanal through Foncebadon isn’t that long or hard since the Way had been ascending in stages all the way from León. The walk was enlivened by crowds of bright butterflies that fluttered around my legs, literally dozens if not hundreds of them. I was happy to arrive well before the tourist buses that would start to plague the place later in the day. The Cruz is a simple iron cross atop a 15 metre pole and is attended by various legends, some of which say it has been there since Roman days. It is undoubtedly true that its original purpose would have been to mark the path through the heavy snows of winter. There has certainly been an iron cross here for a thousand years, and throughout this time the tradition has persisted of carrying a stone on your pilgrimage to place at its base. Reasons given vary but the persistent thread is of a penance for yourself or another, so I had carried one of the slivers of quartz the children were selling in Hornillos which I inscribed with Harry’s name and placed on what is now a sizeable hill, every piece of it left here by centuries of pilgrims.
My last Camino Francés was marred by hordes of Germans brought there following the great success of a book by a German comedian that described the Camino as a jolly tourist romp. At the Cruz, as I had been waiting my turn to place a stone, a taxi turned up and disgorged a group of Teutons who proceeded to run up and down the hill hurling the stones at each other, hooting. This time my Camino has been almost entirely German-free, with the exception of the delightful Wolfgang, so I had no difficulty passing a quarter hour of quiet contemplation before placing Harry’s stone.
Leaving the Cruz I began the long and brutal descent, or rather traverse and descent, to Molinaseca. I was now in the peaks of the Leónese Mountains and the path through spectacular mountainous vistas was harsh, hot, stony and seemingly endless. It was on this section that I had fallen and smashed my guitar on my first Camino, but that traverse at least was in cool, misty conditions, with drifts of snow in shaded spots. The difficulty I faced now was not so much the stony nature of the surface but its extreme unevenness, with pits and rocky obstructions which as two hours turned into three were giving my tin knee a hell of a battering, not helped by the persistent sting of the blister on the other foot. I had not even reached the first village, the picturesque El Acebo de San Miguel, and stood in desperate need of a break when, miraculously, I turned a corner and saw a taxi van pulled over at the roadside with a family of four in the process of loading their packs into the back. A portly American gent waved to me and asked if I had seen his wife, whom he described. I had in fact passed her less than half an hour earlier and assured him she was fine and enjoying the walk. He asked if I needed a lift; I could have kissed him. Determination to walk every step of the way is all very well but I was clearly heading for a medical emergency had I insisted on pressing on. As I experienced on my first Camino, pushed too far the knee swells up like a watermelon and pretty much immobilises me – not good in these mountains.
I cannot describe the bliss of sitting back in an air-conditioned van and watching that savage trail rolling by. The Italian family and I shared a conspiratorial jollity, cheating together and delighted to be doing so. We went through El Acebo and reached what appeared to be the easier, and final stages of the walk so we thanked our American friend, who declined reimbursement, and disembarked. I winked at the others and said, “Lips sealed, OK? This never happened.” “It never happened,” replied the father, beaming, and we set off on what turned out to still be another hour of hard descent, although softened by green valleys and tumbling streams. On the way I recognised the long, side-sloping sheet of slippery rock where I had fallen onto my guitar seven years earlier.
Entering Molinaseca was like walking into paradise. We followed the road down a kilometre-long hill to the ancient Romanesque bridge and crossed the Rio Meruelo into the lovely, perfectly preserved old town. Beside the bridge the river widens into a broad, slow-moving pool where a dozen townspeople and pilgrims were bathing. Forgetting that the 20-odd kilometres from Rabanal to Molinaseca would be such slow, hard travelling I had planned to carry on the next seven kliks to Ponferrada but there was no way I was leaving this heavenly spot for that rather dull town. I went off and took the first albergué I saw where the Italians that I had never shared a taxi with were already installed. We greeted each other warmly, I washed my daily T-shirt and underpants, took my guitar and went straight back to the communal swimming pool, picking up a couple of ice-cold cans of San Miguel Especial on the way.
Because all my previous Caminos had been made in the cooler, wetter months it had never occurred to me to pack a pair of togs but I was damned if I was going to miss out on a swim. I simply shed my t-shirt and boots and plunged into the exquisitely cool, crystal-clear water. I was still swimming when I looked up at the bridge and saw the irrepressible Rubén limping into town. I couldn’t believe he had managed that harsh section of the Way but he was all smiles when he turned up on the reserve and joined the party half an hour later. In the baking mountain heat my shorts dried on me in less than an hour. I had a long conversation on literary and political matters with a highly educated if somewhat loud-mouthed young American guy, who also played my guitar as if he were trying to tear the thing apart. I’ve never seen such a savage hand on an instrument.
As the afternoon wore on more and more locals, mostly the younger set, turned up for a swim, most of the girls in bikinis whose lower sections were virtually what the French call a cache-sex. At one point I noticed a couple of particularly pretty girls in microkinis and as they drew closer I realised that, although well developed, they could not have been more than twelve years old. It shocked me – what mother, I wondered, would let her girl child offer so very much of her naked body for public display? I suspect social media pressure, that evil of our age.
Clockwise from the sandals: the American, can’t remember, Dave, Mariken, Karin, Rubén.
Next day began with an easy and entirely solitary walk to Ponferrada, where the Camino took me past the spectacular castle of the Knights Templar. The road was distinctly up and down and I accepted the fact that hills were going to be part of my life for the next couple of days as I still had the murderous climb to O Cebreiro ahead of me. Although my blister had not broken it had bothered me so much over the previous couple of days that I had burst and drained it, disinfected with the ubiquitous anti-Covid hand cleaner and sealed it with a Compeed. Now it hurt worse than ever so I made up my mind to have my pack couriered next day to the summit. I was also very tired, not just from the exertion but from not having slept well or long over the last couple of nights.
In spite of this I had to keep going to make my appointment with Leanne on the 21st in Santiago, having twice now fallen short of the schedule I had made to achieve that. Notwithstanding the pain, and wondering why I was doing this to myself, I pushed myself hard through the hills and it was with great relief that I staggered under the roasting sun into the municipal in picturesque Villafranca del Bierzo. 31kms, not a record but a bloody long walk in those conditions. Villafranca is all up and down, hanging off the slopes of a steep-sided river valley, and although Leanne, now a couple of days ahead of me, had urged me to stay at Albergué Leo, which she praised as the best in town, I was not going to take one more unnecessary step down or up any hill and collapsed on the front lawn of the municipal. Leanne, as we chatted constantly on WhatsApp, chivvied me for not having followed a single one of her recommendations but then I had not stopped in many of the same towns and rarely ate in restaurants so the opportunity did not often arise. After a long rest I made my way down to the bottom of the valley and up the other side to the town centre. I met one of my friends from yesterday (I forget which one) in the main square who told me that some of the others were swimming at the river. I ambled off to find them but failed, passing by Albergué Leo, clearly a much more attractive option than the barren and almost empty municipal but I consoled myself with the fact that what I wanted more than anything else this night was a long rest. I bought a baguette, a small salad and a tin of sardines from the supermarket and made my meal by the riverside, then back to the albergué and abed while it was still light.
Next morning I was off before dawn because O Cebreiro, sitting on a small summit as it does, is short on accommodation and only the municipal was open. Municipals don’t take bookings so the only way to have a good chance of a bed was to arrive early. I found a flyer for the local backpack courier service, called Juan and told him where I was and where I wanted my mochilla taken. No problem. I filled the details on the envelope/flyer, put €5 in it and set off carrying only my guitar and what was usually my front pack.
The first half of the walk runs level beside the Valcarce river and, refreshed, with the Compeed working its magic and the pain now minimal, I kept up the pace, passing the few pilgrims out so early. It was a beautiful morning and very quiet since the old highway is now superseded by one of the astounding skyways that have levelled so many of the mountainous parts of Spain, so high above that I could not even hear the traffic.
The landscape here is most beautiful, with surely uneconomic tiny farms and half-deserted villages dotted among the wooded hills, in fact the distinction between village and farm is vague at best.
I reached Herrerias, the last village before the ascent, at about ten o’clock. Here it is possible to join a horse trek to the top – the idea tempted me but I saw no sign anywhere advertising the service and in any case, not carrying my pack I felt quite relaxed about the climb so I set off up the hill. Initially a pretty walk on an easy surface through woodlands besides gurgling streams, the inclines seemed to get steeper with every turn in the road. I began to really struggle, particularly since in many sections the track was not wide enough to allow for my usual tactic of zig-zagging back and forth. For once I felt my age with some regret as the younger pilgrims strode past me, often in conversation, and I began to worry about nailing a place for the night.
My mood was not helped by this:
The late Mr O’Connor was certainly younger and even looked fitter than I and for a fleeting moment my thoughts turned to my irregular heartbeat, risk of stroke, yada yada. Then I gave myself a good notional kick in the pants and returned to the climb.
Finally I sweated my way into La Faba, which my memory told me grimly was only half way up. But the path levelled out considerably after La Faba and as I passed the large and ornate milestone telling me I was leaving Castilla y León for Galicia I wondered how accurate my recollection was because I knew that the border was quite close to the summit. I couldn’t help but stop occasionally to appreciate the spectacular views across deep valleys. There is nothing quite like one mountaintop after another stretching into the distance on a clear day in a foreign country.
Feeling a second wind I was ready to deal with a few more kilometres when I rounded a bend and discovered that I had arrived. The drama was over; I lived to walk another day.
I threaded my way through the crowds of tourists and quaint thatched souvenir shops and restaurants to the municipal albergué where a crowd of perhaps twenty pilgrims sat waiting for it to open at one o’clock. There was much speculation about capacity. Apparently the Galician commune had mandated a 30% loading for public albergués during the pandemic; someone calculated that this meant 32 beds out of the 104 capacity but the sign in the window informed us that 28 beds would be available.
A headcount told me that I was number 25 – supposedly safe but close enough to make me nervous. Soon the hospitalera arrived in her little white Fiat, a short plump woman in heavy make-up and large spectacles and very obviously a council employee, quite unlike the traditional volunteers who usually staff albergués.
We lined up and she slowly checked us in one by one. After she stamped my credencial and handed me the usual packet containing a paper fitted sheet and a paper pillowcase she left her cubicle, counted a few pilgrims behind me and told the rest they would not be admitted, a cue for a minor confrontation over the 30% tally. But this was a council functionary in the classic mould and the protestors quickly assessed her perfect indifference and sloped off. I first felt relief and then, when I entered my assigned bunkroom, indignation on behalf of the rejects.
What a bureaucratic absurdity! My first impulse was to protest but realised that by physically removing the bunks the commune had eliminated any discretion. But I would have my revenge in Palas de Rei.
It was now two in the afternoon and there was no sign of my backpack, provoking severe anxiety. Since it was only a 20 km drive it should have arrived hours ago. I found the functionary outside dragging heavily on a fag and asked if she had seen it. She informed me that the couriers left all the packs at the Hotel Cebreiro and to my relief I found it sitting in the lobby. I felt my exertions, frustrations and worries had earned me a decent meal and ordered the pilgrim’s menu in the restaurant, not expecting much for my €10. To my gratified surprise it turned out to be a very tasty and well-cooked pork loin and veg with a piquant sauce on the side, accompanied by a whole bottle of the cold and perfectly palatable house white wine.
By four in the afternoon the day-trippers had departed in their cars and coaches leaving the spectacular 360º view to the few pilgrims. I spotted a very small hand-painted sign pointing to a tienda (shop) and descended a set of iron stairs to a thatched building sited on one of the only locations in the village with no view at all. A few people hung about in a small courtyard drinking and chatting. I took a stubby of Heineken from a shelf and asked the shopkeeper if she had any of those cold. She smiled, dipped into an out-of-view chest chiller and handed me a one-litre bottle of Mahou lager, price €1.50. She must have liked the cut of my jib because I had found the locals’ spot and was being included. I sat outside with the drinkers who were indeed all locals, played a bit of music and was duly plied with drinks. I had a chat with a man in his 20s who lived in León but had come back home to visit family and hang out with his mates. We had an entirely (if I had thought about it) predictable exchange.
“It must have been wonderful to grow up in these mountains.”
“Yeah. But there’s nothing to do.”
The next morning’s walk was a joy. A pleasant chill in the air, a well-formed track that stayed among the peaks for the first couple of hours, every turn presenting another gorgeous vista bathed in golden light, often looking down on hamlets far below.
I took breakfast at the first village, just past the giant pilgrim statue on Alto San Roque, and began the long descent to Triacastela where I spent a pleasant if uneventful night before setting out on what I knew would be the last experience of the ‘normal’ Camino. From the next stop, Sarria, the population would explode. The cathedral at Santiago issues an ornate certificate called the Compostela to anyone with a credencial containing stamps proving that they have walked more than 100km of the Camino. Sarria is 110 km from Santiago, and we were still in the Spanish summer holiday period. I had been trying for some days to nail a booking for every stop along the way, successfully except for Palas de Rei where I fully expected to sleep on the streets; many stories were circulating of dozens and even hundreds doing so. Actually I was not at all concerned – I had the equipment and would have been happy to share the safety and congeniality of sleeping in a group.
I walked for a while in the company of a young couple with signs on their back offering free pain relief, acupuncture and shiatsu massage. They described themselves as alternative doctors; he, French, had trained in Chinese acupuncture and she, from Argentina, was an herbalist and masseuse. We talked about Covid and he advanced his theory that illness came from a state of being out of balance with the earth and, oddly, the sun, assuring me that if your body was correctly in alignment you had nothing to fear from a virus. We were on common ground in the conviction that a great deal of walking was powerfully protective against affliction. They were both, I must say, poised and radiantly healthy so I had to give his theories their due consideration. Do we really know? After all, ten percent of the population carry the bacteria that cause meningitis in their nose and throat and never contract that serious illness. The common cold virus is virtually omnipresent but I, for one, cannot remember ever having a cold.
On this section of the Camino many people take the detour to the spectacular monastery at Samos but I had seen it and found its magnificence somewhat off-putting, so I took the short route and walked into Sarria before lunchtime. The madness begins and it was visible immediately. The place was heaving with what we would soon dub tourigrinos, peregrino being Spanish for pilgrim. I walked past a hotel where a guy was loading a pile of suitcases into his mochilla courier van. Suitcases! On the Camino!
First stop, as usual, was at a bar for the daily Coke Zero to which I had become addicted. Reluctant as I am to support that embodiment of American imperialism, when tired, thirsty and hot there is nothing to match it, served on ice with a slice of lemon. I plonked myself down next to four young women I had been seeing intermittently since Burgos. One of them, an American Chinese who talked a blue streak had been complimentary back in Rabanal about my correct pronunciation of my Cantonese joke nickname Chi Sin Gwai Loa (crazy foreigner); she was as usual regaling the others with a story about herself. Opening my bag I discovered to my dismay that my Decathlon water bottle had leaked all over my credencial, to the ruin of some of its stamps. Unfolding it caused it to separate along one of the folds, which everyone saw.
“Oh bugger!” I exclaimed. “Look what’s …” The talker gave me a lightning glance, decided she didn’t care and kept on with her story. We would not be friends. More agreeably the woman sitting next to me expressed her sympathies and hoped it would be fine after it dried out, which I proceeded to manage by laying it out on a warm stone bench in the sun. Successfully, I am happy to say. In twenty minutes it was bone dry and repaired with the tape I always carry, with only a couple of the stamps now partly legible.
I set off among a flock of tourigrinos to Vilei, three kilometres along the Way, but on arrival I could find no sign of Albergué Matias Locanda. I enquired at the only albergué in sight and after I drew a puzzled blank from the hospitalero the owner appeared and told me that Matias’ albergué was back in Sarria, on the main street. And no, they were fully booked here so there was nothing for it but to return. I still don’t know how I mixed it up.
The albergué turned out to be a huge dark hall behind a pizzeria with one of those awful showers where you have to continuously hold your hand on a button to make the water flow. It was a family business managed by a young man who plainly lived in terror of his harpie of a mother. In the evening I decided it was time to replace the strings on my guitar and while doing so over my pizza the young guy begged me to re-string his completely mis-strung instrument. I used the set I had taken from mine and earned a couple of beers. He was almost embarrassingly grateful.
Next morning, Portomarin. Walking among a crowd of strangers was different but the weather was perfect, the way easy and picturesque and I simply and successfully decided not to let the crowds bother me. My first sight of Portomarin puzzled me – previously I had entered the town across a bridge over a lake. The bridge came into sight but no lake. As I drew closer I saw it now crossed a river at a height of perhaps fifteen metres. The signage before the bridge cleared up the mystery. The lake was in fact a reservoir, one that had drowned the mediaeval village on the river’s shores back in the 1960s. The historically worthwhile buildings had been moved to the top of the hill to become the centre of the new town. The floodgates were open for the summer and below the bridge remnants of the old village were clearly visible, including odd V-shaped lines of stones that I recognised as ancient fish traps.
Because I had not been able to get a bed in Portomarin I had another nine kliks to go, making it a long, 30 km day, so I stopped for a rest and lunch. My walk on to the tiny hamlet of Castromaior was pleasantly solitary until I caught up with two friendly young Spanish girls who, as I discovered, had met while studying English in Australia. They were the best of company. We guessed each others’ ages and got them equally wrong. No-one guesses my real age so that was a sure thing but I made the same mistake, placing them in their late teens; both surprised me by being in their mid-20s. I asked them what they thought of Australian men. Tactfully, they said it was difficult for them because they differed so much from the Spanish boys they were used to. “You mean they drink too much?” They laughed, tact abandoned. “And take lots of drugs. We are used to boys who are serious, studying for their careers. Australian boys leave school too early, have far too much money when they are young and spend it all on drink and drugs. All they care about is that, and surfing and sport.”
“Doesn’t sound like much fun for you.”
“It was boring, and sometimes we did not feel safe.”
Yep. Those girls had definitely been to Australia. Both gorgeous, I could imagine the hassles they would have faced from drunk Queensland surfers.
Albergué Ortiz was a clean modern building in the middle of nowhere. Tired after a long slog it suited me perfectly and I saw no sign of the owner’s rudeness as featured in some pilgrims’ comments on the app. I set off next morning in the dark, very early since at the next stop, Palas de Rei, I still had not been able to find a bed and was counting on being among the first to arrive, which, since I had a nine kilometre head start, I thought to be a reasonably safe bet. I kept up a good pace and arrived early. Only one pilgrim was waiting at the big Albergué Os Chacotes, one of two municipals in Palas, but this was a kilometre outside of town and I thought I stood a good chance of a place at the other municipal in town. There appeared to be no more than a dozen pilgrims waiting in a scattered bunch. A French pilgrim had noted that the sign in the window allowed for 18 beds, incredibly frustrating for an albergué that, but for Covid, would have taken 60. He had us line up our packs in order; I saw that one guy was placing an extra pack for a friend who he claimed had gone off for breakfast.
The French pilgrim counted off; I was number 19. “Hang on,” I objected. “The deal is if you’re here you’re here and if you’re not you’re not. I don’t agree with this.” Our volunteer organiser took me aside.
“I think these guys are honest. They walked through the night to get here at 8.30.”
I gave in. “Fair enough.”
Then a group of three said that they had a possible booking somewhere else and might leave.
“I think you should stay,” said my new friend. “I have a feeling you’ll get in.”
A dilemma. But I wasn’t up for the risk and legged it back to Os Chacotes, arriving in time to be sure of a place. Once checked in I headed back into town for a meal. A crowd of pilgrims were queuing outside a restaurant two doors up from the municipal, my French mate among them. Laughing I declared, “I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me.”
“You wouldn’t have got in. You did the right thing.” But then another pilgrim started crowing delightedly. “You would have got in! You shouldn’t have left.”
“Stop talking,” I yelled over him. “I really don’t want to know.”
But he was having none of it, intent on rubbing it in.
“Haha! You lost! Five people left. You should have stayed.” As he kept baying away I just walked off. This, I thought, is the last 100km. This is what you get. Assholes.
He wasn’t the only one. At the next town I bumped into the French guy who told me that he had seen the ‘pilgrims’ who had ‘walked through the night’ – in their car.
I simply don’t get it. What is the possible value of a Compostela gained by driving from town to town, depriving of a bed tired pilgrims who had walked hundreds of miles?
That night I stopped in for a drink at the restaurant next to Os Chacotes where I found Mariken with a group of eight or nine others. They were hoeing in to a proper feast, the table strewn with dishes piled high. She greeted me joyfully.
“You can have anything you want,” she offered, and told everyone that I had given her money when she had none. Actually, I thought I had loaned it to her and would rather have had the money, but as it turned out I ended up stuffing my face. They had ordered a large plate of pulpo, the prized Galician specialty of octopus, but it seemed no-one much cared for the taste or more likely the slightly slimy texture. It sat there until I decided that I was not going to have such a fine creature lose its life just to end up in a rubbish tin. I would never order it, but I don’t mind the taste; it’s seafood, after all, and I slowly munched my way through the lot. Given the cost of pulpo I’m sure I consumed every cent of my €20.
They had formed a group and were committed to travelling together to Santiago, apparently headed up by a blonde French guy who seemed to be the group’s social theorist. Agreeing to stick together in that situation pretty much guaranteed that they would not find beds and indeed they had slept out for the last three nights. I saw my chance for my revenge on the idiot bureaucrats of the Galican authorities, and to help them out.
“Come and stay at the albergué. The hospitalero has gone home, I have the door code and there is a huge, totally empty room downstairs.”
A discussion followed. The French intellectual didn’t care for the idea; it seemed ‘sneaky’, he wasn’t sure of the ethics and it had to be all or none. But the nights were now cold and they had not showered for three days. Common sense prevailed; we all trooped back to the albergué.
On the road to Arzúa
After an easy and enjoyable 20km walk to Boente, a few kliks past Melide, I checked into the expensive but luxurious Albergué Aleman. I was most impressed at the generous serving of vino verde the barman poured me until I raised it to my mouth; it was unmistakeably heavily watered. Although it calls itself the German albergué the only German present seemed to be a most gregarious bloke in glasses who insisted I join his group at their table. I had been sitting alone when he came over and declared, “No, no. This not the Camino way. You cannot be alone.” I had been feeling a little isolated and was grateful for the company.
Next morning I found it difficult to get out of bed – I had been walking for 29 days with only one break and averaging longer daily distances than I had ever done in the past. The fatigue was so overwhelming I decided to use the backpack courier service again. I rummaged around in the drawers of a desk downstairs and found an envelope, called the courier and left my pack beside one other and a couple of suitcases by the front door. This was the last night before Santiago and perhaps due to the fatigue I remember little of the walk to O Pino and Albergué Andaina, above a large restaurant. The barman took me up a flight of outside stairs to the dormitory entrance where I saw a couple of packs with courier tags. Neither was mine. I immediately thought back to the fact that the envelopes had not been in view on top of the desk but in a drawer. Was there a reason for that? Had the hospitalero withdrawn them because of some problem? I dialled the number from my recent calls. No answer. Not good. I called the albergué and was relieved to hear that my pack was gone. Perhaps he was still driving, running late. I went downstairs and stood at the roadside looking anxiously back down the road, then decided to go ask the staff. As I turned I saw the barman bringing me my pack, which I took and gratefully went upstairs for a shower.
I sat at a table and ordered a drink. At the next table a lone man in his 50s was eating a meal that looked irresistible in my hungry condition so I called the waiter and asked for the same. Ten minutes later I was tucking into one of the best simple meals I have ever eaten – beef on the bone, slow-cooked in a rich broth. The meat fell off the bone at the touch of the fork, the boiled potatoes perfectly firm under their coat of butter. The man invited me to join him and we enjoyed our meal and a conversation that wandered through the subject of Europe, the economy and especially Spanish history since he turned out to be a history teacher. He had not enjoyed his Camino. He was a lover of the mountains and the endless wheatfields had bored him so much that he almost quit the walk. After the Camino he was heading for the mountains of Asturia for some proper solitary hiking. We got onto the subject of Franco and the monuments to the murdered Basques.
“A Spanish friend told me,” I said, “that the whole ETA thing was not fundamentally about Basque separatism but a continuation of the Civil War in the 30s, which my friend claimed didn’t end at all in ’39, as Franco claimed, but actually went on with armed militias still shooting at the Francoists up to the 70s.”
“That’s true to a point,” he replied, “but it would be more accurate to describe it as a continuation of the Carlist wars of the 19th century.” I could scarcely believe him but he assured me it was true. Even more astonishing, those wars were the result of the very same Salic law that Henry’s advisers use to support his claim to France in Shakespeare’s Henry V.
In terram salicam mulieres ne succedant. Henry V, Act 1, Sc. 2
i.e. In Salic land no woman may succeed (to the throne, in this case). The conservative monarchists used this in 1833 to try to stop the infanta Isabella, whose regent mother was a liberal, succeeding in favour of the conservative Carlos, the dead king Ferdinand’s brother. This same liberal vs conservative strain, with the liberals strongest in Catalonia and the Basque country, continued through the three Carlist Wars and the Civil War.
We parted affectionately and he informed me that I had inspired him. I did not have to ask why; it was not the first time I had heard such remarks on this, and for that matter, previous Caminos. It is not difficult to be inspiring, especially to the young, at 73. All that is required is to keep living a normal life and not do all those unnecessary things most septuagenarians do such as walk slowly, whistle your ‘s’s and grunt when you sit or stand, all of these in most cases the direct result of telling yourself repeatedly that you’re ‘getting on a bit’ and letting yourself slide into lazy, corpulent senescence. To actually live life requires effort. The mediocre grow tired and quite understandably bored with themselves. It is my observation of my contemporaries that by the mid-70s many have had enough and although they would never admit it, least of all to themselves, they are actually quite ready to lie down in a coffin for the infinite snooze.
I still felt fatigued as I set out next day for Santiago with my guitar and pack, on the road at 5.30am to maximise my time in the city of the Apostle. No courier today; there was no way I was going to arrive at the Plaza Obradoiro looking like a day tripper. Yes, vanity. Whatever. Having a coffee just after dawn I got into a conversation with a young woman who worked for something called the Ashok Foundation, which put people with great ideas together with older mentors. She asked me a few questions and then suggested that I would be a good mentor and was I interested? Of course I assented and we set off together – I was most interested and wanted to hear more. What I heard instead was an interminable monologue about how she expressed herself through dance. She literally talked on this single subject non-stop for forty-five minutes until I simply could not bear to hear another word. I excused myself, saying that I always liked to walk alone into Santiago (which was true) and we parted company, exchanging WhatsApp contacts. I followed up a couple of days later and noticed that my messages were not received.
Two hours later I walked through the dark tunnel with its perpetual bagpiper (they do shifts) and onto the square. Leanne came skipping over waving her arms and we embraced. Then as I posed before the cathedral for the obligatory photo the delightful Mariken came running up and inserted herself joyfully into the shot.
It was done. Although we would walk on to Fisterra, the pilgrimage proper ends at Santiago Cathedral. It is such a special moment, the feelings so mixed that it is essential to take some time to absorb the experience. I wandered about, greeting familiar faces. They had not all just arrived; it’s part of the fun to stay for two or three days and go to the Plaza to watch friends having their moment of apotheosis. It always strikes me how one can instantly distinguish at their moment of arrival between those who have walked (or driven!) from Sarria and the others who have come from Navarre, France or even further afield. The real pilgrims.
I basked in the joy of a difficult undertaking completed while sensing the beginning of regret, for the moment I stepped onto the plaza I ceased to be a pilgrim – a distinctive identity, now gone. In the space of a few weeks that long road across Spain had become my home, the long walk my work, and I had just lost both. The pilgrim experiences man’s most natural state, that of the hunter-gatherer. This was how our ancestors lived, carrying their few, essential possessions and walking all day every day, something we did for at least three hundred thousand years. We began to farm only ten thousand years ago, not long enough for any significant evolutionary change, so essentially we are still walking machines, and tribal. This is why everyone on the Camino is cheerful and sociable. We have been a tribe, but now the tribe will dissolve and we will all go back to a far less natural way of life, all of us, regardless of nation or livelihood.
Epilogue: To the Coast
Leanne was treating herself to the luxury of the Seminario Mayor, the grand former seminary one block from the cathedral, but I had opted for the albergué of the Seminario Menor a kilometre away. Although it is called the minor seminary it is huge, even larger than its senior counterpart, and gives a striking picture of the long ascendancy of the Catholic Church in Spain, for these are just two of the many seminaries where they trained the nominally celibate army that for centuries held the social and political life of Spain in its corrupt iron grip. Between them they must have contained more than a thousand beds – the Menor was much bigger than any hotel I had ever seen, the dormitories and corridors and single rooms going on forever, the different classes of accommodation reflecting the Spanish class system. The sons of the poor slept in long dormitories, the middle class boys had one of the individual rooms I occupied and I don’t doubt there were apartments with servants’ quarters for the sons of grandees. Although the Church still has vast real estate holdings it has lost the people, paying heavily for its scandalous support of the dictator Franco. Masses are never full except on very high holidays, and old, bitter-faced women very much dominate the small congregations rattling around in vast, empty churches.
My single room was comfortable and good value and I wasted no time showering, doing my wash and heading back into town for some shopping. I needed to replace a lost T-shirt but most importantly the cloth wallet in which I had been carrying my passports and credencial, now filthy from sharing space in my daypack with random bits of food in varying states of disintegration and an embarrassment every time I had to produce my credencial. A fruitless search – I suppose the beginning of the Camino is the place to buy such an item and none of the half-dozen shops I tried had anything suitable. Later I caught up with Leanne and – surprise – Albi for a noisy meal with a crowd of other pilgrims. I didn’t linger as we were up early next morning for the morning Mass in the cathedral before setting off for Fisterra.
The way to Fisterra seemed to be entirely hilly and I made tough going of it. I normally take a medication to correct an endocrine malfunction and was beginning to learn what life without it was like – hard. By adding the 100 kliks to my journey at the beginning I had run out of the topical gel a few days before reaching Santiago. Eliza had posted me a top-up from England but it had not been awaiting me at Seminario Menor as I had hoped. Checking the tracking number I saw it had been diverted for customs inspection and immediately knew I would never see it since Brexit has made it illegal to post medications to the EU. Which meant that much of the next few days would be walked with gritted teeth, groaning with dread at the numerous hills. However it was not without its joys – around the middle of day one we wandered into Ames, an astonishingly beautiful village around an old Roman bridge, a sun-soaked refuge with a sweet river threading its way between ancient stone embankments.
Leanne on the Ponte Maceira in Ames
Our first stop was at a hilltop albergué, Alto de Pena. Having to climb to a mountaintop bunk was, suffice to say, not my most wished-for day’s end. Lovely views though, and quiet and restful until the invasion of kids on a school trip. The second day was somewhat easier, finishing in Olveiroa, a destination Wonder Woman had originally intended to reach in a single thirty-three km stage, which would have killed me on those hills. At Olveiroa a funny little Frenchman asked if he could borrow my guitar and proceeded to spin out hot café jazz that put me to shame, beautifully fluid and perfectly on beat. He would pop up along the next stages, with his funny gurgling giggle. He was a mystery – he had walked from Paris but still possessed a wobbly paunch. When I asked him how it was possible he laughed and said, “It’s because I’m a pig!”
Finally, the great day: our first sight of the sea, after easier walking. We had intended to reach Corcubión across the bay but after the precipitous descent into Cee my knee had had enough so we stopped in the little port. The weather was now cool but a few hardy souls were still swimming off the sandy beach. Leanne and I wandered around the little town, both delighted to be by the ocean again after the long cross-country trek. We had intended to walk first to Muxia but again that would have been another long hilly trek and I was definitely running out of steam so we plumped for the closer Fisterra.
Although I had always viewed the Cathedral as the end of the pilgrimage there is a host of traditions around the walk to Fisterra, principally a reverence for the place where the apostle’s headless body was said to have washed ashore protectively covered with scallops, a ridiculous proposition since scallops have no means of attaching themselves to anything. But then again, St James was also supposed to have appeared on a white horse at the head of a Christian army and driven back the Moors, a scene often depicted in iconography in the image known as Matamoros – Moor killer. Those mediaeval Christians could put Alice, with her ability to believe three impossible things before breakfast, to shame. So the walk to Fisterra certainly felt like a pilgrimage and it was an emotional moment when we left the wooded road and stepped onto Playa Lagosteira, the firm sandy beach that stretches more than a mile to the town of Fisterra.
In the thick sea mist we could sea the outlines of other pilgrims, a couple wading into the water but no-one that we could see performing the traditional end-of-pilgrimage ritual of burning clothes and swimming naked in the sea. We walked along the beach and into the pretty seaside town. After checking into the albergué I wandered around for a while – Leanne was back at work on her laptop – then went to the tourist office to get my certificate for having walked to Finisterre, having missed my opportunity to collect a Compostella back in Santiago. No big deal – I already have three of those sitting in cardboard tubes back home.
Leanne had found me a candle in a red protective transparent tube, Harry’s last candle, which I left burning concealed in a niche in a rocky headland. I sat for some time while it burned, meditating about life, the gift that we have for an unknown length of time, about my kids and friends so far away and finally just sat absorbing the vastness of the ocean a few metres away.
A couple of miles further on, the lighthouse at Cape Finisterre, recognised by the Romans as the westernmost point on the continent and hence finis terra – the end of the earth. (Actually they were wrong, technically – Caba de Roca in Portugal is a few inches further west.) Comically, this is where we found one of the two 00.00km Camino milestones. Muxia, at the other end of the Coast of Death as they like to call it, has also taken to calling itself the end of the Camino and has an identical milestone which certainly wasn’t in place when Bridget and I were there a few years ago. Sigh. The exploitation of the Camino continues its relentless march.
And that was that. We took a bus to Muxia, a particularly lovely seaside town on such a narrow peninsula that some places had sea views fore and aft, and famed for its seafood. We took in the sights – an ancient church, dramatic seascapes, the other 00.00km milestone – and then, next morning, a bus to Santiago.
There we parted company, Leanne to return to negotiating professional sports disputes and teaching law, me on to Portugal and Andalusia. But not to study flamenco accompaniment. I have decided to return to New Zealand and continue to play solo. I know that I’m deficient in certain aspects of technical timing but I do make a pretty good noise that only the purists could fault with and there are precious few of those in NZ. I’m happy.
This has probably been my last Camino. Not because of my age – as soon as I returned my endocrine system to normal all my vigour returned – but because I can’t justify the insult to the planet that flying to Europe to go for a walk would embody. However, and I pondered this repeatedly on the journey, if the Cop26 conference at the Last Chance Saloon fails to decisively grasp the climate challenge I will reconsider. I feel there’s no point in putting myself through deprivation if the impotence of the big players condemns us inevitably to a future of catastrophic environmental degradation.
We’ll just have to see …
Bristol, November 1st, 2021.