The Way of St. James is the most famous pilgrimage route in Europe. But the path of the true traveller doesn’t stop at the cathedral
In Spain, they say the pilgrimage starts with the first step out your front door. For me, it began with a thought, sitting in a Galician restaurant on Calle de Las Huertas, Madrid.
“Galicia, eh? Where’s that?” I asked Gordon, my Irish friend. “It’s the region just above Portugal,” he said. “Green and wet. It’s like the Ireland of Spain.”
This, I admit, was news to me.
We were eating a kind of baked mussel/prawn/scallop mousse served in a seashell, boiled octopus sprinkled with sea salt and paprika, and hot beef stew in a clay pot, which, even before Gordon’s statement, tasted like a rather Irish dish to me. The music in the place sounded Irish too: Bagpipes with that ‘fiddle-dee-diddle-dee-dee’ rhythm of a sea chantey.
“There,” said Gordon, nodding his head towards the wall, “check out the map.” I immediately recognised the name of Santiago de Compostela, the third city of Catholicism after Rome and Jerusalem. Its cathedral marks the end of the Camino de Santiago, probably the most famous pilgrimage route in Europe.
“Oh, that’s where Santiago is,” I apologise to the map. I should have known that. And that scallop shell Gordon was spooning seafood from — of course, now I remembered, from reading The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho in my early 20s: That was what the pilgrims wore on a string around their necks or tied to their backpacks.
Beside the map hung a framed poster blaring in block letters ‘Nunca Máis’. It didn’t ring any bells then, but would later.
My Andalusian friend Rafael, it turned out, had walked the pilgrimage — the camino — to Santiago a couple of years ago. I told him that I was shopping around for an adventure, but out of sheer childish spite, I didn’t want to follow Coelho’s footsteps. Other books in other languages had contributed to bringing the Way of St. James firmly into tourist territory, and there’d be all those milquetoast questers out there as well, ‘finding themselves’. No sale. I wasn’t going.
“But the camino does not have to end in Santiago,” grinned Rafael. “There is about another 100 km of walking to Finisterre.”
“Finis / terre?” I repeated. “Does that mean…”
“Yes,” he continued. “The Romans thought that was where the earth ended. It’s a long cape sticking out from the Costa da Morte.”
“Costa da / Mo—”
“Yes,” he said, almost rolling his eyes, “the Coast of Death. They say the route was perhaps used by the Celtic tribes, maybe for a kind of sun worship.” “Celtic tribes, eh?” Maybe my word associations weren’t so random.
Could Spain and Ireland have more in common than toilet-flushed economies and staggering IOUs to the European Union? Could my maternal Irish ancestors have anything to do with Spain?
“The path west from Santiago follows the Milky Way,” explained Rafael, “and not nearly as many people walk that camino”. Sold. I was going — to walk a post-Compostela, post-Coelho pilgrimage of my own making.
Spite can be a powerful thing.
It’s the first time in just over a decade that it’ll be just me and my backpack in Europe.
On the train from Madrid to Santiago, I find it hard to picture any lush forests, green hills, or rocky outcrops busting Atlantic waves into mist. Before long, I’ve convinced myself that I’m riding a model train across an ersatz landscape, built over a plywood plank in some hobbyist’s basement. On a ridge up ahead, a line of tall, white wind turbines spin — but don’t think for a second I’m going to indulge in that Spanish cliché.
After a few EU-blasted tunnels through the Cantabrian range, the landscape does begin to green up. In the distance, one craggy mountain bulges up, much like Croagh Patrick, the mountain of Ireland’s patron saint in County Mayo. It is beginning to look a lot like Ireland. Apparently, Galician myths and superstitions are just as replete with banshees and purgatory-stalled spirits as those of the Celts in Ireland.
I’m certain we’re in Galicia when the station names begin to replace the Castilian ‘j’ with the ‘x’ of Galego, a language that, though it does sound like ‘Gaelic’, is closer to Portuguese — which makes sense, considering the shared geography of Galicia and northern Portugal. Rising from Galicia’s southeast to the northern coast, the Cantabrian mountains have historically made travel difficult between Galicia and the rest of Spain.
As for the Celtic connection, there didn’t seem to be anything linguistic, besides certain words prefixed ‘dun’. Here, ‘dun’ refers to the hill forts the Iron Age Celts built in Galicia, later called castros by the Romans (yes, Fidel traces his lineage to Galicia, and so does General Franco). Castro culture, more or less, marks the period after the central Europe-migrated Celts and the Iberians mixed genes — and adjectives — to become known as Celtiberians. So, I reason, there probably wouldn’t be much of any Celtic language left. Maybe all that was left of the Celtiberians was the walk to the end of the world.
Or maybe, not quite. As I set out from Santiago cathedral at 8 am, I am bid farewell by a chorus of Galician bagpipes — gaita — coming from somewhere behind the cathedral: ‘Fiddle-dee-diddle-dee-dee’.
The road west out of Santiago dips down a mostly residential street, and I can see my first set of hills to be conquered in the distance. Both this road and the first café on the right share the name of the Madrid street where this caper was hatched: Las Huertas. I take it as an omen. Maybe not the same kind of omen that sees fit for a black cat to cross my path in the first village after being out of Santiago — today of all days, Friday the 13th — but let’s face it, we’re always choosing what to accept as omens and what to ignore as insignificant, what to dismiss as myth, and what to accept as history. And in Galicia, mythology and history are not always easy to separate.
As I walk, I reminisce, that whether good or bad, Friday the 13th is ‘unlucky’ because this is the day the Knights Templar were rounded up by the Holy See in Rome for getting a little bit too big for their chainmail britches after the Crusades. The Templars’ symbol was a red cross, and it hits me now that it may have been borrowed from the namesake saint of the cathedral looming behind me.
The chances that St. James, the patron saint of Spain, is actually buried under his cathedral are slim to none. The church was built on the spot where shepherds, guided by strange lights in the sky — cough — were led to the saint’s grave, 700 years after he was beheaded in Jerusalem. The stories of his remains’ voyage to Galicia are even more ludicrous. But consider: This myth was created during the Muslim drive through Spain in the 8th century, when Galicia, along with the Basque region, was one of the last Christian holdouts on the entire peninsula. Frankly, the cause needed a hero.
West beyond Olveiroa, the path of the Milky Way splits: Left to Finisterre, or right to Muxia at the top of the Costa da Morte. I’d originally planned on branching off right and walking the 28 km to Muxia, then tackling the 26 km down the coast to Finisterre, but my lower half is killing me. I
(This story appears in the 12 August, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)