The Second Road to Santiago, and the Queen Who Walked It

The Portuguese Way is now the busiest approach to Compostela after the French road, and its recent popularity has obscured how old and how royal its use actually is.

From Lisbon, or in practice from Porto

The full route runs north from Lisbon through Coimbra and Porto and crosses the Minho into Galicia at Tui, but the great majority of walkers begin at Porto, which leaves roughly a fortnight to Santiago. Two branches carry much of the modern traffic: the coastal variant along the Atlantic, quieter and more scenic, and the Spiritual Variant near the end, which detours to Padron, where the body of James is said to have come ashore, and can be completed partly by boat up the estuary.

An old devotion revived

Portuguese royal and popular use of the road is well attested long before the modern revival. Isabel of Aragon, queen of Portugal and later canonised, walked to Santiago in the 1320s and 1330s and is said to have left her crown at the tomb. The road then faded with the general decline of pilgrimage and revived steeply only after 2010, so that a route with a genuinely medieval pedigree now carries a largely contemporary and international body of walkers.