The Camino de Santiago

The Camino is usually described as a thousand-year-old pilgrimage that people are rediscovering. That is half right, and the half that is wrong is the more interesting half.

The gap

The road was genuinely one of the three great pilgrimages of Latin Christendom, alongside Rome and Jerusalem, and it genuinely carried very large numbers of people between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Then it stopped. The Reformation removed most of northern Europe from the pool of pilgrims. The relics were hidden against a feared raid in 1589 and the hiding place was forgotten for nearly three hundred years. The Enlightenment and the nineteenth century had no use for the thing.

By the middle of the twentieth century the walking pilgrimage was effectively extinct. The numbers in the first years for which the Pilgrim's Office kept a count are in the low hundreds annually, not a declining tradition, but a handful of eccentrics on a road that no longer functioned as one.

What was actually done

The revival was made, not found, and it is possible to name the people who made it.

• Elias Valina Sampedro, parish priest of O Cebreiro in the Galician mountains, wrote a doctoral thesis on the Camino as a legal-historical object in 1965 and then spent the 1970s and 1980s driving the route with tins of yellow road paint, marking it. The yellow arrow is his. It is the single most effective piece of infrastructure on the road and it is younger than the people walking past it.
• The confraternities, refounded in Spain, France, England and elsewhere from the 1980s, which produced guidebooks, opened albergues and issued credencials.
• The Council of Europe, which in 1987 named it the first European Cultural Route, a piece of institutional Europeanism that gave the road money and status at exactly the moment it needed both.
• John Paul II, who came in 1982 and again in 1989 for World Youth Day, putting several hundred thousand young people on the road at once.

The result is a curve that does not look like a tradition at all. Fewer than a thousand compostelas a year in the early 1980s; above four hundred thousand a year in the 2020s, on the cathedral's own count.

Who is walking

The composition is the part the Church has handled with more grace than it is usually credited for. A large share of walkers register non-religious, spiritual-but-unaffiliated or simply mixed motives, and the Pilgrim's Office records this in its published breakdown without evident discomfort. The compostela is still issued in Latin, and it is still issued.

The honest description is not that an ancient pilgrimage survived. It is that a medieval road was rebuilt in the late twentieth century, largely by parish clergy and volunteers with paint and money, and that a mostly post-religious European public then walked down it in numbers the Middle Ages would have recognised. Both halves of that are remarkable. Neither is what the brochure says.

The road exists because of a claim about a grave. In the early ninth century a burial in a field in Galicia was identified as that of James the Great, the apostle, on the authority of the local bishop Theodomir, whose own tombstone was found on the site in the nineteenth century and is one of the few hard objects in the story. The legend that carries the identification is the translatio: that after the apostle's execution in Judaea his disciples carried the body by sea to the far end of the known world.

The scallop shell attached itself to the pilgrimage early and its origin is not settled. It is native to the Galician coast, it was sold at Santiago as proof of arrival, and it works as a scoop for water. Whatever the reason, by the twelfth century it was the badge of the Santiago pilgrim specifically, in a period when different shrines had distinct badges, and it is now the waymark as well as the emblem: a stylised shell on a blue ground marks the routes across several countries.

The administrative apparatus is medieval in principle and modern in operation. The credencial is stamped at albergues, churches and bars along the way, and on presentation at the Pilgrim's Office in Santiago, showing the last hundred kilometres walked or two hundred cycled, it earns the compostela, a certificate issued in Latin with the pilgrim's name Latinised. The office asks the motive for walking and publishes the breakdown.

Two further institutions belong to the destination rather than the road. The botafumeiro, the great censer swung across the transept by a team of tiraboleiros, and the Holy Year, declared whenever 25 July falls on a Sunday, when the cathedral's holy door is opened.