On the Camino

By: Heather Regen

May 20, 2013

“Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads!” As I walked along, flanked by stretches of pines in the Galician hills, Doc Brown’s words to Marty McFly suddenly struck me. For the past 18 miles, yellow arrows and scallop shell signs had pointed me along the Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St. James. A Catholic pilgrimage to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela, the Camino de Santiago has attracted pilgrims since the eighth century. Over 60,000 people walk the Camino on ordinary years, and as many as 270,000 people take the pilgrimage on holy years. Beaten down by the feet of tens of thousands of travelers, the various routes are usually well-trodden and well-marked.

But when the pine grove with its neat dirt path suddenly thinned and an overgrown field took its place, all signs of a well-traveled trail disappeared. The road was gone. Where it should have continued plainly, a marker with a yellow scallop shell—the symbol of the Camino de Santiago—simply pointed left.

I looked back at my friends, who shrugged, and led the group in the shell’s general direction. We had been more lost before; in the second town we passed through, we followed railway tracks and an estuary for a mile or two when the yellow shells and arrows disappeared. So we crunched through the tall grass, hopefully leaving a clearer path for any pilgrims behind us.

After our first day of hiking, however, worries about getting lost vanished. Thirty miles in, we noticed a pattern emerging—just when the yellow signs seemed to have deserted us, a new one would suddenly appear, albeit in a strange location. Sometimes a scallop shell tile was plastered to the top corner of a house at a crossroads; other times a yellow spray paint arrow clung to a large patch of dried moss.

We needed the markers less once we found fellow travelers on the second day. A group of six Irish friends led the way several paces in front of us until they picked up speed and disappeared. We ran into two of them that afternoon, and I offered them chocolate bars. They walked with us until we reached the next small town, telling us how they were doing the Camino as a reunion. While some of them still lived in Ireland, others had moved to the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia, and what better way to catch up than to walk together for four straight days? A German couple that lagged behind us until we stopped for lunch brought binoculars and cameras with them, using the trek as a bird-watching and wilderness expedition.

In the past, the Church used to issue indulgences to pilgrims who walked the Camino de Santiago, but today, many people pilgrimage for non-religious reasons, or for spiritual, but not necessarily Catholic, reflection. My Spanish host mother leads a pilgrimage to Santiago for groups from her church almost every summer. Martin Sheen even walked the Camino—although as a character—in the film The Way. For me and my Georgetown friends, the Camino provided a break from the prisa (hustle) of Madrid and a chance to explore Galicia.

When my friend first proposed that we walk the Camino, I had the fuzziest idea of what the pilgrimage might be like, and came up with some hybrid image of a Girl Scout hike and The Canterbury Tales. But what I expected most was a scenic path, winding its way lazily through the Galician forest, crossing the occasional stream and farm. While we certainly did hike through many a forest and plenty of farms, our route varied far more than my imagination had.

We started our walk on a Friday morning after taking a sleeper train to the coastal city of A Coruña, where we ate breakfast on the beach. After filling up on mango pineapple juice and homemade biscotti, we officially started the Camino Inglés. There are over 20 recognized pilgrimage routes that make up the Camino de Santiago, some taking almost two weeks to complete and covering over 750 kilometers. But in the interest of getting back to Madrid in time for school on Monday, our group only clocked around 57 miles, or 93 kilometers—just short of the official 100 kilometers that would have qualified us for an indulgence back in the day.

At times it felt like we were walking the same path as the English pilgrims taking the Camino Inglés back in 1434, with nothing in sight but foggy hills and dense shrubbery. But much of the time an odd coupling of modern sights and technologies mixed with the rustic Galician surroundings. Toward the end of the first day, we saw a huge plume of smoke rolling out of a distant hill. Several hours later, we realized it was spewing from a nuclear power reactor, and we found ourselves walking along the fence of a giant electricity station. One farm we passed by fit the pastoral stereotype, except for a large fiberglass brontosaurus statue guarding the heads of lettuce. On the second night, we reached a town whose tiny population was celebrating a trout festival. After eating the freshest octopus I’ve ever tasted in a carnival food tent, we wandered through the fairgrounds, where kids were riding on SpongeBob mini rollercoasters.

Even as we wound our way between the bizarre carnival booths, we heard a familiar greeting: “Buen camino!” For the three days of our trek, the phrase wishing us a safe pilgrimage had replaced the usual “Buenos días!” And with all those small greetings of encouragement, we made it into Santiago de Compostela on Sunday in time for the pilgrim’s Mass. The cathedral was beautiful, but much more spectacular was the group of people inside. With the exception of a few well-dressed and rested-looking people, it was apparent that everyone had just walked the Camino. Backpacks and sleeping bags lined the pews, people without a seat leaned from foot to foot until giving in and sitting on the floor (myself included), and every other person responded to the prayers in a different language.

Before the Mass began, a nun read out all the starting points of those who had arrived in Santiago: Brazilian pilgrims who started in Lisbon, Korean pilgrims who began in Madrid, French and Irish and Spanish and American pilgrims who started from all over the Iberian Peninsula. We each left the paths a bit better worn, and after almost getting lost, our little group even added a trail marker of our own. If you ever find yourself walking the Camino, look out for a yellow arrow that says “Hoya Saxa!”

Opens in a new window