Camino Francés, Spain

In the autumn of 2005, inspired by our friend Robert’s stories of walking the Camino Francés and in need of respite from the clamour of our lives, we walked out of St Jean Pied de Port on an 800-kilometre pilgrimage to the holy city of Santiago de Compostela.

A candle, lit in the cathedral in Santiago; a hand placed on the same marble column that pilgrims have placed their hand on for centuries; a relic, a piece of the true cross (plastic or otherwise); and that we travel well together. These were the entreaties from friends we carried with us as we walked across northern Spain. What follows are notes from our diary of 30 extraordinary days on the Camino Francés (literally, the Camino from France).

Day 1, 26 km

In the medieval town of St Jean Pied de Port in the French Pyrenees, we register as ‘cultural’ pilgrims from a list that includes catholic, religious and sporting. After lingering over breakfast and stopping for the first song of morning mass (the music and appropriateness of starting a pilgrimage in such a way drew us into the church), we pass through an ancient gateway and, later than is advised, start the long, steep climb up to the mountain pass, the Col de Lepoeder, and across it into Spain. 

The tinkling of sheep bells, ancient stone crosses, black-bereted farmers. Mist softening the intensity of the sun. A beautiful, weather-beaten basque virgin high on a remote peak, the first of the many homages to the virgin we encounter in the next 800 kilometres. The grandeur of the Pyrenees all around us as we walk in and out of high altitude cloud forests.  

In fading light, we descend a steep, rocky path to Roncesvalles. There’s no hot water left in the cavernous stone Albergue at such a late hour but we luck upon the last two empty beds, a simple meal and glass of local wine. 

Day 2, 53 km

We wander in heavy fog through oak forests and striking Basque mountain villages, feasting on wild berries and sensing a shift in ourselves to a calmer way of being. As the early morning haze lifts, we find an open cafe, already crowded with pilgrims in need of coffee. The waiter sings bawdy songs as he works, favouring some pilgrims over others and trading vigorously in insults and stories. A young woman sits, head bent, reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales while around her, centuries later, the tales still play out. 

In and out of villages of 3-storey, whitewashed, red-shuttered houses, the deserted siesta-time streets reminiscent of a Henri Cartier Bresson photograph. 

At day’s end, we share a set-course pilgrims meal with a young English/Irish couple who’ve just graduated from university and are deeply in love. However, her (English) family are not in favour of a cross-cultural union with the Irish, so they’re walking the Camino Francés in the hope of finding a path through their family troubles to a future together.

Day 5, 119.5 km 

Medieval villages, almond groves, vineyards of ripening grapes. The last storks of summer nesting high up in the tower of Puente la Reina’s monastery. Stretches of Roman road that have been walked for 2,000 years, a 12th-century church and one of the few remaining Nationalist civil war monuments (most were destroyed after the death of Franco in 1975). A side trip to Eunate to visit an octagonal chapel; a beautiful, simple sacred space with a carved wooden virgin and ethereal music resonating around its stone walls.

We meet a French woman in her late 60s who set out walking from her home in Paris five weeks ago. She found the first few days arduous but says that her pilgrimage is now a joy and she intends to walk all the way to Santiago. Heartened by her advice that it’s just a matter of taking one step at a time, our hope that we might complete the journey is transformed into a belief that we can.

Later, we walk with a recently retired Canadian couple who have just emerged from emotionally demanding jobs and seeing four children through university. They’re walking the Camino as a way of transitioning to being a couple again.

Persistently heavy rain tests our spirits and proves our wet weather gear inadequate. But fortune favours us with a festival of ancient music in Estella. We spend the evening in the Iglesia de San Miguel, listening to the sublime music of Emma Kirby and the London Baroque Orchestra. Our wanderlust is revived. Violins, cellos, a piano and a soprano voice soar to the heavens. We sleep the sleep of angels. 

Day 7, 169 km

We’ve been walking now for seven days straight. Our bodies are holding up and our minds finding their way to clarity. We happen upon a local fiesta at day’s end and dance the night away with the locals in the town plaza. The fun is temporarily suspended when the band takes out the electricity supply but the Spaniards, ever inventive, substitute the music with the firework finale. Children huddle over boxes of fireworks as men light fuses and then everyone, including us, runs for cover as wayward rockets shoot sidewards as well as skywards. Around 1 am the electricity kicks back in and music wafts up to the outdoor terrace where we are sleeping.

We’re in Logroño in the heart of Rioja, Spain’s renowned winemaking region, and enjoying one of Rioja’s finest as we write. Our pension, the Fonda Bilbaina, has seen better days but we’re enchanted by its owners; an effeminate son, his boisterous rough brothers and his generous but crazy mother who chastises us one minute and indulges us with homemade chocolates the next. We feel like extras in a scene from an Almodóvar film.

Day 9, 224 km 

Rolling hills, asparagus fields, vineyards & orchards. The warm air scented with wild fennel, pimientos roasting over coals and fermenting grapes. We visit the remarkable La Asuncion church in Navarrete, said to have the most stunning baroque retablos in all of Spain. Later we pass a monument marking the place where Roland defeated the seven-metre giant, Ferragut, during the reign of Charlemange.  

Late yesterday afternoon we arrived in Naraja tired and sweat-drenched, only to find the albergue full. We needed every bit of mental fortitude we could muster to put our packs back on and walk another 5 kilometres to Azofra. There we found an angel named Maria who opened the closed-for-winter parish albergue for us because we had come so far (i.e. from Australia). In the plaza, another harvest festival was in full swing and after Maria’s guided tour of the church’s saints, we joined the crowd who were dancing and drinking a concoction of cheap red wine and coca-cola.

There are many stories told about the origins and symbolism of the Camino Francés. An Irish pilgrim explains to us that it’s a rite of passage through nature. First, you pass through air as you cross the high plains of the Pyrenees, then through earth as you walk across the red loamy fields of Navarre and La Rioja. Next, you pass through fire on the hot, dry Meseta and finally through water, across Galicia where, it is said, rain is art. 

Being true to his Irish story-telling heritage, he has another take on the Camino. He says that in pre-Roman times, the Camino Francés was the route taken by the tribes who held the wild goose sacred and followed its flight path to Finisterre, the end of the known world. 

The next night we sleep in the bell tower of a church and attend evening mass with 40 other pilgrims and a few black-clad women from the village. Afterwards, the priest joins us for dinner. Before he leaves, he writes down the name of each pilgrim around the table so that he can pray for us tomorrow evening, just as we prayed this evening for the pilgrims who were here last night. There’s a poignancy to our names being spoken after we leave and the connection made between the pilgrims who came before us and those who will follow. 

Day 12, 294 km

The earth changes as we walk beyond the orange ochre terroir of La Rioja to soil the colour of bleached stalks. Purple flowers grow close to the ground; they foretell the coming of autumn and look like decorations strewn at a ceremony.

In a suspended gilded cage in the cathedral at Santo Domingo de la Calzada, there’s a live cock and hen, kept to commemorate a legend involving a lustful innkeeper’s daughter, a pious German pilgrim condemned to death and a miraculous intervention by Santiago (St James the apostle). 

In Burgos, the city of art and food, we enjoy a rest day, ambling about and catching up with people we’ve walked with, including Sarah, a well-travelled Australian, and three young Italians and their father. The father walks at his own pace, catching up with his daughters when they stop for a cigarette. Sarah is leaving the Camino here to fly to Washington to take up a job. She plans to return next year with her mother and continue on from Burgos to Santiago. 

We celebrate our wedding anniversary with a feast and marvel at the ‘Aire y Luz’ light show on the facade of the world heritage listed cathedral. As we walk down the dark hill towards our hotel, we pass a group of Romany Gypsies sitting on the back steps of the cathedral, singing the soulful laments that travel with them across countries and centuries.

Day 15, 395 km

We’re halfway through the Camino Francés. It’s a fascinating walk through modern and medieval Spain. The art, the architecture and the history are a revelation and the slow journeying into the landscape allows us to glean a sense of its lifeblood. 

The earth’s shadow, the quiet of early morning, dawn breaking across the Meseta. Looking out the window of a bar, all we can see are wheat fields and great flocks of whirling birds. 

Like most pilgrims, we are walking long days across the Meseta; 40 kilometres yesterday, 33 kilometres today. Some struggle with the sparseness of the windswept plains but we’ve embraced the expansive skies, the meditative rhythm of the walking and the strangeness of the sights you see. A nun in black robes walking alone down a dusty back road; adobe villages that appear out of the earth of the Meseta; ornately costumed dolls, abandoned by the side of the road; a shepherd striding across a wheatfield with his dogs, a goat, a donkey and a flock of sheep.

We dine with a French couple who speak no English and barely any Spanish but we find a way through the mire of language and spend an evening absorbed in conversation. 

As we step out early the next morning, the moon is setting in the west at the same time as the sun is rising behind us in the east.

Another night, another small town on the Meseta. At a quasi-religious Albergue, we participate in a sunset ceremony designed to reflect on life, nature and all that bought us here. Anna is chosen to translate the non-religious prayer from Spanish and recite it in English. Others do likewise in German, French, Italian and Czech. Afterwards, we sit down together to share a simple meal to which everyone has contributed, our spirits and our walk-weary bodies nourished by the experience. 

In Mansilla de las Mulas we meet up with Anne and Pete, English friends we haven’t seen for four years. They’re travelling through Spain on their way home from Portugal and we enjoy one riotous night together; talking, eating, drinking and staying up way later than is good for pilgrims.

Day 17, 483 km

Minds as sparse and bodies as dusty as the Meseta, we walk into Leon and find a room with a balcony overlooking the Plaza Mayor. We have a day and a half to explore the city; the Cathedral with its famed stained glass windows, a Gaudi building, various museums and as many tapas bars as we can manage. 

We wash everything, sleep late and catch up with people, including a young German who set out five months ago from his home on the shores of the Baltic Sea. By the time he reaches the Atlantic Ocean, he will have walked close to 4,000 kilometres. He tells us that when he was a child he read about a countryman undertaking such a journey and the story stayed with him. He is walking to honour his recently deceased father, shed the restlessness of his youth and arrive at a place of peace with adulthood.

In the late afternoon, we sit on the balcony of our pension, enjoying a bottle of vino and contentedly watching the neighbourhood gather in the plaza below to gossip and play.

Day 21, 535 km

Astorga signals the end of the Meseta and houses yet another extraordinary Gaudi building, the Bishop’s Palace.  From here we are promised some of the most beautiful landscapes of the Camino. For us, the walking has become a zen-like experience. We no longer dwell on the past or the future. There is only the present, the moment we find ourselves in, the day as it unfolds. 

The clouds on the horizon solidify into mountains as we walk past medieval jousting fields and Romanesque chapels on our way to Galicia. Sitting on top of a Roman wall and looking out to the west we see thick smoke from wildfires reported to be burning out of control. Rising winds and thunderstorms are forecast for the next two days, making us nervous about the fires. Our fellow pilgrims seem a little bemused by our concern.

Day 23, 601 km

A slow gradual climb to the Cruz de Ferro with its mound of stones and offerings left by pilgrims in an act of unburdening, a seeking of forgiveness for past transgressions and an expression of hope in new beginnings.

Rolling hillsides, a descent through chestnut groves and, lower down, vineyards. It’s harvest time all over Bierzo. The fields are lively with pickers and the air heady with the aroma of grapes being crushed and made into wine. We eat blackberries, figs and apples that we find along the path. Later we spend the evening in a fabulous restaurant, feasting on fine local cheeses, Jamon, peppers, a glass of cava and fine Bierzo wine.

Day 25, 660 km

We walk steeply up into the mountains and cross into green and verdant Galicia. The air is sharp with wild mint and damp forests. The small hamlets of stone and slate buildings are built to withstand the incessantly wet, harsh winters. This is the Celtic part of Spain and it’s strangely reminiscent of Anna’s birthplace in south-west Victoria where the Irish settled after the Great Famine drove them from home. 

For a while, high on a ridge, we walk with an old man out for a late morning stroll with his dog. He speaks a dialect he says is a mixture of Spanish and Galician and shows us where the Romans mined gold before Christo. After asking us to teach him the English word for castaña (chestnut), he points out a path down through the chestnut groves to the next village. We shake hands, acknowledge that it’s been a pleasure to share this time together and go our separate ways.

Day 27, 718 km

The walking into deepening green is a sharp contrast to the Meseta. Narrow, stone-wall lined paths; oak and birch groves; farmers out herding cows and harvesting apples. We detour to Somos to visit the monastery, once the most powerful in Spain and now home to just 15 monks. In the garden of one of its cloisters is a wildly erotic sculptured fountain. Our tour guide is at a loss to explain its presence.

We breakfast in a small bar, eating delicious thick local honey on toast and watching early morning Spanish television. The round-up of regional news from across Spain could be a parody but isn’t. The news from Galicia is all about cows and fishing, the Andalusian news tells of bulls and the culture of bullfighting, and from Castilla y Leon comes news of castles and other tourist hot spots.

Day 29, 784 km

Sunday in Melide. Great steaming copper pots of pulpo (octopus) that, once cooked, is doused with oil and paprika and served on wooden platters. The stalls at the local farmers market are piled high with chestnuts, figs, pimientos, tomatoes, lettuce, eggs, honey, wine, grapes, apples and cheeses. We lunch on pulpo, excellent local cheese, quince paste and a glass of fine regional white wine.  Post-mass, the streets are lively with impeccably dressed townsfolk; families out for a meal, young couples walking hand in hand and groups of older people sharing the narrative of their week.

Day 30, 801.5 km

Yesterday morning in near darkness and with the scent of home prevalent, we walked through eucalyptus forests towards Santiago. 

As it lightened, we walked for a time with a father and son from Dublin. One retired, the other in the full thrust of his working life, they were seemingly at great peace with each other. You would wish the same for every father and son. 

At about 11 am we stopped at Monte del Gozo to watch a solar eclipse with hundreds of bused-in, high-spirited Spanish school students. Then, after 30 days and 801.5 kilometres on the Camino Francés, we walked into Santiago de Compostela. 

Impressed by the ornate majesty of the cathedral, we entered and placed our right hand on the Tree of Jesse, the marble pillar that pilgrims have placed their hand on for centuries, so many giving thanks for a safe arrival over so many years that an indentation of a human hand is etched deep into the marble. 

We attended the pilgrims’ mass, sung by a bird-like nun with an exquisitely haunting voice. Many pilgrims, including ourselves, were moved to tears. The bishop noted the recently arrived pilgrims, including two Australians who had walked from St Jean Pied de Port. 

We received our Compostela, granted to us for completing the walk. We were pleased to say with sincerity that the Camino Francés had been a remarkable cultural and spiritual journey. 

That evening we dined for free in the basement of one of Spain’s most luxurious hotels. Once a pilgrims hospital, by royal charter this Parador has to continue the tradition of offering hospitality to pilgrims and provide food to 10 pilgrims every breakfast, lunch and dinnertime.

Over the next couple of days, we caught up with many of the people we spent time with on the way. We congratulated each other on having reached Santiago in good spirits and, with a depth of warmth and affection, hugged and wished each other a good life, always.

When we finished the Camino Francés, we didn’t imagine ever walking another Camino. However, three years later we walked the Via de la Plata, a 1,000-kilometre journey on foot from Seville to Santiago de Compostela. 

Since then, we’ve walked for weeks at a time, through Spain, France, Portugal, England, New Zealand, Australia and Turkey. Although we didn’t know it at the time, the Camino Francés awakened in us a passion for long-distance walking, a gift that keeps us on a path towards light and beauty.

If you would like to explore some other camino and pilgrim routes, you might enjoy our stories including: The Way of St James, Chemin de St Jacques, Camino Mozárabe, Camino Portugues, St Cuthbert’s Way and in 2020 Our Isolation Camino.

As noted, we walked the Camino Francés in 2005 and at this time we owned a small film camera and the photographs in this story are taken from a photo album (quaint, we know). We are indebted to our good friend Cliff Schaube for generously copying the photos in the album. His skills ensured that we have images to illustrate our story, despite the poor quality of the originals.

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