Early each morning, as they have for centuries, pilgrims gather in the romanesque Cathédral Notre-Dame-du-Puy to be blessed before starting their journey on the Way of St James, the oldest Camino de Santiago route outside of Spain. Down a flight of 60 steps, pausing to take a last look back at the imposing white and black striped facade of the cathedral, reminiscent of the great mosque of Cordoba, and onto an ancient trail first walked by Bishop Godescacl in the winter of 951 AD. Read More
Three hundred and seventy plus kilometres from AlmerÃa to Córdoba on the fabled Camino Mozarábe. An injury. A rest day in Córdoba. Uncertainty in the air as we set out on the final stage of the journey to Mérida, the old Roman capital.
A singular woman in a bright red flamenco dress walks home from a late-night gig through the quiet, early morning streets of Córdoba. We catch a suburban bus bustling with Sunday hikers a few kilometres up through the forested hills to Cerro Muriano to lessen the impact of today’s long-distance on Michael’s injured tendon. Read More
Two hundred plus kilometres from AlmerÃa to Granada on the fabled Camino Mozarábe. An afternoon in Granada; a visit to the Alhambra, the sultan’s heavenly palace and the gardens of the Generalife. Built on the ruins of a Roman fortress in the 13th century by the Nazari dynasty (the last Arab Caliphate in Iberia) its architecture, its blue, red and golden interiors, its courtyards of roses and orange trees, its fountains and its history of political and romantic intrigue are beguiling.
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Travelling south to AlmerÃa (the start of our Camino Mozárabe) through provinces ruled by the Moors for 800 years. The landscape a dream. Windmills for tilting at, iconic black bulls silhouetted against the bright sky, stunted vines growing in the parched earth, trees white with blossom. The rugged, snow-covered peaks of the Sierra Nevada. A shimmer of yellow wildflowers in the valley below. Tall slender poplars, bare of leaves. Islamic forts, cave dwellings, forsaken adobe villages and stations where the train no longer stops. Afternoon winds laden with red dust from the Sahara, making the skies hazy and the horizon blurred.
On a warm hazy afternoon, we met our French friends, Jean and Marie-José, on the steps of the Lisbon Cathedral, procured our pilgrim credentials and set out to walk the Camino Portugues.
This is our third Camino. In 2005 we walked the 750 km Camino Françes from St Jean Pied du Port on the French side of the Pyrenees, across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela. Three years later we walked the Via de la Plata, a 1,000 km journey from Seville in the south of Spain to Santiago de Compostela. It was on this walk that we met and fell in with Jean and Marie-José, our affection for each other and ‘the way’ triumphing over our limited grasp of French. We last saw them in 2010 when we spent a few idyllic days in their village of Saint-Thomè in the wild and beautiful Ardèche. Now we are together again, to walk the 650 km Camino Portugues from Lisbon, through Portugal and into northern Spain, hugging the coastline where we can and avoiding the more travelled inland route.
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).
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