If Aymeric Picaud could see what the Camino de Santiago looks like today, he might eternally roll his eyes. Maybe with the words “blasphemy” and “heathens” on his lips.
800 years ago, Picaud, a French Benedictine monk, completed the treacherous, 500-mile pilgrimage across northern Spain on horseback and created its first guidebook. He thought the trek was sacred. The Camino de Santiago, which literally translates to “The Way of St. James,” was established in the 12th Century as a way for people to verify and worship the remains of the apostle St. James. People could start anywhere on the map, from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France to Lisbon, Portugal, but they all ended in the same place: the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, a city in the Galician region of Spain known for elaborate plazas, stone-carved buildings, and St. James’ tomb.
The pilgrimage still draws around 300,000 annual visitors to Spain today and always attracts a hodgepodge of people from all social classes. Historically, kings, queens, and members of the nobility traveled by carriage or on horseback. Merchants and artisans traveled on horseback or on foot. Peasants, usually serfs, when they were too old to work, walked the way at the ends of their lives.
The average pilgrim braved mountain passes and deep gullies against sleet, hail, or the baking sun—traversing through untouched nature that was home to bears, wolves, and wild boars. They spent their nights in pitiful shelters, often sharing one big bed among 20 people and an army of fleas or just sleeping on a haystack if they arrived too late for a spot on the bed. They had to make dangerous gambles when it came to distinguishing between poisonous and safe drinking water, something Picaud devoted an entire chapter to in his guidebook. Bandits were so common that most pilgrims traveled in groups, even if they started out alone.
Pilgrims saw all of the dangers of the trail as trials of their souls on the path to religious salvation. Sometimes, they pushed themselves even further to show their faith by enduring sections on their knees or in chains—an undertaking probably dominated by the lower classes. If they could reach St. James’s tomb, they could ask for forgiveness of sins, spiritual comfort, or a physical miracle.
“This church, furthermore, from the moment it was started until today, has shined by the refulgence of the miracles of the Blessed James: in fact, the sick have been restored to health in it, the blind have been rendered their eyesight, the tongue of the dumb has been untied, the ear of the deaf unplugged, movement has been restored to the lame,” wrote Picaud in 1130 AD.
But restoring my eyesight, speech, or movement wasn't the reason I decided to make the same pilgrimage in the summer of 2019. In fact, I’m not even sure why my friend Anna and I agreed to do it in the first place. With my increasingly complicated relationship with Christianity, dearth of knowledge about Catholicism or the saints, and skepticism about miracles, I certainly wasn’t doing it because I thought it was a sacred path to salvation.
I didn’t believe in miracles, but part of me was hoping the Camino would give me one anyway. I’d spent the previous year confining myself to my room because of chronic migraines and struggling to make friends at school. I lost the energy to do anything other than work and sleep, and finally scheduled my first therapy appointments.
The Camino seemed like a far-off grasp for something more. If I could just make it through the 500 miles of trail, then maybe life on the other side would be different.
I started out on the Camino with the newest edition of a guidebook stuffed in my bag, an iPhone with an international data plan and GPS maps downloaded, shoes an REI salesman insisted I needed, and a backpack stocked with gear I’d accumulated over the years but barely knew how to use. I spent late nights reading online blogs and Picaud’s guidebook, doing deep dives into the reviews of hostels, and researching exactly how I should train in preparation.
Even with all of these self-indulgent modern amenities, the Camino was kicking my ass by the end of the first day.
“If you do not watch your feet carefully, you will rapidly sink up to the knees in the sea-sand copiously found all over,” Picaud wrote.
The Camino wasn’t kicking my ass in Picaud’s I’m-sinking-in-quicksand-and-might-die sort of way, but in the obnoxiously privileged, self-inflicted-physical-pain sort of way that can only come from years of avoiding gyms. I may have done research into what kind of training I was supposed to do, but I kept it at that—research.
The first day carved a steep trail across the Pyrenees mountains. My jet-lagged, out-of-shape body was trembling so intensely that I counted my steps carefully and gave myself a break each time I reached 20. Blisters covered nearly every toe on my feet and both of my heels. In 15.7 miles, Anna and I stopped only once, at the only sign of modern civilization: a bar and café overlooking an intimidating cliff.
That night, we stayed in a hostel that first opened in 1127, but today fills 183 beds on summer nights and still has to turn people away. Anna and I crawled into precariously high bunk beds above two snoring middle-aged men and slept in thin sleeping bag liners treated for bed bugs. I slept wearing my purse for fear of theft, but I was so tired that someone probably could have replaced my valuables with rocks without my noticing.
When I woke up at 6 a.m. the next morning, the first time in years that I was up before the sun, the hostel was almost empty. I felt like I was asleep at the starting line of a race.
Our next hostel was 13.7 miles away, a distance I completed only after getting a few new blisters, bursting into tears at least twice, and somehow getting lost even while walking with a friend, guidebook, GPS, and heavily marked trail. After reaching the hostel, I spent the rest of the afternoon in bed and fell asleep at the ungodly hour of 7 p.m.
The next morning, everything repeated itself: blisters, breakdowns, and all. By the end of the third day, my feet looked so vile that they attracted the concern of a group of perfect strangers sharing a bedroom with Anna and me.
Four Irish mothers huddled around me spot on the floor and grimaced.
“Ohhhhh,” one breathed out. “You need to pop those. Do you have supplies?”
As it turned out, blister supplies had been some of the few things I left at home to lighten my load. So the moms all scampered to their respective corners of the bedroom to gather their own supplies, set up a makeshift operating table on the floor, and fed me instructions and encouragement as I dealt with my feet.
By the time I woke up the next morning, the Irish women were gone. I never saw them again.
For 12 days, we walked half-marathon distances, and for 12 days, I got blisters in new spots and finished my days with the same anxiety-fueled breakdowns. Each day, I texted pictures and daily recaps to my family and tried to feign an air of peppiness. On day 13, we committed an act that Picaud and his peers might have considered sacrilegious.
We took a bus.
It was our third day of rain, and Anna had started to develop plantar fasciitis in her heel. She could only walk without limping if she taped her foot so tightly that it nearly cut off her circulation.
I, on the other hand, didn’t have any physical excuses. I just couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do less than walk another half-marathon in the rain. So we downloaded the local bus schedule and rode over to the next town.
The bus got us there in about an hour. It would’ve taken us two days to walk.
After two days of rest, we went back to our regular schedule, sans the blisters and breakdowns.
For the following few days of walking, I felt extremely guilty for that bus ride. I had convinced myself that walking 500 miles in 35 days with barely any days of rest was most authentic to the Camino’s origins. With foolish pride, I was afraid that any other way of doing it would be admitting weakness and opening myself up to a world of criticism from a sometimes-competitive Camino atmosphere. By busing and resting, I felt like I was letting all of the Camino forefathers down—like Picaud was going to pop out of his grave at any moment and chastise me for being a “fake” pilgrim.
But as it turns out, the pilgrims of the Middle Ages weren’t that much different.
“The pilgrimage to Santiago hardly ever meant an uninterrupted day after day march along the route stopping only for the mandatory nightly rest. Quite to the contrary,” wrote William Melczer, a scholar known for his translation of and commentary on Picaud’s guidebooks.
Picaud actually encourages pilgrims in his guidebook to spend extended periods of time at churches of particular importance. And sometimes wealthy men didn’t even make the journey themselves—they paid someone else to do it for them.
Some pilgrims in the Middle Ages walked the Camino as punishment for their crimes or as self-inflicted punishment to show loyalty to St. James. Others—who made up a much larger portion of the pilgrim population than I initially thought—didn’t choose the journey as punishment, but rather as space to breathe and grow in their faith.
After I allowed myself to believe that any guidelines for traveling the Camino were only determined by me, everything about my journey felt easier.
“Miriam, you look fabulous!” my mom responded one time to the day’s recap. “In spite of all the challenges and hardships (or maybe because of?), this trip seems to be agreeing with you … the word radiant comes to mind.”
By allowing myself the freedom to experience the pilgrimage in whatever way I chose, I focused less on any physical ailments of my body and became more aware of the original intentions of the pilgrimage: it wasn’t about me.
“Pilgrims, whether poor or rich, who return from or proceed to Santiago, must be received charitably and respectfully by all,” Picaud wrote. “For he who welcomes them and provides them diligently with lodging will have as his guest not merely the Blessed James, but the Lord himself.”
Thousands more pilgrims walk the Camino today for non-religious reasons than in Picaud’s time. Yet the path and the people on it are still sacred.
In my 35 days of walking, I felt more cared-for by random strangers than I ever had in my everyday life.
It wasn’t just the Irish women and their blister supplies. One man quietly paid for Anna’s and my dinners when he overheard us whispering about our budgets. Another man gave me his only protein bars and some tablets for muscle cramps when he saw me limping. A local woman walked us all the way from our hostel to the grocery store when we asked for directions. When Anna got a stomach bug, one stranger made her tea from herbs in his garden and held her hair back while she threw up, and one couple spent an hour tracking down plain white rice for her to eat.
While on the Camino, we were gifted a hiking pole, a hat, a pocket knife, homemade meals, and bracelets from strangers whom we had only known for a few weeks, days, or minutes.
Everything about the Camino has changed—but at the same time, nothing has. When it comes to the Christian ideal of being a good “neighbor,” people walking the Camino today are pilgrims in the most authentic sense of the word.
“When he finally reached the Cathedral of Compostela through its north portal, he probably entered it, as Master Matteo would do later at the Portal de la Gloria, on his knees,” Melczer wrote about the pilgrims in the Middle Ages.
When Anna and I finally entered the city of Santiago de Compostela, I was wondering if the cathedral would be as beautiful and elegant as Picaud had hyped it up to be. I wish I could say that I strolled up to the cathedral with my head held high and full of profound thoughts and reflections. But by the time I was entering the plaza, I was stiffly waddling from exhaustion and hunched over, holding my stomach from a bout of nausea.
When we got there, the front face of the cathedral was tall, ornately carved with detailed columns, patterns, sculptures—and lined with construction tape, swarming with workers dangling off the sides of the building.
We didn’t even try to go inside. Instead, we bought a bag of cookies at the nearest grocery store and found a spot to sit in the cathedral’s courtyard. Friends we had made on trail came and joined us, and we all assembled in a row, facing the front of the cathedral.
For two hours, we didn’t move.
While construction workers and tourists frenzied around and our plastic grocery bags threatened to drift away in the wind, we stayed right there, simply staring at the cathedral in reverent silence.
Excessive Issue | January 2020