The Medieval Pilgrim Route That a Library Saved

The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela claims to hold the bones of the apostle James, discovered in a field in the 9th century. By the 11th century pilgrims were walking to it from across Europe — by some estimates a quarter of a million a year — along a network of routes that stitched together hospices, monasteries, and bridges built specifically to support them.

By the late 1970s the tradition had nearly died. Spanish historian Elías Valiña Sampedro, the parish priest of O Cebreiro near the Galician border, started painting yellow arrows on rocks and walls to mark the old French Way through León and Galicia. He published a 1985 guidebook drawn from medieval sources and his own walking. In 1986 the entire Camino had perhaps 2,500 pilgrims who collected the official credential at Santiago.

In 1987 the Council of Europe declared the Camino the first European Cultural Route. UNESCO added the French Way to the World Heritage list in 1993. By 2019 the cathedral was issuing more than 347,000 credentials a year. The yellow arrows have spread along half a dozen recognized routes — the Portuguese Way from Lisbon, the Northern Way along the Bay of Biscay, the Vía de la Plata from Seville — and have been copied for new pilgrim trails in Norway, Japan, and Mexico.

The modern walker is mostly not Catholic and often not religious. Surveys done at the Pilgrim's Office in Santiago consistently find that fewer than half of those completing the route give a religious motive as their primary reason. The Camino survives now as an old physical infrastructure — paths, hostels, churches, fountains — used by people walking for reasons the medieval church would not have recognized.