Camino de Santiago Routes Compared

1. The Camino de Santiago in Brief

The Camino de Santiago is a web of medieval pilgrim routes running from all over western Europe toward a single destination, the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in the Spanish region of Galicia, which holds a tomb venerated since the ninth century as that of the apostle James the Greater. The routes differ in length, terrain, weather, crowding and the kind of country they cross, and choosing between them is the first real decision a pilgrim makes.

Six roads carry most walkers today. The Camino Frances crosses northern Spain from the Pyrenees and is the one most people mean when they say "the Camino." The Camino Portugues comes up from Lisbon or Porto and has a busy coastal variant. The Camino del Norte follows the Atlantic shore of the Basque Country, Cantabria and Asturias. The Camino Primitivo climbs through inland Asturias and is the oldest of them. The Camino Ingles is short, running inland from the ports where pilgrims from Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia stepped off their ships. The Via de la Plata runs the length of Spain from Seville along a Roman road.

All of them are waymarked with the same two signs: a painted yellow arrow, and the scallop shell. Both are recent conventions in their present form, and the shell is the older symbol by centuries, worn by returning pilgrims as proof they had reached the Atlantic coast. On the Galician stone markers the shell's rays converge toward Santiago, so the point of the fan gives the direction of travel. Elsewhere the shell is used more loosely and the yellow arrow is the reliable sign.

2. Saint James, the Tomb and the Question of Tradition

James the Greater was a Galilean fisherman, the son of Zebedee and the brother of the apostle John. Mark records their call at the lakeside, leaving their father in the boat with the hired men (Mark 1:19-20), and gives them the nickname Jesus gave them, Boanerges, sons of thunder (Mark 3:17). James belongs to the inner three who were taken up the mountain of the Transfiguration and into the garden of Gethsemane (Mark 9:2, Mark 14:33). He and his brother asked for the seats at Christ's right and left in glory and were asked in return whether they could drink the cup he was to drink (Mark 10:35-40).

That is the whole of the New Testament record of his death, and it is the only apostolic martyrdom the New Testament narrates. James died in Jerusalem under Herod Agrippa I, which places it in the early 40s. Everything that connects him to Spain comes after Scripture and belongs to tradition.

What the tradition says, and what it is

The Spanish tradition has two parts. The first is that James preached in Hispania before returning to Jerusalem to die. The second, called the traslatio, is that after his execution his disciples carried his body by sea to the Galician coast and buried it inland. Written traces of a link between James and Spain appear from around the seventh century in western sources, and the tradition was fully formed by the time the tomb was identified in the ninth. Historians have never found first-century evidence for either half, and there is a plain difficulty in the Pauline record: writing to the Romans, Paul plans a journey to Spain as new ground he intends to open (Romans 15:24, 15:28), which reads oddly if an apostle had already preached there.

Catholic writing on Compostela is at its best when it says this openly. The Church has never proposed the Spanish preaching or the sea voyage as an article of faith. What the Church has done is recognise and regulate a cult: a place of prayer, honoured for over a thousand years, whose liturgical life and pastoral fruit are matters of record whatever the archaeology finally shows. Devotion at a tomb and a historical claim about a body are different kinds of thing, and a pilgrim can hold the first firmly while holding the second lightly.

The 1884 act referred to on this page is the bull Deus Omnipotens of Pope Leo XIII, issued 1 November 1884 following the excavations of 1878 to 1879 beneath the cathedral of Santiago, which affirmed the recovered remains as those of the apostle James and two companions. The text is published by the Holy See and reproduced by the Archdiocese of Santiago de Compostela. It is an act of the papal magisterium concerning the veneration of relics and does not constitute independent historical or archaeological verification.

Santiago Matamoros

A later legend deserves naming because a visitor will see it carved in stone. From the twelfth century, Spanish sources tell of James appearing on a white horse at a battle against Muslim forces at Clavijo, traditionally dated to 844, and the image of Santiago Matamoros, James the Moor-slayer, spread across Spanish churches. The battle is not accepted by historians, and the charter that supposedly recorded a tribute owed to the shrine because of it is a twelfth-century forgery. The image is a medieval political artefact of the Reconquest. Many Spanish churches now present the apostle instead as Santiago Peregrino, James the Pilgrim, in the broad hat and cloak of the men who walk to him, which is the older and the truer figure for a road built on prayer.

3. The Ninth-Century Discovery and the Medieval Boom

The story of the Camino begins in the early ninth century in a corner of Christian Spain that had survived the Muslim conquest. A hermit named Pelayo reported lights over a wooded spot in the diocese of Iria Flavia. The bishop, Theodemir, investigated, found a Roman-era burial, and identified it as the tomb of the apostle. Theodemir's own gravestone, dated 847, was found on the site in the nineteenth century, which at least fixes the bishop and the place in the historical record.

King Alfonso II of Asturias travelled from Oviedo to see the tomb and ordered a church built over it. He is reckoned by tradition as the first pilgrim, and the road he took, over the mountains of inland Asturias, is the route now called the Camino Primitivo, the original way. Alfonso III replaced the first church with a larger one late in the ninth century. The place took the name Compostela, whose derivation is disputed: from campus stellae, field of the star, or from the Latin compositum for a burial ground.

Almanzor, and the road that survived him

In 997 the Andalusi commander Al-Mansur, Almanzor in Spanish sources, sacked Compostela. He burned the church and took the cathedral bells to Cordoba, where the tradition says they were used as lamps in the great mosque. Christian chroniclers record that the tomb itself was left untouched. The bells were carried back north after Ferdinand III took Cordoba in 1236. The raid did not end the pilgrimage; the road recovered within a generation and entered its greatest century.

The twelfth century, the cathedral and the guidebook

The Romanesque cathedral standing today was begun in 1075 and consecrated in 1211. Its western entrance, the Portico de la Gloria, carved by Master Mateo and dated by its own inscription to 1188, is one of the great works of Romanesque sculpture in Europe: Christ in majesty surrounded by the elders of Revelation with their instruments, and beneath, the prophets and apostles, with James seated on the central pillar to greet arrivals.

The same century produced the road's literature. The Codex Calixtinus, a twelfth-century manuscript kept in the cathedral archive, gathers liturgy, miracle stories and history for the shrine. Its fifth book is a practical pilgrim's guide, traditionally attributed to a French cleric named Aymeric Picaud, which divides the French route into stages, names the rivers safe to drink from and the ones that killed horses, describes the peoples along the way with blunt and sometimes insulting candour, and lists the shrines worth stopping at. It is the earliest guidebook to the Camino and one of the earliest travel guides in Europe.

Infrastructure grew around the traffic. The Order of Santiago was founded in 1170 as a military order to protect pilgrims. Bridges, hospices and hospitals were built along the roads, many by men the Church later canonised for exactly that work: Domingo de la Calzada, who cleared road and built a bridge and a pilgrim hospital in the Rioja, and Juan de Ortega, who did the same in the hills before Burgos. Both towns still carry their names. In Santiago itself, Ferdinand and Isabella founded a great pilgrim hospital beside the cathedral at the end of the fifteenth century. For the wider medieval picture of the three great pilgrim destinations, see our guide to what a pilgrimage is in Catholicism.

4. Decline, Rediscovery and the Modern Revival

The pilgrimage declined from the sixteenth century onward under an accumulation of pressures: the Reformation, which cut off the northern European kingdoms that had sent pilgrims for centuries and rejected the veneration of relics on principle; recurring plague; the wars that made long overland travel dangerous; and changing patterns of devotion. For the theological argument behind the Protestant objection and the Catholic answer to it, see our guide to Catholic and Protestant differences.

One event mattered more than the rest. In 1589, with the English fleet under Francis Drake raiding the Galician coast, the archbishop had the apostle's relics hidden. The hiding place was then lost. For nearly three centuries the shrine could not show pilgrims the thing they had come to see. Excavations behind the high altar in 1878 and 1879 recovered remains, and Leo XIII affirmed them as the apostle's in 1884. Pilgrim numbers stayed very low through the first half of the twentieth century all the same.

Elias Valina and the yellow arrows

The modern revival has a first cause that is easy to name. Elias Valina Sampedro, parish priest of O Cebreiro in the Galician mountains, spent the 1970s and 1980s researching the medieval route, publishing guides, and then painting the road. Using leftover highway paint, he and his helpers marked the whole Camino Frances with yellow arrows, and the arrow became the standard waymark of every route on the network. He died in 1989. A bust of him stands at O Cebreiro, and the arrow is his monument.

Institutional recognition followed quickly. The Council of Europe declared the Camino the first European Cultural Route in 1987. UNESCO inscribed the Spanish Camino Frances on the World Heritage list in 1993, and later extended the listing to the northern routes. John Paul II came to Santiago in 1982 and again in 1989 for World Youth Day, which brought a generation of young Catholics onto the road; our profile of John Paul II covers the wider pontificate. Galicia's regional government has promoted the Xacobeo Holy Years heavily since 1993. Books, films and word of mouth did the rest, and the number walking each year rose steeply from the 1980s onward.

Annual counts of pilgrims who complete the route are published by the Oficina de Acogida al Peregrino, the Pilgrim's Office of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, which compiles them from Compostela applications. Those figures count certificate applicants rather than all walkers, and this page cites no figure of its own.

5. The Routes at a Glance

The table below compares the six main roads on the things that actually determine what a walk feels like: how long it is, how hard the ground is, how much shelter and how many churches sit along it, and who tends to choose it.

Distances are approximate and are given as commonly published by pilgrim associations and by the Galician and Spanish authorities that maintain the routes. They vary by several kilometres between sources because the roads have official variants, seasonal detours around river crossings, and alternative entries to towns. Treat every figure here as a planning estimate rather than a measurement.

6. The Camino Frances

The Camino Frances, the French Way, runs about 780 kilometres from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in the French Basque country to Santiago de Compostela. It is the route the Codex Calixtinus describes, the route UNESCO listed in 1993, and the route that carries the largest share of pilgrims in the annual figures published by the cathedral's Pilgrim's Office. Walked in full at ordinary pace it takes something close to five weeks.

The statement that the Camino Frances carries the largest share of pilgrims refers to the annual breakdown by route published by the Oficina de Acogida al Peregrino, the Pilgrim's Office of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Those figures count pilgrims who apply for the Compostela rather than everyone who walks.

The shape of the road

It opens with its hardest single day, the climb over the Pyrenees by the Route Napoleon to Roncesvalles, more than 1,200 metres of ascent in one stage, on a pass that closes in bad weather and has killed unprepared walkers. Roncesvalles itself is a great Augustinian collegiate church that has sheltered pilgrims since the twelfth century, in the pass where the Song of Roland sets its battle.

From there the road drops to Pamplona, crosses to Puente la Reina where the Aragonese route joins it at a Romanesque pilgrim bridge, then works west through the wine country of Navarre and the Rioja by Estella, Logroño and Santo Domingo de la Calzada to Burgos and its Gothic cathedral. Then comes the Meseta, roughly 200 kilometres of high treeless plateau between Burgos and Astorga where the horizon does not change for hours. Some walkers skip it. Others say it is the part that did the work, because there is nothing to look at and no way to avoid your own thoughts.

After Leon the ground rises again. At Foncebadon, near the highest point of the route, stands the Cruz de Ferro, an iron cross on a tall wooden pole set on a mound of stones left by pilgrims. The custom is to carry a stone from home and put it down there, naming what you are laying down with it. Beyond it lie Ponferrada with its Templar castle, the Bierzo valley, and the steep climb to O Cebreiro, a mountain village with a pre-Romanesque church, a Eucharistic miracle tradition from the fourteenth century, and the grave of Elias Valina beside the church door. The last 150 kilometres run through green Galician farmland by Sarria, Portomarin, Palas de Rei, Melide and Arzua, and end at Monte do Gozo, the hill of joy, where medieval pilgrims first saw the cathedral towers.

What the Frances gives you

Density. Villages every few kilometres, hostels in most of them, churches that open for pilgrims, and a pilgrim Mass with a blessing in a great many towns along the way. Someone who wants to receive the sacraments daily on the road will find that easiest here. The same density means crowds, especially in summer and especially after Sarria, where pilgrims walking the final hundred kilometres join in large numbers. Pilgrims who dislike that walk the Frances outside high summer or take another road.

7. The Camino Portugues and the Coastal Variant

The Camino Portugues comes north to Santiago from Portugal. Two starting points dominate. From Lisbon it runs about 610 kilometres, taking in Santarem, Coimbra and the great Marian shrine at Fatima a short detour off the route; our guide to Fatima covers what happened there in 1917. From Porto it runs about 240 kilometres and can be walked in under a fortnight, which is why the Porto start is far the more popular of the two.

The central route

North of Porto the central route climbs inland by Vilarinho and Barcelos, whose legend of the cock gave Portugal its national emblem, then to Ponte de Lima and its long medieval bridge, over the hill of Labruja, and down to Valenca on the Minho. The border crossing into Spain at Tui is one of the most striking moments on any Camino: a fortress town on one bank, a fortress cathedral on the other, and a road bridge between them. From Tui, which sits just over the hundred-kilometre threshold, the way continues by Redondela, Pontevedra, Caldas de Reis and Padron.

Two churches on this stretch belong to the story of the shrine itself. In Pontevedra the Capela da Virxe Peregrina, built in the eighteenth century on a scallop-shell plan, holds the image of the pilgrim Virgin, the patroness of the province. In Padron, tradition holds that the stone boat carrying the apostle's body was moored to a Roman altar stone, the pedron, which is kept under the high altar of the church of Santiago there and gives the town its name.

The coastal route and the Senda Litoral

The Camino Portugues da Costa leaves Porto northward along the Atlantic through Vila do Conde, Povoa de Varzim, Esposende, Viana do Castelo and Caminha, then crosses the Minho estuary and continues by A Guarda and Baiona to rejoin the central route at Redondela. It is about 280 kilometres from Porto. Long boardwalk sections, known collectively as the Senda Litoral, run along the dunes for much of the Portuguese half, which is flat and easy underfoot and exposed to wind. Summer walkers often prefer it for the sea breeze.

The Variante Espiritual

From Pontevedra a marked variant, the Variante Espiritual, turns west through the fishing village of Combarro, climbs to the Cistercian monastery of Santa Maria de Armenteira, and descends the Ruta da Pedra e da Auga, a path of watermills beside a river, to the Ria de Arousa. From there pilgrims may complete the leg by boat up the estuary and the Ulla river to Pontecesures, following the traslatio, the sea route by which the apostle's body is said to have been brought. Stone crosses set in the water mark the way. It is the only maritime stretch on any Camino, and pilgrims taking it should confirm with the Pilgrim's Office how the boat leg is treated for the Compostela before relying on it.

8. The Camino del Norte

The Camino del Norte runs about 825 kilometres along the northern coast of Spain, from Irun on the French border to Galicia, where it turns inland and joins the Camino Frances at Arzua for the final stages. It is the coastal alternative that medieval pilgrims used when the interior was unsafe, and it passes through territory that stayed in Christian hands throughout the period of Muslim rule further south.

The walking

The Norte is harder than its map suggests. There is no single mountain crossing to dread, and instead the road climbs and drops all day, every day, as it crosses the headlands and river valleys of the Basque, Cantabrian and Asturian coast. The cumulative ascent over the route is substantial. Weather is the other factor: this is the wet green north of Spain, and rain is possible in any month, which makes it a cooler summer option than the baking Meseta and a damper one in spring and autumn.

It passes through real cities, which changes the texture of the pilgrimage. San Sebastian, Bilbao, Santander and Gijon are all on or beside the route, and their outskirts take time to walk through. Between them are the things people walk the Norte for: the hermitage of San Juan de Gaztelugatxe on its rock, the beaches of Cantabria, the Romanesque churches of Asturias, the fishing harbours of the Costa Verde, and the cliff path above Ribadeo where the road finally enters Galicia.

Who it suits

Pilgrims who have walked a Camino already, who are comfortable with long days and steep ground, and who want fewer people around them. Pilgrim beds are further apart and fill up in high summer, so stages have to be planned around where the shelter is. Anyone considering it as a first Camino should be honest about their fitness first.

9. The Camino Primitivo

The Camino Primitivo, the Original Way, runs about 320 kilometres from Oviedo in Asturias through the interior mountains to Lugo and on to Melide, where it joins the Camino Frances for the last three stages. It is called the original because it follows the road Alfonso II is said to have taken from his court at Oviedo in the ninth century to see the newly identified tomb, which makes it the first pilgrim route to Santiago.

Oviedo is a proper beginning. Its cathedral holds the Camara Santa, a pre-Romanesque chamber built to house relics brought north for safety, and the Asturian churches on Monte Naranco just outside the city are among the oldest standing in Spain. An old Spanish saying records the local view of the matter: whoever goes to Santiago and not to the Saviour at Oviedo visits the servant and neglects the Lord.

The Hospitales route

The Primitivo's hardest and most admired stage leaves Borres above Pola de Allande and crosses high open moorland past the ruins of three medieval pilgrim hospitals, which give the route its name. There is no shelter, no water and no village for the length of the crossing, and in poor visibility or snow the lower valley alternative through Pola de Allande is the safe choice. Pilgrims who make the crossing in clear weather often describe it as the finest walking they have done on any Camino.

The route descends to Lugo, whose complete Roman wall encircles the old town and can be walked all the way round on top. Lugo sits at roughly a hundred kilometres from Santiago, which makes it a common starting point for short Primitivo walks. From Melide onward the Primitivo shares the Frances, and the solitude of the previous fortnight ends abruptly.

10. The Camino Ingles

The Camino Ingles, the English Way, is the short route, and its shortness is historical rather than modern convenience. Pilgrims from England, Ireland, Scotland, Flanders and the Scandinavian kingdoms came to Santiago by sea, landing at the Galician ports of Ferrol and A Coruna and walking inland for the last few days. Medieval English shipping records and licences to carry pilgrims survive, and the traffic was heavy enough in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to be regulated by the Crown.

From Ferrol the route is about 115 kilometres and is usually walked in five or six days, by Neda, Pontedeume, Betanzos, Hospital de Bruma and Siguerio. From A Coruna it is about 75 kilometres, which falls short of the hundred-kilometre threshold the Pilgrim's Office applies to the Compostela, so pilgrims who want the certificate ordinarily begin at Ferrol. The walking is a series of estuary crossings and short sharp climbs through eucalyptus plantation and farmland, with two towns of real interest in Pontedeume and Betanzos.

11. The Via de la Plata

The Via de la Plata is the long one: roughly 1,000 kilometres from Seville north through Extremadura and Castile to Galicia. It follows the line of a Roman road that linked Merida to Astorga, and Roman milestones, bridges and the great ruins of Merida stand on or beside the route. The name has nothing to do with silver despite the Spanish word; it is generally derived from an Arabic term for a paved way.

From Seville the route runs by Zafra, Merida and Caceres, then Salamanca and Zamora. At Granja de Moreruela it forks. The western branch, the Camino Sanabres, heads through Sanabria and Ourense to Santiago, which is the more common finish. The eastern branch continues north to Astorga and joins the Camino Frances there for the last 260 kilometres.

What makes it hard

Heat and emptiness. Southern Spain in high summer is dangerous walking country, and pilgrims who take this route generally go in spring or autumn. Stages are long because the villages are far apart, and there are days with no water, no shade and no shelter between one town and the next. Pilgrim accommodation is thin in places. In exchange the road offers Roman archaeology, the dehesa oak pasture of Extremadura, two of Spain's finest historic cities in Salamanca and Caceres, and days with almost nobody else on the path.

12. Finisterre and Muxia

The Finisterre extension is the one route walked outward from Santiago rather than toward it: about 90 kilometres west from the cathedral to Cape Finisterre on the Atlantic, with a further stretch of roughly 30 kilometres north along the coast to Muxia, or a direct route from Santiago to Muxia of similar length to the Finisterre road. Many pilgrims walk a loop taking in both.

Fisterra, in Galician, is finis terrae, the end of the earth, so named because the Romans reckoned this cape the western limit of the known world. A stone marker at the lighthouse reads 0,0 km. The practice of walking on to the ocean is medieval and probably older, and the scallop shell that became the pilgrim's badge was collected on these beaches as proof of having reached the sea. Pilgrims who reach Finisterre or Muxia and present a stamped credencial can obtain certificates from the local authorities there, the Fisterrana and the Muxiana, which are separate from the cathedral's Compostela.

Muxia holds the Santuario da Virxe da Barca, the sanctuary of Our Lady of the Boat, built on the rocks at the water's edge. The tradition attached to it is that the Blessed Virgin came to this shore in a stone boat to encourage the apostle James in his preaching, and the great slabs of rock beside the church are pointed out as the hull, the sail and the rudder. The sanctuary was gutted by fire after a lightning strike on Christmas Day 2013 and has since been restored. Its pilgrimage falls in September.

13. The Other Caminos

Beyond the six main roads, dozens of waymarked routes feed the network. They matter chiefly to pilgrims starting from where they live, which was the medieval norm.

• Camino Aragones. Crosses the Pyrenees at the Somport pass and comes down through Jaca and the monastery of San Juan de la Peña to join the Frances at Puente la Reina. The second of the two classic Pyrenean entries.
• Camino de Madrid. North from the capital over the Guadarrama mountains to Sahagun on the Frances.
• Camino de Levante and Camino del Sureste. Long inland routes from Valencia and Alicante across the centre of Spain.
• Camino Olvidado. The forgotten way, an early mountain route along the southern edge of the Cantabrian range, used when the plains were unsafe and now revived.
• Camino Baztanes and the Camino Vasco del Interior. Basque routes from Bayonne and Irun that cut inland to meet the Frances.
• Via Podiensis, Via Turonensis, Via Lemovicensis and Via Tolosana. The four historic French roads, from Le Puy-en-Velay, Paris, Vezelay and Arles, which gather pilgrims across France and deliver them to the Pyrenees.
• Camino Lebaniego. A short Cantabrian route that leads to the monastery of Santo Toribio de Liebana rather than to Santiago, and has its own Holy Years. Worth naming because pilgrims on the Norte often branch onto it.

The principle behind all of them is the medieval one: the Camino starts at your front door. Modern pilgrims who cannot walk from home reproduce the idea by starting further out than they need to.

14. The Credencial, the Pilgrim Passport

The credencial is a folded card that identifies the bearer as a pilgrim and records the journey in stamps. Its ancestors are the medieval letters of safe conduct that a parish priest or bishop gave a departing pilgrim, which vouched for the traveller's purpose and asked for hospitality along the road. The modern version does the same two jobs.

What it is for

• Admission to pilgrim hostels. Municipal, parish and association hostels along the routes accept pilgrims on presentation of a stamped credencial and turn away travellers without one.
• Evidence for the Compostela. The Pilgrim's Office reads the stamps to establish where the pilgrim started and that the road was actually covered.

Where it comes from and how it is stamped

Credencials are issued by parishes and cathedrals, by diocesan pilgrimage offices, by confraternities of Saint James, and by pilgrim associations in many countries, as well as at the traditional starting points on the routes themselves. The stamps, sellos in Spanish and carimbos in Portuguese, are collected as you go from churches, hostels, town halls, cafes, pharmacies and police stations. Over the final hundred kilometres the Pilgrim's Office asks for two stamps a day rather than one, which is the check against people covering the last stretch by vehicle.

Collecting stamps becomes a small pleasure of the walk, and it is worth remembering what the card is. A record of a road covered on foot, carried into a cathedral and handed over at the end, is a physical act of witness of the kind pilgrims have always made. Treat it as an offering rather than a scorecard and it will do you good.

Requirements for the credencial and for stamping described here are those published by the Oficina de Acogida al Peregrino of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, which issues the Compostela and sets the conditions for it. Administrative details are set by that office and can change, so confirm current requirements with the office or with the association that issues your credencial.

15. The Compostela and the Distance Thresholds

The Compostela is a certificate in Latin, issued by the cathedral's Pilgrim's Office, testifying that the bearer has devoutly visited the tomb of the apostle. Certificates of this kind have been issued at Compostela since the Middle Ages, when they served as proof of a completed pilgrimage for people who had been sent on one, sometimes by a court as a penance. The applicant's name is written on it in Latin form.

The conditions

• Distance. At least the final 100 kilometres on foot or on horseback, or the final 200 kilometres by bicycle, arriving at Santiago.
• Evidence. A credencial stamped along the way, with two stamps a day over the final 100 kilometres.
• Motive. A stated religious or spiritual purpose for the journey. Pilgrims who state another motive receive a certificate of welcome instead, which records the same journey without the religious formula.

The hundred-kilometre rule explains the geography of modern starting points. Sarria on the Camino Frances, Tui on the Camino Portugues, Ferrol on the Camino Ingles, Lugo on the Camino Primitivo and Ourense on the Camino Sanabres all sit just beyond that line, and each of them fills with pilgrims beginning a week's walk. The Pilgrim's Office also issues a separate certificate of distance, which records the place you started and the kilometres covered, for pilgrims who want the full journey stated.

The distance thresholds, the stamping requirement and the distinction between the Compostela and the certificate of welcome are as published by the Oficina de Acogida al Peregrino of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. These are administrative conditions set by that office rather than doctrine, and the office may revise them.

16. Arriving in Santiago

Pilgrims come into Santiago through the modern outskirts, then the old town, and arrive in the Praza do Obradoiro under the baroque west front of the cathedral. People sit down on the stones. Some cry. It is worth knowing what waits inside so that the arrival is not spent working out where to go.

The Portico de la Gloria

Master Mateo's carved portal of 1188 stood for centuries as the pilgrim's first sight on entering, and generations wore a hollow into the marble of the central pillar by placing a hand on it. Touching the pillar was stopped to protect the sculpture during and after the portico's restoration, and the cathedral sets what access is allowed. Look instead at the twenty-four elders of Revelation tuning their instruments across the arch, and at James seated below Christ with his pilgrim staff, waiting for the people who walked to him.

The tomb, the embrace and the Mass

Behind and above the high altar stands a thirteenth-century seated figure of the apostle, reached by a stair, and the custom is to climb it and embrace the statue from behind. Beneath the altar, in the crypt, a silver reliquary casket holds the remains affirmed by Leo XIII in 1884. The pilgrim Mass is celebrated in the cathedral daily and is the proper end of the journey; our guide to the Mass explains what is happening in it. Confession is heard in the cathedral in several languages, and going before the Mass is the traditional order of things. Our guide to confession covers what to expect if it has been a long time.

The botafumeiro

The cathedral's great censer hangs from a pulley system in the dome of the transept and is swung by a team of red-robed attendants called tiraboleiros, who haul on ropes until it sweeps in an arc the length of the transept, trailing smoke. Censers of this kind were in use at Compostela in the Middle Ages, partly for the practical reason that a church full of pilgrims who had walked for a month needed it. The present censer dates from the nineteenth century. It is not swung at every Mass, and pilgrims who arrive hoping to see it should ask at the cathedral rather than assume.

17. The Holy Year and the Feast of Saint James

The feast of Saint James the Greater falls on 25 July, kept in Santiago as the city's and the archdiocese's great solemnity, and marked across Spain, where James is a patron of the nation. A second Jacobean feast, the Traslacion, the translation of the apostle's relics, is kept on 30 December. Our guide to the liturgical calendar explains how feasts of this rank sit in the Church's year.

The Xacobeo

When 25 July falls on a Sunday, Compostela keeps a Holy Year, the Ano Santo Jacobeo, known in Galician as the Xacobeo. The privilege is traditionally attributed to Callixtus II and was confirmed by Alexander III in the bull Regis Aeterni of 1179. Because of the way the calendar falls, Holy Years come in a repeating pattern of six, five, six and eleven year gaps. The most recent was 2021, which Pope Francis extended through 2022 on account of the pandemic. The next falls in 2027.

In a Holy Year the Holy Door on the east side of the cathedral, the Porta Santa, is opened for pilgrims, and the archdiocese publishes the conditions under which a plenary indulgence may be gained. Those conditions are the ordinary ones the Church attaches to any plenary indulgence: sacramental confession, Eucharistic Communion, prayer for the intentions of the Holy Father, and freedom from attachment to sin, together with the prescribed visit and prayer at the cathedral. An indulgence remits temporal punishment for sin already forgiven, and it is never the forgiveness of sin itself, which comes through confession. Our guide to the Jubilee treats Holy Years and the Roman Holy Doors in detail.

The conditions for a plenary indulgence summarised here are those of the Enchiridion Indulgentiarum issued by the Apostolic Penitentiary and of the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1471 to 1479. The particular grants attached to the Compostelan Holy Year are published by the Archdiocese of Santiago de Compostela for each Holy Year and should be read there rather than taken from any website.

18. Who Walks It Now

A large share of the people on the Camino today are not walking it as Catholics, and any honest guide has to say so plainly. The Pilgrim's Office asks applicants for the Compostela to state their motivation and sorts the answers into religious, religious and other, and non-religious, and it publishes the breakdown each year. Walkers give reasons that have nothing to do with the apostle: a bereavement, a divorce, a redundancy, a birthday, a long-postponed physical challenge, a friend who suggested it, a film.

That is worth treating fairly rather than as a grievance. The road was built by prayer and it holds prayer, and the hostel that takes in a walker with no faith is doing what pilgrim hospitality has always done. Medieval roads carried merchants, penitents sent by courts, adventurers and the merely curious alongside the devout, and nobody at the time thought the pilgrimage was thereby ruined. A Christian walking beside someone who came for the exercise is in an old situation.

Two things follow for a Catholic pilgrim. The first is that you will find the sacraments available on every main route and pilgrim Masses in most towns, because the Church has kept them there for you. The second is that the person walking next to you may be closer to a question than they can say, and thirty kilometres a day for a fortnight has a way of bringing questions up. Walk with them, carry their pack up a hill, and do not preach at them. The road does its own work slowly.

The motivation categories described here are those used by the Oficina de Acogida al Peregrino, the Pilgrim's Office of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, which publishes the annual breakdown of stated motives among Compostela applicants. This page cites no figure of its own.

19. Walking It as a Pilgrimage

A long walk turns into a pilgrimage by a few deliberate choices, and none of them costs anything. The Church attaches nothing to a purchase, and nothing sold on this site or anywhere else is needed to make a pilgrimage. What follows is durable practice rather than logistics.

Name the intention before you go

Pilgrims go for something. Write down one intention before departure, a conversion, a healing, a decision, a person who is ill, a marriage in trouble, a grief you cannot put down, and carry it the whole way. The intention is what turns walking into petition. Bring it to the tomb and to the Mass at the end and hand it over there.

Go to confession before you leave

Beginning a pilgrimage in a state of grace is the oldest advice given to pilgrims and still the best. Confession is also available in the cathedral at Santiago in many languages, and a great many walkers use it there after years away. Both ends of the road are the right time.

Keep a rule for the road

Agree with yourself, before the first day, on something small you will do daily and can actually keep when you are wet and your feet hurt. A decade of the rosary each morning. The Angelus at noon wherever you are standing. Silence for the first hour of walking. Compline before sleeping in the hostel. Our guide to the rosary sets out the mysteries if you want a structure that fits a walking rhythm.

Stop at the churches

The Camino is lined with Romanesque parish churches, hermitages and monasteries that most walkers pass without entering because they are chasing a bed for the night. Going in is the point. Sit for five minutes. Many of these buildings have received pilgrims continuously for eight hundred years, and you can pray in them for nothing.

Accept the difficulty rather than removing it

Blisters, rain, snoring dormitories, a bed you did not get, the day the tendon goes. Pilgrims have always accepted a measure of hardship as part of the offering, and the modern instinct to smooth all of it away with transport and booked private rooms will smooth the pilgrimage away with it. Take reasonable care of your body and offer the rest.

Come home differently

The oldest complaint about pilgrimage, made by Christian writers since the fourth century, is that people go a long way and come back the same. Decide before you finish what will change at home: a Mass in the week, a return to confession, a debt of forgiveness paid, a habit dropped. Our guide to making a pilgrimage covers the return in more depth, and our guide to praying a pilgrimage from home is for anyone whose health or circumstances rule the road out entirely.

20. Related Topics