The Camino Frances: The Classic Route to Santiago de Compostela

1. The Camino Frances in Brief

The Camino Frances is a single continuous pilgrim road across northern Spain, running from the Pyrenean border town of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, a distance commonly given as about 780 kilometres. It crosses four Spanish regions in order: Navarre, La Rioja, Castile and Leon, and Galicia. Walked in full at 20 to 25 kilometres a day it takes roughly five weeks, and the terrain divides into three unequal parts, a mountain crossing at the beginning, a long flat middle, and a hilly green end.

The road is old and it is also, in its present form, recent. Its line was fixed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by kings who wanted pilgrims to reach Compostela and paid for the bridges, hospitals and towns that made the journey survivable. It carried enormous traffic through the Middle Ages, emptied almost completely after the sixteenth century, and was put back together in the second half of the twentieth century by a handful of parish priests, scholars and volunteers who researched the medieval line, waymarked it and reopened hostels along it.

Four features make the Frances the road most people mean when they say Camino. It is the route the medieval guidebook in the Codex Calixtinus described in detail. It is the most densely served, with villages every few kilometres and pilgrim hostels in most of them. It carries the greatest number of walkers, which means company for those who want it and crowds for those who do not. And it is thick with major churches, several of which would be worth a journey on their own.

2. Where the Route Runs

The Camino Frances runs west along the northern third of Spain, keeping south of the Cantabrian mountains and north of the Duero valley, on a line that has been a road since Roman times. The shape of it is easiest to hold in the mind as five blocks of country, each with its own character, weather and difficulty.

Two other facts about the line matter. It runs mostly west, which means the sun is behind a walker in the morning and in their eyes in the late afternoon, and it climbs to its highest point late, at the Cruz de Ferro above Foncebadon at around 1,500 metres, when a pilgrim has already been walking for a month. The old rule that the Camino gets easier as it goes is false. It gets easier in the middle and harder again at the end.

Distances on the Camino Frances vary between guidebooks by several kilometres because publishers measure variants and town approaches differently, and sections of the waymarked path are re-routed from time to time by the regional authorities that maintain it. The figure of about 780 kilometres from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port is the one in common use and should be treated as approximate.

3. Why the Frances Became the Default Road

The Camino Frances became the main road to Santiago because eleventh and twelfth-century rulers deliberately made it one. The tomb at Compostela had been venerated since the ninth century, and pilgrims reached it by whatever tracks existed. What turned those tracks into a highway was a political decision by the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain to concentrate traffic on a single protected corridor and to invest in it.

Sancho III of Navarre in the early eleventh century and Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile later in it are the names usually given. Their governments improved the road, secured it, and granted charters to towns along it. Bridges went up at the river crossings, several of which still carry pilgrims. Hospitals and hospices were founded, many by monasteries and by the military orders. Frankish settlers were invited in and given legal privileges to populate the new towns, which is where the road gets its name. The Cluniac reform, spreading into Spain in the same period, planted monasteries along the corridor and tied it into the wider network of Latin Christendom.

What the road did to Spain

The consequences went well beyond piety. The Frances carried the Romanesque style into Spain from France, and the great churches at Fromista, Jaca and Compostela belong to a single architectural family that grew along it. It carried the Roman liturgy, which replaced the older Hispanic rite in most of the peninsula in the eleventh century. It carried trade, coinage, chansons de geste, and the French language into Navarrese and Castilian towns. Anyone who wants to know why northern Spain has so many twelfth-century churches in villages of two hundred people can find the answer on the map: they are on the road.

Why walkers still choose it

Modern pilgrims choose the Frances for reasons that follow directly from that history. The infrastructure is the densest of any route, because the medieval infrastructure was densest here and the modern hostels grew back on top of it. Villages come close together, so a walker can stop early or push on. Churches are open along it in a way they are not in most of Europe, and a great many towns have a pilgrim Mass with a blessing at the end. Somebody who wants daily Mass on a long walk will find it easiest here. The same density produces the crowds, and pilgrims who want solitude either walk it outside high summer or take a quieter road.

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 certificate rather than everyone who walks, and this page quotes no totals from them.

4. The Codex Calixtinus and the First Guidebook

The Camino Frances has a twelfth-century guidebook, and it survives. The Liber Sancti Jacobi, known from its finest manuscript as the Codex Calixtinus and kept in the archive of the cathedral of Santiago, was compiled around the middle of the twelfth century. It gathers liturgy for the feast of Saint James, sermons, a collection of miracle stories, a legendary history of Charlemagne and Roland, and, in its fifth and last book, a practical guide for pilgrims travelling to Compostela.

Book V is what makes the manuscript famous outside music and liturgy. It sets out the roads through France that feed the Spanish route, divides the road from the Pyrenees to Santiago into thirteen stages, and then tells the traveller what he needs: which rivers are safe to drink from and which will kill his horse, which shrines to stop at, where the passes are, which towns have hospitals, and what to expect from the people of each region. The attribution in the manuscript points to a French cleric usually named as Aymeric Picaud. Historians commonly describe it as the earliest travel guide in European literature, and the description holds up when you read it.

What the Codex is like to read

The tone is bracing. The author is enthusiastic about the shrines and rude about the inhabitants, and his chapter on the Navarrese is a sustained piece of national abuse that modern editors publish with an apology. He warns against innkeepers who water the wine, ferrymen at the river crossings who overload their boats and drown pilgrims, and false pardoners selling relics. He also records what the road was for, which is the tomb, and his descriptions of the pilgrim churches along the way are among the fullest surviving accounts of what those buildings looked like when they were new.

Three things in Book V are still recognisable on the ground today. The stages he lists correspond broadly to the sequence of towns a modern walker passes. The shrines he singles out, among them Saint-Gilles in Provence, Saint-Sernin at Toulouse, Sainte-Foy at Conques and Saint-Martial at Limoges on the French roads, are still standing. And his warnings about the state of the pilgrim's feet, his money and his companions have not aged at all.

The Codex Calixtinus is a twelfth-century manuscript held in the archive of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. The description of Book V above follows the text itself in the standard published editions and translations. The attribution to Aymeric Picaud comes from the manuscript's own closing material and is accepted by many scholars and doubted by others.

5. Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and the Crossing of the Pyrenees

Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port is a small walled town in the French Basque country at the foot of the pass, and it is where most pilgrims who walk the whole Frances begin. Its name means Saint John at the foot of the pass. The old street, the Rue de la Citadelle, runs steeply down through the town, under the Porte d'Espagne and over the river Nive, and the traditional first act of a pilgrim is to collect a credencial at the pilgrim office on that street and to pray in the fourteenth-century church of Notre-Dame du Bout du Pont beside the bridge.

Two ways over the mountain

The first stage climbs from about 170 metres to over 1,400 and drops again to Roncesvalles, and there are two ways to do it.

• The Route Napoleon. The high road, climbing steeply out of Saint-Jean by open pasture and ridge, over the Col de Lepoeder, and down through beech forest to the monastery. It is the historic pilgrim way, the finer walk by a wide margin, and the more dangerous. It is exposed for hours with no shelter, no water for long stretches and no way off the ridge.
• The Valcarlos route. The lower road, following the valley by the village of Valcarlos, with less climbing and shelter available along the way. It is the winter route and the wet-weather route, and choosing it is a judgement rather than a failure.

The high route is closed in winter by the Navarrese authorities and can be shut in any month when the weather turns. People have died on it, and the deaths have generally involved walkers who set out in poor conditions, in fog, or too late in the day. A pilgrim who reaches Saint-Jean determined to take the Route Napoleon regardless of what the pilgrim office and the mountain rescue notices say has misunderstood what humility on a pilgrimage looks like.

What the crossing is like

The climb is relentless rather than technical. There is no scrambling, no exposure of the kind mountaineers mean, and no navigation problem in clear weather. What breaks people is that it is the first day, on legs that have not walked with a pack before, at altitude, often in heat, and that it goes on for hours. The traditional advice is the right advice: start early, carry water and food, put on a rain shell before you need it, and turn round or drop to Valcarlos if the weather closes in. Many walkers split the stage at Orisson a few kilometres up the mountain, which turns one brutal day into two reasonable ones.

Near the top the route crosses the border into Spain at a cattle grid, and there is nothing to mark it beyond a stone and a change in the signposts. The Fountain of Roland stands not far below it, and the last stretch down through the beech woods to Roncesvalles is steep enough on tired knees to be the part most pilgrims remember.

6. Roncesvalles

Roncesvalles, Orreaga in Basque, is a collegiate church and monastic complex standing alone in a wooded valley on the Spanish side of the pass, and it has sheltered pilgrims since the twelfth century. There is no town. The buildings are the church, the cloister, the hostel, a chapel, and a hotel, in the middle of the forest, and the pilgrim who staggers in from the mountain finds a working religious house rather than a village.

The collegiate church of Santa Maria was founded in the early twelfth century by the bishop of Pamplona, Sancho de Larrosa, and built in an early Gothic style influenced by French models, which is exactly what you would expect at the mouth of a road carrying French traffic. Inside, over the altar, stands the silver-plated statue of Our Lady of Roncesvalles, a Gothic seated Virgin that has been the object of local devotion for centuries. The chapter house holds the tomb of Sancho VII the Strong, king of Navarre, who died in 1234 and whose effigy is famously long, and beside it hang the chains said to come from the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.

The Chapel of Sancti Spiritus, the small square building next to the church, is the oldest structure on the site, a twelfth-century ossuary. The medieval hospital of Roncesvalles was one of the great pilgrim hospitals of Europe, and the tradition of hospitality has continued without much interruption. The evening pilgrim Mass in the collegiate church, at which arriving pilgrims are blessed by nationality, is the first of the many pilgrim blessings on the road and for a good many walkers the first Mass they have attended in years.

Roland and the pass

The valley carries a second history that every French pilgrim knows. In the year 778 the rearguard of Charlemagne's army, retreating from an expedition into Spain, was ambushed and destroyed in these mountains, and the Frankish annals record the death of a commander named Roland. Three centuries later the Song of Roland turned that ambush into the founding epic of French literature, with Roland blowing his horn at Roncesvalles and dying with his face turned toward Spain. The historical attackers were Basques defending their own country. The poem made them Saracens, because a chanson written in the era of the crusades needed a different enemy.

The Codex Calixtinus knew the legend well and made room for it, since its fourth book is the pseudo-history of Charlemagne's Spanish campaign. Pilgrims walking down from the pass are walking through the setting of both stories at once, the historical ambush and the poem, and the monastery keeps memorials to Roland alongside its own.

7. Navarre: Pamplona and Puente la Reina

Navarre gives the pilgrim the first three or four days of Spain, and they are among the most varied on the route. The road drops from Roncesvalles through Burguete and Zubiri, along the Arga valley by Larrasoana, and into Pamplona through the old city walls at the Portal de Francia.

Pamplona

Pamplona, Iruna in Basque, is the first city on the road and the historic capital of the kingdom of Navarre. The Camino runs straight through the old town. The Gothic cathedral of Santa Maria la Real, rebuilt from the late fourteenth century on the site of the Romanesque church where the kings of Navarre were crowned, holds the tomb of Charles III the Noble and his queen, and its fourteenth-century cloister is a celebrated piece of Gothic work. The neoclassical west front is a late addition and hides everything behind it, which is a pattern the pilgrim will meet again at Santiago.

Pamplona is best known outside Spain for the running of the bulls at the fiesta of San Fermin in July, and pilgrims arriving in that week find a city with no beds. Fermin is venerated locally as a bishop and martyr of the early Church and the fiesta keeps his name and a religious core, and what surrounds it is a very large secular festival.

The Alto del Perdon and Puente la Reina

West of Pamplona the road climbs a long ridge to the Alto del Perdon, the height of forgiveness, where a line of wrought-iron silhouettes of medieval pilgrims stands along the crest under a row of wind turbines. The inscription on the monument, put up in 1996, says that here the way of the wind crosses the way of the stars. The descent on the far side is loose stone and it is harder than the climb.

Puente la Reina is where the road becomes one road. The Camino Aragones, which crosses the Pyrenees further east at Somport and comes down through Jaca, joins the Frances just before the town, and the medieval marker at the junction carries the old line about all the ways to Santiago becoming a single way here. At the top of the main street stands the church of the Crucifijo, kept in the Middle Ages by the military orders, holding an unusual fourteenth-century crucifix with the cross in the shape of a Y, brought from Germany or made under German influence. At the bottom of the street the eleventh-century pilgrim bridge crosses the Arga on six arches, built by royal command to get pilgrims over the river without paying ferrymen, and it is the image most people carry away from Navarre.

8. Estella and the Octagonal Churches

Estella, Lizarra in Basque, was founded as a pilgrim town in 1090 by King Sancho Ramirez, populated with Frankish settlers, and built specifically to serve the road. The Codex Calixtinus mentions it approvingly and praises its bread, its wine, its meat and its fish. It has more Romanesque architecture in a small space than almost anywhere else on the route.

Two buildings stand out. San Pedro de la Rua, reached by a long flight of steps above the street, has a Romanesque doorway with lobed arches that show Islamic influence transmitted through northern Spain, and a cloister with two surviving carved galleries. Opposite it stands the Palace of the Kings of Navarre, a twelfth-century Romanesque civil building, which is rare, since almost all surviving Romanesque work in Europe is religious. On its capitals is a carved combat of Roland and the giant Ferragut, taken from the Charlemagne legend the pilgrims brought with them over the pass.

A short distance west of Estella the road passes the monastery of Irache, a Benedictine house documented from the tenth century, which served as a pilgrim hospital and later as a university, and stands beside the vineyards that made the district. The complex has been through many uses and the church and cloister remain.

The round churches

Two eight-sided churches near this stretch of the road are worth a detour, and they raise a question that has occupied historians for a century.

• Santa Maria de Eunate, standing alone in a field near Muruzabal, a late twelfth-century octagonal church surrounded by an arcaded cloister walk, with no village attached to it. Human remains with scallop shells have been found around it, which points to a pilgrim burial function.
• The Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Torres del Rio, twelfth century, octagonal, with a ribbed dome of interlacing arches modelled on Islamic vaulting of the kind found at Cordoba.

Both are commonly linked with the Knights Templar in popular writing, and the documentary evidence for that connection is thin. The more sober explanation is that eight-sided churches all over Europe imitate the rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and that a pilgrim road is exactly the kind of place where a builder would repeat the plan of the most famous pilgrim church in the world. For the military orders themselves and the period that produced them, our guide to the Crusades gives the background.

9. The Rioja and Santo Domingo de la Calzada

La Rioja is the shortest of the four regions the Frances crosses and the one where the road runs through vineyards for days. The stage into it passes Los Arcos, with its church of Santa Maria whose interior is a Baroque explosion of gilding entirely at odds with its plain exterior, and crosses into the Rioja at the river Ebro at Logrono.

Logrono is a working city, and the Camino runs through its old quarter past the church of Santiago el Real, whose facade carries a large seventeenth-century sculpture of Santiago Matamoros, James on horseback with a sword. It is the first of many on the road. The image belongs to medieval Spanish war propaganda built on the legend of the battle of Clavijo, and the battle as described has no historical basis. Naming that plainly is the right way to look at it, and pretending the sculpture is not there would be worse.

Beyond Logrono the road passes Navarrete and reaches Najera, once the capital of the kingdom of Navarre, where the monastery of Santa Maria la Real is built against a cliff face over the cave in which, by the foundation legend, a king hunting with a falcon found an image of the Virgin. Its royal pantheon holds the tombs of the kings and queens of Navarre, Leon and Castile, and its late Gothic choir stalls are among the best in Spain.

Santo Domingo de la Calzada

Santo Domingo de la Calzada is the one town on the Camino founded by a saint whose whole vocation was road building. Dominic of the Causeway, an eleventh-century hermit rejected by two monasteries for lack of learning, settled by the river Oja and spent his life clearing the forest, building a causeway, throwing a bridge over the river and running a hospital for pilgrims. He is buried in the cathedral he began, and the town grew around his work. His disciple Juan de Ortega carried on the same trade further west, and the church at San Juan de Ortega is his.

The cathedral is Romanesque and Gothic, with a free-standing Baroque bell tower, and it contains something no other cathedral in the world contains: a live hen and cock, kept in an ornate cage set into the wall of the nave. The custom comes from the town's famous miracle story. A German pilgrim family passing through was falsely accused of theft after a girl at an inn was refused by the son, the young man was hanged, and his parents on their way back found him alive on the gallows, held up by the saint. They went to the magistrate, who was at dinner and said the boy was as alive as the roast fowl on his plate, at which the bird stood up and crowed. The Spanish rhyme puts it as the town where the hen crowed after being roasted.

The story is a medieval miracle tale, told in various forms across Europe and attached to Santo Domingo since at least the fifteenth century. The Church has never asked anyone to believe it. What it is worth is the reminder that the road ran on stories as much as on stone, and that a pilgrim on the Frances is walking through the setting of the tales the medieval walkers told each other at night.

The hen and cock kept in the cathedral of Santo Domingo de la Calzada are a documented and continuing custom of that cathedral. The miracle narrative attached to them is a medieval legend recorded in several versions from the late Middle Ages onward, and it has never been the subject of any doctrinal act of the Church.

10. Burgos and Its Cathedral

Burgos is the first of the two great cathedral cities of the Camino Frances and the point where the road leaves the vineyards for the plain. The approach on foot is long and industrial by the main road, and a river path along the Arlanzon offers a much better way in. The old city opens through the Arco de Santa Maria, a fortified gateway rebuilt in the sixteenth century as a triumphal arch covered with statues of Castilian worthies, and the cathedral stands immediately behind it.

The cathedral of Saint Mary of Burgos was begun in 1221 under Bishop Mauricio and King Ferdinand III, in the French Gothic manner and probably by masters who had worked in France, and it went on being built and rebuilt for three hundred years. The openwork spires on the west front, added in the fifteenth century by Juan de Colonia from Cologne, are the feature everyone recognises. Inside, the octagonal lantern over the crossing, rebuilt after a collapse in the sixteenth century, is a piece of late Gothic engineering that repays standing under it for several minutes.

Under that lantern, set into the pavement, is the tomb of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, El Cid, and his wife Dona Jimena, moved there in 1921. The Chapel of the Constables behind the high altar is a self-contained late Gothic funerary chapel with a star vault. High on the wall of the nave hangs the Papamoscas, the flycatcher, an automaton figure that opens its mouth as it strikes the hours. The cathedral was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1984 in its own right, separately from the pilgrim route.

The 1984 inscription of Burgos Cathedral is recorded in the UNESCO World Heritage List. The 1221 foundation date and the sequence of building campaigns follow the standard art-historical chronology and the cathedral's own published history.

A word about stopping

Burgos falls at roughly the point where a pilgrim's body has finished complaining and settled into the work, which makes it the natural place for a rest day. Walkers who push straight through it and out onto the Meseta the same afternoon usually regret it. The cathedral deserves a slow morning, and the Meseta is easier to start on fresh legs.

11. The Meseta: Burgos to Astorga

The Meseta is the high plateau of central Castile, and the Camino Frances crosses roughly 200 kilometres of it between Burgos and Astorga. The ground is flat or gently rolling, largely treeless, planted with wheat, and the track often runs dead straight for an hour at a time beside a farm road. The sky is enormous. In July the heat is severe and there is no shade at all. In winter the wind comes off the plateau with nothing to break it.

This is the stretch walkers argue about. A significant number skip it by bus from Burgos to Leon, on the grounds that it is monotonous and hard on the feet. Others say it is the part that did the work. Both are describing the same thing accurately. Nothing happens on the Meseta, which is precisely why it is where a person runs out of distractions and starts having the conversation with themselves, or with God, that they came for. The monastic tradition has always known that the desert is a place of encounter rather than of scenery, and the Meseta is the nearest thing on the road to a desert.

What is actually on it

The Meseta is not empty of buildings, and several of the finest things on the whole route are on it.

• Castrojeriz, a long thin town strung along the base of a hill under a ruined castle, with the collegiate church of Santa Maria del Manzano and the ruins of the convent of San Anton, whose Antonine friars cared for sufferers of the burning disease known as Saint Anthony's fire. The road passes under the arch of the ruined church.
• The Alto de Mostelares, a short brutal climb out of the Odra valley that is the only real ascent for days.
• Fromista, and the church of San Martin de Tours, consecrated in the eleventh century, one of the purest Romanesque buildings in Spain, with a long band of carved corbels running under its eaves. It was heavily restored in the late nineteenth century, and the restoration itself is a landmark in the history of conservation argument.
• Carrion de los Condes, with the church of Santiago and its carved frieze of Christ in Majesty, the trades of the town worked into the archivolts beneath him, and the church of Santa Maria del Camino, and a religious community that has sung with pilgrims in the evening for many years.
• The Calzada Romana west of Carrion, seventeen kilometres of straight track on the line of a Roman road with no village on it and no shade.
• Sahagun, once the site of the greatest Cluniac monastery in Spain, now largely gone, and the town where Mudejar brick Romanesque begins: San Tirso and San Lorenzo are built of brick because there was no stone, by Muslim craftsmen working for Christian patrons.

The geographical midpoint of the route falls near Sahagun, and the town keeps a tradition of issuing a certificate marking the halfway stage. Beyond it the road runs by Mansilla de las Mulas and comes into Leon.

12. Leon

Leon is the second great cathedral city of the route and the old capital of the kingdom that carried the Reconquista and the Camino together. Its name comes from the Roman Seventh Legion that camped there, and the Roman walls are still visible in stretches. The Camino enters from the east and goes straight to the cathedral.

The cathedral

The cathedral of Santa Maria de Regla, begun in the thirteenth century, is the most French of Spanish Gothic cathedrals, built on the model of Reims and Amiens with the stone reduced to the minimum the structure will bear. What that produces is glass. The windows fill the walls almost entirely, from the rose windows to the clerestory, most of the glazing medieval, and the interior on a bright day is a coloured room rather than a stone one. The structural cost was heavy: the building was close to collapse in the nineteenth century and was largely dismantled and rebuilt by a long restoration campaign, which is why so much of it looks sharp.

The west front carries a Last Judgement in its central tympanum, with the blessed at Christ's right and the damned being shovelled into the mouth of hell on his left, and the smiling Virgin known as the Virgen Blanca on the central pillar. Pilgrims stand in front of the Judgement for a long time, which is the reaction it was carved to produce.

San Isidoro

The Basilica of San Isidoro, a few streets away, is the older and in some ways the more important building. It was built in the eleventh century to house the relics of Isidore of Seville, brought north in 1063, and beside it is the Panteon de los Reyes, the royal burial chamber of the kings of Leon. The low vaults of that chamber are covered with Romanesque frescoes of the twelfth century, painted with the Annunciation to the shepherds, the Last Supper, Christ in Majesty and a calendar of the agricultural year, in colours that have never been repainted. Guidebooks often call it the Sistine Chapel of Romanesque art, which is a guidebook phrase, and the paintings need no help from it.

The third building the Camino passes in Leon is the Hostal de San Marcos, a vast Plateresque range beside the river built by the Order of Santiago, which served as a monastery and a pilgrim hospital and is now a hotel. Its facade, a hundred metres of carved sixteenth-century stonework with medallions of classical and biblical figures, is a reminder of the scale of the institutions the pilgrimage supported.

The 1063 translation of the relics of Isidore of Seville to Leon and the eleventh-century foundation of the basilica follow the standard published histories of San Isidoro. The dating of the Panteon frescoes to the twelfth century is the consensus of art historians and has been debated in its details.

13. Astorga, Rabanal and the Cruz de Ferro

Astorga marks the end of the plain and the beginning of the mountains of Leon. It is a small walled city with Roman foundations, and it sits at the junction of the Camino Frances and the Via de la Plata coming up from the south. Its cathedral is a long building begun in Gothic and finished in Baroque, and beside it stands the Palacio Episcopal designed by Antoni Gaudi in the 1880s for a bishop who was, like the architect, a Catalan. Gaudi's granite palace now holds the Museo de los Caminos, a museum of the pilgrim road. The surrounding district is the Maragateria, whose people, the Maragatos, kept a distinct identity and trade as muleteers for centuries and whose local dish, the cocido maragato, is famously eaten in reverse order.

Rabanal del Camino

The road climbs from Astorga through the Maragato villages to Rabanal del Camino, a stone village on the mountainside where the Knights Templar are recorded as having kept a presence in the twelfth century. Since the turn of the twenty-first century a small Benedictine community has been established in the village at the monastery of San Salvador del Monte Irago, and the monks sing the office in Gregorian chant in the parish church of Santa Maria and offer a pilgrim blessing. A pilgrim who arrives in the afternoon can be at Vespers within the hour, and for many walkers on the Frances it is the point where the walking turns back into a pilgrimage.

Foncebadon and the Cruz de Ferro

Above Rabanal the road reaches Foncebadon, a village that was abandoned to ruins in the twentieth century and has partly come back to life because of the Camino. A little beyond it, close to the highest point of the route at around 1,500 metres, stands the Cruz de Ferro: a small iron cross on a tall oak pole, set in an enormous mound of stones.

The mound is the point. Pilgrims carry a stone from home, sometimes for the whole 780 kilometres, and lay it on the heap, naming in prayer what the stone stands for. Some carry a stone for a person who has died, some for a sin, some for something they intend to leave behind. The custom is old, and heaps of stones at high passes are older than Christianity, which the Church absorbed and pointed at Christ, as it did with a great many pre-Christian gestures.

Nothing is conferred by the act. Laying a stone forgives nothing, and a pilgrim who wants sin dealt with goes to confession, where Christ deals with it through the priest. What the gesture does is give the body something to do with what the mind has been carrying, which is the whole logic of pilgrimage and the reason the Church has never been embarrassed by physical devotions.

14. Ponferrada, the Bierzo and Villafranca

The descent from the Cruz de Ferro into the Bierzo is steep, long and rough underfoot, and it hurts more than the climb did. It passes El Acebo and Molinaseca, a handsome slate village with a Romanesque bridge over the Meruelo, and comes down into a wide fertile basin ringed by mountains where the climate turns warm and the fruit and wine begin again.

Ponferrada takes its name from an iron-reinforced bridge built for pilgrims over the river Sil in the eleventh century. The town is dominated by the castle of the Knights Templar, granted to the order in the twelfth century and built up by them to protect the pilgrim road, one of the largest Templar fortresses in Spain. The order was suppressed in the early fourteenth century and the castle passed to other hands, and what stands today is a much-restored complex of walls, towers and a gatehouse. Beside it is the Basilica of the Encina, whose title comes from the finding of an image of the Virgin in a holm oak, and the Mozarabic church of Santo Tomas de las Ollas nearby is a tenth-century survival worth the short walk.

Villafranca del Bierzo and the Door of Pardon

Villafranca del Bierzo, at the head of the valley, was a town of French settlers, as its name says. At the top of its street stands the Romanesque church of Santiago, and in its north wall is the Puerta del Perdon, the Door of Pardon. By long tradition a pilgrim who reached Villafranca too sick to cross the mountains ahead could pass through that door and receive there what they would have received at Compostela. The privilege is attributed to a fifteenth-century papal grant.

The tradition has a hard doctrinal edge that is worth stating plainly. The Church attaches indulgences to acts, and it can and does move where an act may be performed, because the point of the pilgrimage is repentance rather than mileage. A person too ill to finish was never told they had failed. For what an indulgence is and is not, and the conditions the Church attaches to a jubilee, see our guide to the Jubilee.

From Villafranca the road runs up the Valcarce valley beside the motorway on concrete pillars, through Trabadelo, Vega de Valcarce and Herrerias, gaining height gently for twenty kilometres, and then turns up the mountainside for the hardest climb since the Pyrenees.

15. O Cebreiro and the Entry into Galicia

O Cebreiro is a mountain village at about 1,300 metres on the Galician border, reached by a climb of some 700 metres from the valley floor, and it is the threshold of the last region of the Camino Frances. The village keeps several pallozas, round dry-stone houses with conical thatched roofs of a type built in these mountains since antiquity, and the weather at the top can turn in an hour in any season.

The church of Santa Maria la Real is among the oldest churches still standing on the route, in origin a pre-Romanesque building of the ninth century, low, thick-walled and dark, attached to a hospice that sheltered pilgrims from the mountain for a thousand years. It was served by French Benedictines from the eleventh century, and it has never stopped being a pilgrim church.

The Eucharistic miracle of O Cebreiro

The church keeps a tradition of a Eucharistic miracle dated to the fourteenth century. A peasant from a nearby hamlet climbed through a snowstorm to attend Mass, and the monk celebrating it thought privately that a man would not struggle so far through snow for a little bread and wine. At the words of consecration, in the tradition, the host and the wine visibly became flesh and blood. The chalice and paten associated with the story are kept in the church, together with a reliquary given by Isabella the Catholic, who is said to have stopped there. The arms of Galicia carry a chalice with a host above it, and the connection with O Cebreiro is part of the local memory.

The Church has not defined the event, and it does not need to be defined for the doctrine to stand. Catholic teaching is that at every Mass the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, with the appearances of bread and wine remaining, which is what the Church calls transubstantiation. A Eucharistic miracle is an exception to the appearances rather than a change in the doctrine, and a Catholic is free to hold or not hold any particular case. Our guide to the Eucharist sets out the teaching, and the page on the Eucharistic miracle of Lanciano works through what the Church does and does not say about such cases.

Elias Valina

Beside the church door is the grave of Elias Valina Sampedro, parish priest of O Cebreiro, who died in 1989. Valina wrote a doctoral thesis on the Camino as a legal and historical institution, published guides to it, and organised the modern waymarking of the route. The yellow arrow painted on walls, kerbs, rocks and tree trunks from the Pyrenees to Santiago is his, taken up by volunteers and associations and now the recognised sign of the Camino everywhere in Europe. A pilgrim who has followed yellow arrows for a month should stop at that grave for a moment, because the arrows are the reason they did not get lost.

Elias Valina Sampedro was parish priest of O Cebreiro and a scholar of the Camino, and his role in organising the modern yellow-arrow waymarking of the route is recorded by the pilgrim associations and in the published literature on the twentieth-century revival of the Camino. The Eucharistic miracle of O Cebreiro is a local tradition of the fourteenth century; the Catholic Church has issued no doctrinal definition concerning it.

16. Sarria to Monte do Gozo

The last stretch of the Camino Frances runs about 150 kilometres from the Galician mountains to Santiago, and it is the busiest, greenest and most sociable part of the road. From O Cebreiro the route crosses two more passes, drops through Triacastela, and reaches Sarria either directly or by the longer valley road past the great Benedictine monastery of Samos, one of the oldest monastic foundations in Spain still in use, which is worth the extra kilometres.

Sarria is where the road changes character, because it is the last town more than one hundred kilometres from Santiago and therefore the usual starting point for pilgrims walking the minimum distance required for the Compostela certificate. Our guide to the Camino routes explains the credencial and the distance thresholds. What matters for the Frances is the effect: from Sarria onward the road carries far more people, many of them fresh, in large groups, walking for a week. Pilgrims who have come from the Pyrenees often find this difficult, and the honest response to that difficulty is to notice it and let it go. Nobody on the road owes anybody an explanation of where they started, and the Church has never graded pilgrims by distance.

What is on the last stretch

• Portomarin, reached across a long bridge over a reservoir. The old town lies under the water. When the Belesar dam flooded the valley in the 1960s the Romanesque fortress-church of San Nicolas was taken apart stone by numbered stone and rebuilt on the hill above, and the numbers are still visible on the blocks.
• Vilar de Donas, a short detour off the road, a twelfth-century church of the Order of Santiago with medieval wall paintings and the tombs of knights of the order.
• Melide, at the junction with the Camino Primitivo, known for octopus cooked in the Galician manner.
• Arzua and O Pedrouzo, dairy country, with the road running in and out of oak and eucalyptus plantations on stone-walled lanes.
• Monte do Gozo, the hill of joy, five kilometres from the cathedral, where medieval pilgrims first caught sight of the towers of Santiago and where by custom the first of the party to see them was called the king of the group. Modern building has blocked most of the view, and the name still does its work.

The final approach runs down off the hill, over the motorway, through the suburbs and into the old city by the Rua de San Pedro and the Porta do Camino, and then through the streets to the Praza do Obradoiro, where the west front of the cathedral appears all at once. What to do on arrival, the embrace of the statue, the crypt, confession and the Pilgrim Mass, is set out in our guide to Santiago de Compostela Cathedral.

17. What the Frances Asks of a Walker

The Camino Frances asks for about five weeks, a working body, and a tolerance for discomfort that most people discover they already have. It does not ask for mountaineering skill, unusual fitness or any particular age. Walkers in their seventies finish it every year, and so do people who have never walked more than five kilometres before starting.

The physical shape of the thing

Ordinary stages run 20 to 25 kilometres, which is five to seven hours of walking for most people. Three parts of the route are genuinely hard: the Pyrenean crossing on day one, the climb to O Cebreiro, and the long descents, which do more damage than the climbs. The classic injuries are blisters, tendonitis in the front of the ankle from downhill work, knee pain, and shin splints, and almost all of them come from the same three causes, a pack that is too heavy, boots that were not worn in, and walking too far too early because the first week feels easy.

The traditional discipline of the road is to carry as little as possible. Medieval pilgrims travelled with a staff, a gourd, a scrip and a shell. A modern pack of ten per cent of body weight is the usual rule of thumb, and almost everyone starts heavier than that and posts things home from Burgos.

The other kind of difficulty

The harder part is not physical. Five weeks of walking strips out the distractions a person normally uses, and things surface: grief that was parked, a decision that has been avoided, resentment that has been carried for years. Hospitaleros and priests along the road see this constantly, and it is the reason so many pilgrims go to confession at Santiago after decades away. Anyone walking the Frances should expect a bad week somewhere in the middle and should not treat it as a sign that the pilgrimage is going wrong. It is usually the sign that it is working.

18. Praying the Camino Frances

Walking the Frances as a pilgrimage rather than as a hike takes a small amount of deliberate structure, and the structure that works is simple and old.

Carry names. Ask people before you leave what they want prayed for, and write the list down. Praying for the intentions of others is the oldest reason anybody went to a shrine, and a written list turns a vague feeling on a mountain into an actual act of intercession. Read the list at the Cruz de Ferro and again in the crypt at Santiago.

Go to Mass. The Frances makes this easier than any other route. Roncesvalles, Pamplona, Puente la Reina, Estella, Logrono, Santo Domingo, Burgos, Carrion, Sahagun, Leon, Astorga, Rabanal, Ponferrada, Villafranca, O Cebreiro, Sarria and Portomarin all have churches with regular Mass, and many parishes give a pilgrim blessing afterwards. Our guide to the Mass covers what is happening in it, which is worth reading if you have been away a long time.

Give the empty hours a shape. The Rosary is made for walking and the decades fit the rhythm of a road. The psalms work as well, particularly the psalms of ascent, Psalms 120 to 134, which were sung by pilgrims going up to Jerusalem and are the closest thing in Scripture to a pilgrim's book. Our guide to prayer sets out the forms.

Go to confession on the road as well as at the end. Many pilgrims wait for Santiago and arrive with a month of thinking to unload in a five-minute queue. Priests along the way will hear you in Burgos or Leon, and the last two hundred kilometres are different when they are walked afterwards rather than before. Our guide to confession explains the form if you have forgotten it.

Do not audit your own feelings. Consolation on a pilgrimage is a gift and it is not a measure of anything. Plenty of people feel nothing at the Cruz de Ferro, nothing in the cathedral, and a great deal three weeks later at a kitchen table at home. Say the words, do the acts, walk the road, and leave the rest to God.

19. Related Topics