Camino de Santiago

The Camino de Santiago is not a single road but a family of routes converging on one destination: the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, where medieval tradition holds that the bones of the Apostle James rest beneath the high altar. Of all these roads, the Camino Francés — the French Way — is the most ancient and most travelled. Pilgrims have walked the Camino since at least the 9th century, when the shrine first drew the faithful from across Christendom. At its medieval peak, hundreds of thousands came each year; the route gave rise to a remarkable infrastructure of hospitals, bridges, monasteries, and Romanesque churches whose scallop-shell motifs mark the way across France and Spain. The Camino is also a journey through the landscape of the Iberian interior: the vineyards of Rioja, the meseta's vast plateau, the green hills of Galicia. It passes through cities of extraordinary historical weight — Burgos with its Gothic cathedral, León with its stained glass, Pamplona of the running of the bulls — before descending into Santiago's ancient squares. To walk it is to join a procession stretching across a millennium.