The Camino de Santiago is a Christian pilgrimage over 1,200 years old. Humans have long traveled the lands across southwestern France and northern Spain. Pilgrims have left signs- stone tools, painted caves, rock art, hilltop settlements, prehistoric roads and later, medieval towns and chapels. Locals claim there is a special energy in the land itself. The Camino de Santiago is a line on earth poetically tracing the path of the Milky Way seen by pilgrims in the night sky, a melding of nature and culture.
0 BC to 814 AD
Legend says Saint James the greater (Sant Iago/ Santiago in Spanish), one of Jesus’ twelve apostles, preached on the Iberian Peninsula in the years following Jesus’ death and resurrection. It wasn’t until the late 6th and early 7th century that any written record of these legends were noted down in the Brevarium Apostolorum (Breviary of the Apostles). The Breviary makes the connection between St. James and Iberia, including his evangelization, martyrdom, and burial.
The people’s imagination was stimulated by hymns, stories and poems about Saint James and this belief remains: Saint James spent several years in Iberia evangelizing but seemed to lack persuasiveness and he had trouble getting followers. The Virgin Mary appeared to James on the banks of the Ebro River and the apparition convinced him to return to Jerusalem. Upon his return to Jerusalem he was beheaded and then martyred by King Herod Agrippa’s sword in the year 44. His two closest disciples then delivered his body and severed head in a stone boat guided by angels to Galicia Spain, burying him in a cave by the coast, where it remained undisturbed and forgotten for eight hundred years.
The legend continues in the year 814 when the hermit/ shepherd Pelayo miraculously found the burial place by following a trail of stars and a mysterious light shining out of the tomb.
A different legend says it was Charlamagne who found the remains during a military campaign to win the peninsula back from the Moors. Charlamagne then used the remains of St. James as a sign from God that Spain was meant to be Christian.
818 AD to 1500 AD
A chapel was soon constructed over the tomb, on the site of the current Catedral de Santiago de Compostela. King Alfonso II of Asturias made the first royal pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela between 818-842 on a path through the Cantabrian mountains that’s now known as the Camino Primativo. In 950-951, Le Puy en Valey’s bishop, Godescalc, made the first official pilgrimage from outside Iberia, beginning in south-central France, using old Roman roads, and crossing the Pyrenees to reach Santiago’s tomb. This came to be known as the Camino Frances and is the route we will be taking on our pilgrimage.
Slowly at first and then a flood of pilgrims journeyed to the northwestern, wet, and mountainous area of what became Spain, a place that was once believed to be the end of the world- the farthest western piece of land before the sea dropped off into the unknown. Pilgrims walked to pay homage to those remains that had made their own miraculous journey.
The pilgrimage to Compostela which started in the ninth century and by the thirteenth century some scholars estimate half a million people walked to Santiago each year. Saint Frances walked the Camino in the thirteenth century. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand in the fifteenth century.
1500 AD to 1975 AD
By the 16th century the pilgrimage was in decline. Political and religious trends meant that Pilgrimage had fallen out of fashion as a rational world that valued the material over the spiritual. Fewer pilgrims meant the route became more dangerous as bandits and rogues traveled the Camino. Protestant reforms outside of Spain saw the Catholic pilgrimage as extravagant and superstitious and diminished interest even more. Spain turned more liberal and secular. Jesuits were expelled in 1835. Many religious orders were expelled after that and the monasteries and convents, including those on the Camino, fell into disrepair.
Franco and the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1939 tore apart the country. Spain is still recovering from Franco’s dictatorship which lasted until 1975. The Camino bears witness to the people who were executed and buried during the war. Mass graves have been found on the border of Navarra and La Rioja entering Logrono and another is in a forest tract on your way from Villafranca Montes de Oca to San Juan Ortega.
Present Day
In 1980-1990 the Camino was revived thanks to O Cebreiro’s parish priest, Elias Valino Sampedro, who from the 1960s to 1980s dedicated himself to retracing, mapping and marking the path of the medieval Camino. Don Elias was responsible for the beloved yellow arrows-clear, simple and visible as way markers on the path.
Pope John Paul II visited Santiago de Compostela twice in 1982 and 1989 and the Spanish built a memorial on Monte de Gozo hill (from mont joie, mount joy) in 1993. It is the last hill pilgrims pass before seeing the spires of Santiago’s cathedral for the first time.
In 1987 the European Community named the Camino a European Cultural Itinerary. In 1993, UNESCO declared the road a Universal Patrimony of Humanity.
The numbers of pilgrims have been surging since 2007 with popularity compared to what it was in the 11th and 12th centuries. 2025 is a Catholic Holy Year, designated as a Jubilee Year with the theme “Pilgrims of Hope”. Below is a picture of the Prayer before the Jubilee Cross and of the Jubilee Cross mounted in St. James Cathedral in Seattle Washington,
During the Holy Year the faithful are encouraged to participate in pilgrimages to Rome as well as any holy site. We’ve heard that the Camino will lose some pilgrims to the pilgrimage to Rome, but we are especially blessed to making our pilgrimage on the Camino during this Jubilee Holy Year.