Walking the Camino

by Tony Kevin

  ***

  This might be a good moment to pull together some thoughts about navigation. This is an important practical question for non-Spanish-speaking pilgrims. If you do not have enough confidence in Spanish to ask directions and understand the answers, how do you avoid getting seriously lost? Asking directions can be a problem even for good Spanish speakers like Richard: quite often, a local will say ‘a la izquierda’ (to the left) while waving to the right with his right hand, or ‘a la derecha’ (to the right) while his left hand points to the left. It is then hard to decide whether to believe the words or the hands!

  For me, as an Australian, navigation was perhaps a more serious matter than for my happy-go-lucky European friends, who had an easy confidence that in Europe one is never really lost. Sooner or later, they are sure, there will be a farmhouse or road or village to get directions from and be put back on the right road. For me, brought up on true stories of children and hikers lost in trackless Australian bush and never seen again, not losing one’s way in strange places was something I instinctively took more seriously. I hate not knowing where I am.

  A fundamental difficulty is the huge variety in the camino, which can be a highway or minor road or rutted rural tractor lane or footpath, or even just a set of directions to walk across a large field looking for a gate or stile somewhere in the far, opposite corner. Many times I had to suspend disbelief: could this faint, almost overgrown sheeptrack meandering up the hill through olive or encina trees leading to rusty farmgates into a manure-filled cattle holding-pen really be part of the grand camino across Spain?

  One simply has to trust that it is, if the yellow arrows and the guidebook say so. The local Friends of the Camino waymarking societies that have surveyed and waymarked the route in their local area have decided, in their wisdom, where the yellow arrows should be marked. These societies wanted to design routes that would give pilgrims something that is as close as possible to the authentic medieval experience of walking across country from village to village, keeping as far away as possible from busy motor roads. So where the original Vía de la Plata was difficult to access because it had been buried under the equivalent modern road, which is often the case — and I don’t think anyone really knows where much of the original Vía Mozárabe from Granada to Mérida went; it is more of an historical assumption than an exact memory — the local Friends drew on local knowledge to design and waymark the most direct and attractive possible walking routes, using local minor roads and lanes and footpaths that head in roughly the right direction, to create as close an approximation as possible to what the original camino might have been like. This gives rise to some delightful variety of walking, as you move from road to footpath to forestry trail to agricultural laneway to road again … rarely do you spend the whole day walking on the one kind of route. The camino is almost always an unfolding progression of different kinds of walking.

  But, always, the day’s camino starts and ends at a main church in a village central plaza, or in cities at the cathedral. These are always the end-points, because it is after all a pilgrimage, and this is what pilgrims do after a day’s walking: they visit the local church. The camino, like a Roman or medieval road, tries to avoid serious detours from the most direct, shortest line of walk. So it goes straight up and over the top of hills that are in in the way, rather than curving around them as do motor roads.

  Sometimes, in rough terrain with sheep or goat tracks meandering aimlessly around, it can be hard to stay on the right path. You have to put all your trust in the directions indicated by the painted yellow waymarks. They are a metaphor for spiritual guidance in life, in that they are always correct (they never misdirect) and sometimes easily visible, but at other times quite hard to see. On the camino that I walked, they were painted in the oddest and most obscure places — mostly on wayside rocks or trees, but also on fence posts or lamp posts, at the corners of buildings, on street signs, even in treeless wheatfields on drain culverts at one’s feet. Sometimes there are too few of them — in some areas, the local Friends seem to have decided to not make it too easy for pilgrims, to make them work at finding the next arrow, which may be several kilometres ahead. In other areas there are yellow arrows everywhere. But that is all part of the fun of navigation — and there is the delight and relief when you spy the next yellow arrow and realise that you haven’t lost the track. Sometimes there are yellow crosses, warning not to take a particular road. Sometimes there are puzzlingly bent arrows pointing upwards and then off to the right or left — what do they mean?

  A good guidebook is the main back-up to the waymarks. As I got more experienced and developed more instinct for the many moods of the camino, I needed less and less to check back to the guidebook while on the road — it was enough to have read it the night before to get a general sense of the day ahead. But there were times when it was indispensable. As an example, look at this dense slab of instructions from Alison Raju’s indispensable guidebook to the Vía de la Plata, on a tricky few kilometres between Cáparra and Aldeanueva del Camino:

  1.5 km later the tarmac ends and the N630 is above you, 20m ahead. Veer to L then cross river (via stepping stones if needed) and then arrows direct you under a road bridge under the N630 on RH side of river/stream. The mountains of the Sierra de Gredos are over to the R in the distance.

  On the other side, on your L, is a set of gates (may be locked). Climb over/go through them and head for first electric pylon in field on other side. From there go through gate in the wall in front (at right angles to N630) and turn R alongside wall. In corner go through gateway and turn L, continuing diagonally R, veering L in front of a ruined building (on your R) then reach a wall by a gateway (on its other side). Climb over wall and turn L — you are now on the calzada romana, [Roman road], a wide walled lane, undulating. This is a very nice quiet section with quite a lot of shade — to rest in at least — and which will take you all the way to the outskirts of Aldeaneuva del Camino …

  Navigating these few kilometres with my Swedish friend Marit that day was an exercise for the mind as well as the body. Raju’s admirable guidebook itself is not so precise as to make it mechanical and boring to follow. You often have to guess at distances between the features she mentions, and read between the lines of her encouraging phrases. I found that, ‘gently undulating’ means ‘a lot of hills’; ‘gently uphill’ means ‘steeply uphill’; ‘steep’ means ‘precipitously steep’ … Raju avoids lengthy descriptions of scenery and local history. She focuses her text on the basic, navigational landmark data a walker needs, especially at forks or junctions where you need to take particular care. Her guidebooks are packed with essential information for walking pilgrims, and offer just enough descriptive information to pique the curiosity of the reader. A great advantage of her book is that she does not tell you in detail what is coming next.

  I found that the best roadmaps, which are a useful supplementary resource to a route guidebook, are the Michelin 1:400,000 Orange series, covering Spain by regions. I used three — Andalucia, Extremadura, and Galicia. These maps don’t show footpaths or very minor roads, but they help you to locate yourself in relation to villages and medium-to-large roads and junctions, and to identify distant landmarks (such as mountain summits or lakes). Apart from being useful insurance, they’re essential if you want to plan itineraries and side-trips, and to see how far you’ve come and how far you still have to go.

  Finally, it’s always helpful if you have an internal sense of general direction aided by a bit of basic solar navigation — which is easier on sunny days, when you quickly get a feel for the rightful position of the sun in the sky at different hours of the day, whatever the season you’re travelling in. It can be a useful and reassuring check that you are travelling in the right direction.

  And, in the last resort, don’t forget the power of prayer, and the scallop shell of Santiago around your neck!

  ***

  Tabara was
the end of the hard, dry meseta. The next day was a lovely and varied walk on quiet lanes going north again, away from the N631, over gentle ranges of hills; through Bercianos de Valverde, a truly remote village in a valley; entering wine country with picturesque bodegas (household wine cellars excavated into the softstone hill slopes); and finally walking downhill through the irrigated fields of a large agricultural area in the fertile floodplain of the Río Tera, to overnight in the substantial riverside village of Santa Croya de Tera. We found a gem of a private albergue waiting for us, Casa Anita, near the bridge over the river. It was a business venture — an interesting cross between a tourist hotel (it was the only accommodation in the village) and a pilgrim refuge — built and managed by a charming couple, Anita and Domingo, and their adult children. Casa Anita was large and cool, three storeys high, with its own courtyard kitchen garden bursting with soup and salad greens. The river Tera nearby was large, free-flowing, and clear — the water comes down from the high mountains of León, and the spring snowmelt was still feeding its flow. There was an attractive river swimming spot at the bridge close by the hotel.

  We seemed to be the only guests in Casa Anita. Domingo and I warmed to each other at once: he was a charming and knowledgeable host. The next day, I made a diary voice-entry on my MP3 player, and I’ve transcribed it here to simply let it tell the story of the next two days in all their tumbled immediacy:

  22 June: Today has been an amazing day. Yesterday afternoon we walked into Santa Croya de la Tera, a village on the Río Tera, in the middle of a beautiful irrigation area, and of course I am always happy when we come out of the dry scrub into these irrigation areas. We found an albergue, Casa Anita, run by Anita and her husband Domingo. It is the nicest albergue that we have stayed in: it even has a computer with Internet … and a comfortable, cool dormitory. We were the only ones there. Good early dinner, and after dinner we went and had a look at the famous stone statue of Santiago the Pilgrim in the church across the river [in the sister village, Santa Marta de Tera]. After that, a special treat — Domingo invited me up to see his bodega, while we left Richard watching World Cup football in the village bar. And it was beautiful — a lovely cellar carved out of the hill, very deep under the ground, a vestibule room well set up for parties with a fireplace with a huge grill, solar-electricity cells powering batteries for lights, and a big kitchen sink, counters to prepare food … And then we went down, down, steep stone steps into this deep underground bodega, about ten metres underground, where the temperature was always about 5 to 10 degrees Centigrade, very cool, with a huge wooden barrel which must have been there for ever, lots of metal vats for ageing wine, and wine in cardboard casks ready to drink. I forgot to say that one of the good features of Domingo’s and Anita’s refugio is a free bar, with casks of red and white wine and chilled bottles of both in the fridge. You can have as much as you like, and it is all from this cellar, their own wine, which they make themselves from their own terrain. So I drank too much with Domingo, and I paid the price this morning: the old Spanish saying, ‘noches alegres, mañanas tristes’ (‘joyful nights, sad mornings’).

  But it was very nice up there in the bodega. We sat on the bench in front of the bodega, sipping red wine as the sun set over the hills and the surrounding bodegas grew dark. Domingo was very poetical. It turns out he is 63, the same age as me, though he looks about fifty. He said he comes up to his bodega for ‘la paz, la silencia, la libertad’ (peace, quietness, freedom). It is where he goes to contemplate and meditate, and enjoy a bit of his own wine as well, I think. Anyway, I’d love to build a bodega like this at home. It has an air vent, a high chimney-shaft, so that there is always some circulation of air down into the cellar, not so much as to make it hot, but enough that it doesn’t get stuffy down there. And the air in the bottom of the cellar was wonderfully cool and refreshing. Domingo said the cellar had been made by hand more than 100 years ago, digging down into the soft rock hereabouts. He also said that the people who have these bodegas don’t have any formal training in wine making; they just all know how to make wine because the knowledge is passed on from fathers to sons.

  Today’s walk has been amazing; so far we have already walked twenty-two kilometres, all very different. The first ten kilometres or so was through irrigation areas along the river, in green forests fields and villages, finishing up at a beautiful ermita [country church] at the end of the irrigation area — locked, but we could see inside the church through a little grille, and leave money in a collection box. Immediately after that the country changed completely: first, dry forest scrubland, and then a real jungle of jumbled trees and vines along the riverbank, a dam wall looming ahead of us. It was almost like the Amazon down near the water’s edge. We were having a conversation about anacondas, and I think if my children were here they would have got quite frightened. We climbed out of the river valley, walked over the large concrete dam — an absolute terrorists’ dream. Somebody could just drive onto it with a car full of explosives and do enormous damage downstream, but there wasn’t a single person in sight, not a guard or sentry, not even a camera.

  Then a tormenting four kilometres walking around the edge of the lake; you could see the blue water and empty, sandy beaches. I didn’t want to stop and swim because I knew it would be harder to go on afterwards, but I felt like throwing all my clothes off and just falling into the water, it would have been beautiful. Instead I was pounding along this hot, melting, bitumen road. And then we came to this village [Villar de Farfon], and it was my first sight of a deserted village in Spain, and it was very sad, very poignant. There was this lovely old church where we slept in the shady porch for an hour (I definitely needed the rest), Richard on the floor on his sleeping mat, I on a cool stone bench. It was lovely to get my socks off, get my feet up on the rucksack, get my head on my pillow, and I actually slept for an hour like this. There was a pilgrimage plaque there, and I took a photo of it. It says something like: This village, people don’t live here any more. In its solitude, you the pilgrim will find company, and the Holy Spirit will be with you on your journey. I blinked away tears.

  As I walked through the empty village I saw boarded-up houses and broken-down roofs, only three or four houses still being lived in by people who, I guess, were just hanging on through sheer determination — they really don’t care if their village is falling down around them. Interestingly, there is still a little government office, a clinic where a doctor comes to see patients; he must have very few around here. It is sad to see a depopulated village like this. There are a couple of active farms on the edge of the village, but I think the people who live there must just think of themselves as farmers, not as people of a village. As a village, it’s dead.

  Now we are doing the last six kilometres of a very long day, twenty-nine kilometres, to Ríonegro where we hope we will find a refugio; there is supposed to be a new one there. Ríonegro sounds like a functioning village; there will be somewhere to stay there. But today I felt really like a pilgrim because it was such a long day with so much variety. Now we are walking through encina trees and dry meadows again, lots of wild asparagus, beautiful. And we can see the mountains of Galicia getting closer.

  The landscape now was finally changing character as we moved up into the higher-rainfall foothills of the mountains of León. North of Ríonegro, where we were to stay that night, the N631 main road from Zamora merges into a very important east-west road: the A52 motorway from Benavente to Ourense and on to Vigo. To the south of the motorway is a linked chain of huge dams on the Río Tera, holding the winter snowmelt from the mountains of León. South of these dams is the wild Sierra de la Culebra: dry, unpopulated mountains that are still home to the largest population of wild wolves in western Europe, on the border with Portugal. The remote north-eastern Portuguese region of Tras Os Montes (‘across the mountains’), with its regional capital at Braganca, was about thirty kilometres to the south of us. Our camino was now winding in and out of the A52 moto
rway, sometimes along the now little-used older trunk-road N631, and sometimes going off on walking paths to the left or right.

  These are the Sanabrian borderlands: fertile, well-watered mountain valleys rich in history where Castile, Galicia, and Portugal meet. Nowadays this area is something of a backwater, but these valleys were frequent battlefields during the early imperial expansion of León and Castile, in the years when Galicia was absorbed into the expanding Castilian empire while Portugal struggled to defend its independence and separate cultural identity. Portugal weakened and temporarily succumbed to Castilian rule in the sixteenth century; but then, in 1640, a great figure in Portuguese history, Duke John of Braganca, grandson of the famous Catherine, Duchess of Braganca, defied the might of Philip IV of Spain by boldly declared himself King John IV of Portugal. There followed a twenty-eight-year war to restore Portugal’s independence — a war the Portuguese remarkably won, showing incredible fortitude against the mighty resources of imperial Spain, helped a little by friendly Britain and the Netherlands. There is, in fact, an alternative Portuguese camino route from Zamora to Ourense, running through the Tras Os Montes region and Braganca. I was tempted to take it, but in the end decided to stay on the Spanish route.