Knowing I needed to walk was one thing; finding a path was quite another.
Seven years ago, my journey of recovery and self-discovery led me to Galicia. Countless pilgrims walk the Camino de Santiago each year, but I had an intuition that this was not my path. Eventually, I found a trail that matched my intentions, and following it would profoundly shape my experiences.
The world is criss-crossed with well-trodden pilgrim paths. But I’m a firm believer that any footpath, trail or hiking route can be a way of deeper connection and transformation. The landscapes we wander through are full of stories, and we add to them with our footsteps.
This is an extract from an ongoing writing project about my experiences walking the Camiño dos Faros. In case you missed it, these were my first steps, which I published last Saturday. This week, I want to explore the place I walked - Galicia.
Approaching Galicia
Galicia is a region in the northwesternmost part of the Iberian Peninsula, bordered by Portugal to the south and the rest of Spain to the east. This land is shaped by a thousand rivers that descend from high granite mountains to deep rías, steep-sided Ice Age valleys that flooded as sea levels rose. The result is a jagged Atlantic coastline that winds over 1,600 kilometres from Ribadeo in the northeast to O Muíño in the far southwest.
This place has always been a land apart, protected by impenetrable terrain and wide, fast-flowing rivers, with a rugged shoreline that nurtures a unique seafaring culture. The neolithic dolmens scattered across the landscape were already ancient when Bronze Age sailors began trading metals and sharing culture along the Atlantic seaboard, reaching as far north as Ireland and Scotland. These ancient travellers became known as the Gallaeci, the Celtic tribe that lends its name to the land they sailed from.
The Gallaeci left an indelible mark on Galicia. Their hillforts remain remarkably intact. Built on rocky summits that were spared the plough, their densely clustered roundhouses stand to this day with walls ten stones high. Although the Gallaecian language was trampled under the boots of an advancing Roman army, traces remain, buried in inscriptions, place names, and the etymology of a handful of words, including the Galician for path.
Camiño.
The birth of pilgrimage
First-hand written accounts of pilgrimage begin with a solitary departure from Galicia. In 381CE, Egeria left her home in the region to embark on a journey that took her to sites in the Holy Land, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. She climbed mountains, forded rivers, observed rituals, and documented her wandering life. This intrepid woman’s account of her three-year journey is the earliest record of Christian pilgrimage, inspiring seekers to step onto the path to enlightenment.
But it was almost 500 years before pilgrims began to walk towards Galicia. The story of the Camino de Santiago begins in the mythic account of the apostle James’ martyred body being brought from Jerusalem and taken on an ox cart to the forest of Libredón, where he was buried by Queen Lupa in a tomb beneath the trees. Centuries later, a wandering hermit saw a shower of stars leading to the forest and, calling on a bishop to investigate with him, discovered the remains of the saint and two of his disciples.
The miraculous discovery reshaped the geography of the Christian world. Early royal expeditions to the apostle’s tomb cemented Santiago de Compostela’s reputation, and over the following centuries, the growing city came to rival any of the sacred destinations that Egeria had visited in her wandering. A network of pilgrimage routes sprang up across Europe, bringing weary believers to Galicia in search of penance, guidance and blessing.
Today, there is no single Camino de Santiago. Instead, a complex network of footpaths across Portugal and Spain lead to the city, some starting as far afield as Poland, Ireland and Malta. Hundreds of thousands walk these paths each year, following golden scallop shells and arrows etched into stone waymarkers. But wherever each pilgrim’s camino begins, for most, it ends at Saint James’ tomb.
Each day in Santiago de Compostela, a mass is held in the cathedral to greet tired travellers. But just as important is a visit to a nearby administrative office, to stand in a long queue to show a completed credencial, the official pilgrim’s passport issued by the diocese and stamped daily at monasteries, churches and lodgings along the route. Travellers can exchange their completed credencial for a compostela, a parchment certificate conveying the church-sanctioned status of pilgrim. For the most devout who hope to escape purgatory, the certificate represents the chance of receiving a plenary indulgence, which opens the path beyond this life that leads directly to the gates of heaven.
Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela may begin in Christian myth and end in arcane administrative ritual, but travelling in search of meaning transcends any single spiritual tradition. The history of pilgrimage begins long before Egeria left her homeland. Across cultures, there are accounts of places filled with transcendent meaning and people who displace themselves from their everyday lives to embark on epic quests to reach them.
Leaving and returning
Today, the urge to pilgrimage drives devotees to Mecca and the Ganges, to holy mountains and remote islands, to cities in the high Andes and to temples on the coast of Japan. We celebrate a musical hero at Graceland. We mourn the incalculable horror of Auschwitz. We leave our homes and go to distant places to make sense of what it means to be human.
Completing any pilgrimage is a testament to the dedication of time and effort to walk the journey of a lifetime. And for many contemporary pilgrims who reach Santiago de Compostela, boarding a flight home marks a transition back to everyday life. But sinking into the comfort of an airline seat robs modern-day wayfarers of an essential element of the pilgrimage experience: walking home.
While some mediaeval pilgrims settled in Santiago de Compostela, many more returned home on foot. Walkers would carry the stories of their adventures with them as they retraced their steps, encouraging others to press on. But they were also witnesses to an instinctive knowledge that a distant shrine is not the end of the journey but only a temporary resting point. It is the walking that transforms, not the encounter with the relics of a long-dead saint. So, the walk home offers an opportunity to incorporate the learning of the journey, returning a pilgrim who is changed by their experiences.
The cycle of leaving and returning home is one of the hallmarks of pilgrimage. By embracing the return, pilgrimage transcends the exertion of a long-distance hike to become a ritual of transformation, a rite of passage. Anthropologist and folklorist Arnold van Gennep identified three phases of such rites. First, there is leaving, a separation from the concerns of the day-to-day world. Next, a threshold is crossed into a liminal space, a place of magical transformation between worlds that offers a different way of being. And finally, there is the return, and a new life is built that consolidates the learning from the journey.
“Life itself means to separate and to be reunited,” he wrote, “to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and to rest, and then to begin acting again, but in a different way. And there are always new thresholds to cross: the threshold of summer and winter, of a season or a year, of a month or of a night; the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity and old age; the threshold of death and that of the afterlife for those who believe in it.”
Making a new trail
On 7 December 2012, a small group of friends set out with their dogs from the northern Spanish fishing village of Malpica to see if it was possible to hike along the Costa da Morte, the coast of death, all the way to Cabo Fisterra, Cape Finisterre, the lonely outcrop that the Romans identified as finis terrae. The end of the earth.
Before the friends began creating their path along the Costa da Morte, there were a handful of short official footpaths between towns and along river estuaries, and numerous fisherman's tracks that wound their way across the headlands. But no single path followed the entire coast. Over a series of winter weekends, they completed their first attempt at a route, arriving at their final destination on 26 January 2013.
The friends wanted to showcase the wild beauty of the landscape and the extraordinary cultural richness it holds. The goal of staying as close as possible to the coastline meant their path would traverse rocky outcrops and cliffs, pass through dense vegetation, and venture to some of the most isolated locations on the wild edge of Europe. It would take in lighthouses, too, perched on headlands overlooking the Atlantic and standing as a warning to sailors not to run aground on the shore. Their route would be coastal walking at its best, offering breathtaking views, gentle coves and bustling villages. A hike, not an amble.
After their initial explorations, they decided not to keep their new route a secret. In the spring of 2013, they gathered a larger group to follow the path. Later that year, they established the Asociación O Camiño dos Faros, the Lighthouse Way Association, as a grassroots organisation dedicated to promoting and maintaining the trail.
Over time, the detailed route was waymarked with distinctive green arrows and dots painted onto rocks and fence posts. GPS maps followed, as did social media promotion, and hundreds of people began following the path. Despite the camiño’s growing popularity, the friends remained secretive about their identities; only the dogs' names were recorded for posterity: Xia, Xes and Brisa. Even today, their owners do not take public credit for making the trail.
It is time to find a new path. Galicia is calling to me, but the wide camino to an ancient cathedral is not mine to tread. Instead, the wild edge of whalebones and shipwrecks waits for me.
O Camiño dos Faros. I will tread this way of light along the coast of death to the end of the earth. This will be my pilgrimage, my rite of passage, following the voice that calls to me from beyond the horizon.
A great reminder to consider what is the right path for each of us in every sense. 🙏
Having spent several days driving through Galicia, last year, and then spending a few days with a friend in Pontevedra, I feel the call to go back as soon as possible. Such a magical coastline. I may not have a trek like this in me, but I can immerse in the landscape.