Hi Friends,
I’m writing to you today from Corcubión, Spain. It’s our 42nd day on the Camino. We began in Saint-Jean-Pied-Du-Port, France and walked the Camino Francés to Santiago de Compostela, which is the ending point for most people (790 kilometers). I wondered if I would feel something, stepping onto the square in front of the cathedral after nearly 500 miles of walking across Spain. The square was crowded with walkers and bikers and other tourists who had come by plane, ship, or bus. I didn’t feel anything except the need to take a shower and then sit down. We took a couple of quick photos (not even trying to angle them to cut out others, which would have been impossible) and left, knowing that this wasn’t the end of our journey, as we had planned to keep walking to the ocean at Finisterre, also known as the end of the earth—the goal of the earliest pilgrims, predating Catholicism.
I had visited 20 years ago, and had remembered Santiago de Compostela as a misty and magical place, full of stone, exquisite cheese and wine shops, windows displaying still-quivering fish, and warm people. Back in 2002 , only a handful of people—mostly devout Catholics—walked the Camino. We saw a few of them struggle in and then go inside the cathedral to hug the statue of Saint James, which is still a popular rite, but now requires following a long queue down into a crypt and back up another set of stairs to the gold-plated saint. The whole thing felt like waiting to ride Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean. I had to go see all of this for myself, of course, though I
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