In it’s 12th century peak anywhere between 250,000 and 1 million pilgrims were making their way to Santiago
The Council of Europe declared the Camino its first ‘Cultural Route’, saying ‘the Compostela is considered the biggest mass-movement of the middle-ages’
At one time wealthy criminals were offered walking the Camino as an alternative punishment. One Surrey adulteress was given the choice between the Santiago or ‘being beaten with rods six times around various churches’!
not everyone was so positive about the Camino, King Louis XIV forbade his subjects from going and said ‘Go a pilgrim, return a whore’.
In the 1950s the Santiago was reclaimed by nature after a lack of Pilgrims causing would be pilgrims to need a machete to cut their way through the undergrowth and forests. As late as the 1980s pilgrims struggled to find the path.
The Hostal de Los Reyes Catholicos in Santiago’s cathedral square, despite no longer being the pilgrim hospital it once was is still required by decree to serve any person carrying their Compostela (passport) a free meal.
Medieval pilgrims would typically spend 4 months getting to Santiago and back, some of them walking on the spiritual behalf of their lord and landowner.
Of the 61,000 pilgrims who walked the camino in 2001 about a third were non-Spanish and a 5th did it on bikes. Fewer than half claimed they walked for religious purposes.
There are people known as ‘serial-pilgrims’ who walk the Camino nearly every year!
The original pilgrims carried stones with them, not as symbolic for their sins but because they were needed to wall the cathedral of Santiago.
