Logroño

Albergue de Peregrinos de Nájera. 12.59.

I was supposed to take the day off today, but as it’s a Sunday, nothing is open. No shops, no museums, zilch. So, since my intention to use my rest day to restock was somewhat redundant, I set out at the relatively tardy hour of half past six for Nájera.

Logroño must have been partying late into the night, like Jaca last week. There were more than a few amorous couples locked in each other’s arms in front of doorways on the streets running off the Gran Vía. The average age a Spaniard is able to leave home is now in the mid-thirties, which must make dating considerably more complicated here: the sexual revolution has happened, society has caught up, but the financial reality has got Spain’s youth in a stranglehold.

There are still Palestinian flags everywhere you go. It probably chimes with the mindset of the average liberal peregrino, but there’s another reason they’re so ubiquitous in this stretch of the Camino: we’re still in the Basque territories. And if any people are more likely to sympathise with an oppressed nation under the heel of a supposed colonising force, it’s the Basques, whose own freedom-fighting/terrorist organisation, ETA, only stopped its violent methods in the 1990s. I’ve seen one prayer in Hebrew for one of the captives still held by Hamas along the Camino, so it’s not entirely one-sided, but the Palestinian flag is far and away the most common flag along the entire Camino so far.

I reached the Parque de la Grajera about an hour after leaving the city. I was early enough to catch the night herons that seem to hang around the place. They have a somewhat patchy distribution across Europe, but they were here when I last did the Camino from Logroño to Burgos in the spring of 2023, so I was glad to see them again.

They were much too far off for a photograph, but the park’s red squirrels were a lot more obliging. Without the invading greys to worry about, they seem a lot more confident around people here, and so I was able to get quite close – or rather, it came quite close to me on its jaunty sortie across the bridge.

Today’s route featured a small pilgrimage of its own, to the shrine of La Virgen del Rocío. She is, in the humble opinion of this devotee, one of Spain’s most beautiful incarnations of the Virgin Mary. She certainly knows how to pick out a home, with her sanctuary within the Elysian marshes of Doñana National Park far to the south… and here she is, watching over a lagoon in La Rioja.

I remain convinced that it was partly her intercession – and that of the natural paradise where she resides – that healed me at last from last summer’s heartbreak, and it is partly because of that intercession that I am walking the Camino this summer… to say thanks. I owe her that much.

There were more squirrels to keep me company around the edge of the lagoon, including a boisterous couple that were quite unfazed by my presence, chasing each other up and down the trees on the edge of the lake. You have to travel quite some way in the UK to see these endangered creatures, since the American greys drove them out, but here they’re much more common.

La Virgen del Rocío is, among her other titles, a water spirit of sorts. Maybe that’s why she speaks to me more than the other incarnations across Spain that I’ve encountered: El Pilar, Remedios, Guadalupe… I’ve always felt some sort of connection to marshes and wetlands. It may seem odd that Mary, a woman from the hill country of Southern Galilee, should have such a devoted following in the wetlands of southwest Andalusia, but there it is.

El Rocío is the Spanish word for dew, and the Marian association with the Morning Star – Venus – as the herald of the rising sun is almost as old as her worship as the Mother of God.

I’ve often wondered whether the various Marian cults across the Mediterranean aren’t simply evolutions of the Roman tradition of the lares – guardian deities assigned to individual places – or perhaps even the Celtic peoples before that. In that light, it’s easy to see why other Christians find certain aspects of Catholicism hard to understand. But I think we’re all reaching for the same thing. Many Protestants would say they’re reaching for a more personal relationship with Jesus.

Well, what could be more personal than feeling an intense connection to God through a place that is so close to your heart?

West of Navarrete, the Camino meanders through a vast network of vineyards: a reminder that the tiny autonomous community of La Rioja punches above its weight in wine production (even if it can’t meet the demand on its own). It’s a 29km walk from Logroño to Nájera, but an easy one, and I was in town shortly after 12pm from a 6.30am start. I call that good going.

Reunited with the young folks tonight after an Irish exit and a hiatus of two days. Time for a sociable pizza night! I think I’ve earned it. BB x

6.15am, Gatwick North Terminal

I left over an hour and a half to make my flight this morning, but I could easily have done it in less. Even with the extras (a few more items of clothing than originally planned in case of inclement weather), I’m traveling lighter than ever. Who’d have the fuss of a suitcase when the open road is so inviting?

I think I must have raced to the gate in my eagerness. It was almost deserted for some time when I got here. Only two or three others joined me in my vigil: a Spanish girl chaperoned by her mother, a Greek/English couple (yes, I googled the man’s passport symbol – call me a nosy Parker but the square cross had me stumped) and a woman who from her accent could only be Basque: one side of her head shaved, brow furrowed, a black hoodie emblazoned with the slogan ‘DESIGNED BY AN IMMIGRANT’ in block white capitals.

No tannoy for this flight – the attendant called out Bilbao almost as quietly as I did trying to call a student over in the canteen last week for his poor choice of language. She only changed her tune to ‘Speedy Boarding Only’ when the first six or seven of us were clear. Sometimes, just occasionally, it pays to arrive ahead of schedule.

10.18am, Bilbao Intermodal Bus Station

I’ll say this much for Bilbao Airport: it’s a lot less hassle than Gatwick. All in all I don’t think it took much more than fifteen minutes between touchdown and the shuttle bus.

As I thought, the skies over Bilbao when we landed were clouded, grey and low. They always have been on my visits to this corner of Spain, to the extent that clouds and the Basque Country are virtually inseparable in my mind. The Spanish author Miguel Delibes once said that the sky over Castile is so high because the castellanos themselves put it there from staring at it so much. While my kith and kin chase the coy heavens plus ultra, always in search of the new, the ever practical Basques bring the skies down to their level, coveting the Viscayan rain and wrapping their dark forests in mist and cloud. I don’t expect to be free of that shroud until we reach the frontier.

11.56am, near Pobes

I’m now racing south on the Bilbao-Logroño bus, basking in the intermittent glow of the Spanish sun. Craters of blue have started to appear in the sky as though punched through by some celestial artillery, and still the Basque line of defence holds.

Here below, the landscape is changing. The military ranks of pines encamped around Bilbao suddenly give way to a gentle blanket of beech trees. Patches of brilliant green herald the coming of spring to these hills, and limestone crags scar the mountains like bones – first in uniform grey, then bleached with that warm golden stain that is so evocative of Spain’s highlands.

And then, suddenly, the dark hills of the Basque Country fall away and the plains of Castile are all around me: a forgivingly flat golden country, nestled between the high crags north of Haro and the snowbound peaks of the Sierra de Cebollera to the south. Castles and monasteries dating back to the time of a real frontier sit atop the hills and knolls like childish imitations of the limestone cliffs behind, the handiwork of the greatest craftsman of all.

And there, racing over the fields near an Alcampo petrol station, is my first swallow of the year. It’s only a fleeting glimpse as the bus races on past a bodega and a Lidl in quick succession, but it’s enough to make my heart soar – higher still than those Castilian skies.

I’m drunk on all this scenery, in case that wasn’t obvious (the overblown choice of a frontier semantic field was probably a dead giveaway). Rehab is the usual cure. However – to keep in line with this post’s choice of imagery – sod that for a game of soldiers. I have a week and more to wander around my grandfather’s country once again. I can’t think of a better rehab than this.

5.27pm, Albergue Santiago Apostol, Logroño

Logroño is climbing back out of its siesta. I’ve spent the afternoon here and there, though perhaps more here than there. Here being the Albergue Santiago Apostol, the same place I stayed when I last did the Camino four years ago. The only thing that seems to have changed is the stamp for my pilgrim’s passport. That, and I’ve come alone this time.

The albergue is quiet. I’ve only crossed paths with a handful of other pilgrims: Joan i Laura, a couple of peregrinos from Girona, a French family of three and a German family of four. I expected the Camino to be busier during Semana Santa, but I guess if you have a week’s holiday you’d do the stretch that can be done in a week or less – that is, the last 100km from Sarria. Out here in La Rioja, it’s likely to be rather quiet.

That will make for a rather soul-searching experience, which is no bad thing!

I’ve gone for dinner and breakfast at the albergue, 1) to make sure I actually eat and eat well and 2) to meet some of the other pilgrims ahead of the 31km stretch tomorrow. And also 3) because, at 16€ for dinner and breakfast, it’s a steal. I hadn’t forgotten how affordable the Camino is, but it is nice to rediscover, as it were.

I ate my lunch (chorizo and queso curado in a fresh barra de pan) under a beech tree on the bank of the Ebro river. Spring may be slow in coming to England but she’s been here a while already. The beak-clicking display of the local storks can be heard every so often, even from the albergue, though a drumming woodpecker in the park was giving them a run for their money.

English and Spanish birdsong combined on the riverbank. Blackcaps, wrens and blackbirds supported a local chorus of serins, short-toed treecreepers and wrynecks. I don’t think I’ve seen (or heard) a wryneck since my first stint in Villafranca back in 2015, but I hadn’t forgotten its call. After scanning the branches for a minute or so I tracked it down to a lightning tree just a few metres from where I was sitting. They really do look bizarre, the way they move about mechanically, looking for all the world like the clockwork nightingale from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. The wryneck kept me company for most of my lunch and only took off when a dog walker came by, carrying an African grey parrot on his arm.

I’ll try to catch the first of the procesiones tonight. ‘It’s only Monday,’ said the hostalero at the desk, alluding to the fact that the pinnacle of Semana Santa is toward the end of the week. Even so, my pride as a Spanish teacher is at stake (I have just been teaching the topic to my Year 10s) and besides, I’m a fanatic for the pasos. You can blame my year in Andalucía for that. I’ll also see if I can’t locate the local legend of the Bookseller of Logroño that fellow English traveler George Borrow recounted in his book on the Gypsies of Spain, published a little under two hundred years ago – because what’s an adventure without a quest of some description? BB x