travel

Camino XVII: The Bones of Burgos

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Albergue Casa del Cubo, Burgos. 22.55.

There’s a grumpy old Spanish guy in the bunk below mine. He made a point of asking me earlier if I snored in that direct, you had better not way that Spaniards do (‘No roncas, eh?’). He put the same question to my two companions just before bed. Well, after a couple of rounds of solitaire in his phone, he’s snoring away down there, along with the Koreans in the bunks next door. Like it matters…! You’d have thought a pilgrim might have learned a little patience by Burgos.

We got lucky yesterday. The Albergue in Atapuerca had a room of six beds so we had a room to ourselves, complete with an en suite bathroom. Along the way we’d picked up Gust, a seventeen-year-old Belgian student who was struggling with his blisters, so we took him under our wing for the rest of the day. There weren’t many restaurants in town, so I bought some supplies from the only shop in town (where the Central American shopkeeper was having a great time rapping to a backing track while I browsed the vegetable aisle) and rustled up a rice and vegetable pisto for the six of us. It felt good to cook for company again. It’s been a while.

We set out shortly before sunrise, finding our way up the Sierra de Atapuerca by moonlight. The sun was not yet over the horizon when we crested the hill, and the soundscape was still very much that of the Spanish night: a couple of scops owls called their piping call from the trees, the high-pitched twittering of a bat occasionally caught my ears and, from somewhere far off, the unmistakeable churr of a nightjar.

We stopped for breakfast in Cardeñuela Riopico at the same place I came with Mikkel, Sofia and Lachlan two years ago. It was just as good as it was then, only this time, I allowed myself to stay and eat rather than tearing off harum-scarum for Burgos on my own.

The signs are still defaced all over the place with images of the Star of David equaling a swastika. They’ve tried to cover them up with pilgrim pointers here and there, but the pilgrim preference for the Palestinian cause is obvious.

We reached Burgos early, despite missing the turnoff for the Río Arlanzón alternative (which I maintain is bloody well hidden, as I’ve now missed that turning twice). The result was at least half an hour of trudging through Burgos’ deeply unattractive industrial estate on the eastern side of the city, so we amused ourselves with a protracted game of Just a Minute, at which Talia proved to be a past master.

It was just before eleven when we reached the albergue, which meant we still had an hour to kill, so we took it in turns to do an ice cream run / sightseeing. Gust parted with us to meet up with his brother. We might run into him on the road, or we might not. I hope he looks after his feet – they were in a bad way.

There was a Mexican wedding or quinceañera or some kind of celebration in town, dressed in the decorated black, white and red that could belong to just about any traditional European country – though the loitering mariachis rather gave the game away.

After an afternoon nap (complete with one snoring Spanish hypocrite), I set out to investigate the Museo de la Evolución Humana, one of the world’s best human evolution museums. I managed to convince the team to check it out, but set out ahead of them to take out some money for the meseta stage (where, if memory serves, ATMs are hard to come by).

I’ll be honest with you. Human evolution is one of those things that absolutely fascinates me. In another life I’d have studied anthropology and primatology. Maybe seeing chimpanzees and mountain gorillas in the wild drove it home all those years ago, or maybe it’s an offshoot of a childhood obsession with all things palaeontological, but it’s genuinely one of my major passions in life, albeit one I don’t talk about so much.

I had a similar experience with the Museo de Tenerife in the spring, but the MEH in Burgos is even more jaw-dropping. The knowledge that I was looking at the real bones of some of our earliest ancestors was genuinely spine-tingling.

The caves of Atapuerca are one of the most valuable dig sites for the bones of ancient humans in the world, with over twenty-eight specimens found to date, alongside a host of other Pleistocene and earlier animals that no longer grace these hills, such as hyenas, jaguars, Irish Elk and the mighty cave bear.

I gleaned everything I could about our ancestors the last time came here in 2013, but there was plenty more to clue up on that if missed before: this time I learned a lot about Ramón y Cajal, Spain’s most eminent scientist and the man who discovered the neuron and its function. Maybe that’s why so many of the main streets and squares in Spanish towns and cities carry his name, connecting people and places like synapses firing daily.

In this morning’s walk-and-talk, one of my companions said she was intrigued by my quest for knowledge. That’s probably the biggest ego massage I’ve had in a while, but I’ll take it. I’m glad to have learned something very new, and it is very much an integral part of my personality to be always on the hunt for a new story, a new tale to tell.

I’ll pick this last one to finish, because it’s getting late, I’m behind on my blogging and the Koreans next door are on the verge of creating an unconscious four-part harmony with their cacophonous snoring.

There’s a small replica on the third floor of the MEH that is, as the plaque reads, quite possibly one of the precious of all the treasures in the collection. It is a mammoth task carved into the shape of a human – but with one strange detail. The head isn’t human at all. Rather, it’s quite clearly the head of a cave lion: stocky, bull-nosed but intensely leonine. It’s known as the Löwenmensch figurine – or the Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, and its concrete evidence of our ancestors’ ability to imagine around 40,000 years ago. Quite possibly, it’s the earliest evidence for mythology out there: man-beast hybrids remain a fairly common feature of world mythology to this day. Just look at Hinduism.

I’ll have to look into this incredible artefact some more when I get hole. But for now – sleep. I’ll be up again in five and a half hours… unless the Koreans wouldst wake Heaven with their snoring. BB x

Camino XVI: Silent Hill

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hostal la Plazuela Verde, Atapuerca. 15.50.

After yesterday’s paltry fifteen kilometre walk, today’s 30km+ hike across the Montes de Oca felt like much more of a feat. We’ve landed, at last, in Atapuerca, the last post before Burgos and the end of the line for several peregrinos.

I’ve enjoyed a few later starts over the last few days, so it felt good to get back to another 5am departure under the stars. It was a little chilly this morning, though not as cold as it was the last time I made this trek, when (if my memory serves) I required the use of gloves to stop my hands from shaking in the spring of 2023. The sun rose late, so for at least the first hour of today’s march I was under the aegis of the morning star, Venus, sitting alone in the firmament to the east.

The signs for Santiago are getting shorter. The kilometre count is nearly down to 500, so I’ll be passing the halfway point of the Camino at some stage between Burgos and León. I’m looking forward to the flats of the Meseta, but the mystery of the Camino de San Salvador and the Camino Primitivo are becoming more and more appealing by the day as I hear stories of these less-traveled roads from some of the pilgrims that I meet. It will certainly be a very different Camino to the one I’ve had for the last week or so.

Shortly after leaving Grañón yesterday, we entered the immensity of Castilla y León, Spain’s largest territory. The rivalry between the twin kingdoms remains in the signage, with most of the Camino markers defaced in some way so that the word “León” is crossed or blacked out. The reverse is true once you enter the old Leonese territories around Sahagún, where the graffiti becomes even more markedly separatist in nature. It’s a not so subtle reminder that Spain had always been a conglomerate of different peoples rather than one singular nation, from the Castilians and the Catalans to the Leonese, the Basques, the Galicians, the Andalusians and the Asturians.

How do you even begin to govern such a diverse nation, with such ancient and deeply-rooted territorial disputes?

After a much-needed breakfast stop at Villafranca Montes de Oca, where the bar (El Pájaro) opened just minutes after we arrived, we set off up into the forested hills. The Montes de Oca are the very north-westernmost reach of the larger Sierra de la Demanda. The name comes from an old dispute over land use in the hill country rather than the difficulty of its terrain, but after the relatively flat and easy days from Puente La Reina to Logroño and beyond, it is a demanding task before the endless expanse of the Meseta Central.

The Montes de Oca are a mystical place. Toward the top of the hill, the birdsong seems to die back into silence. Not even the vultures circle here. I’ve encountered this eerie silence before in Sachsenhausen, an olive grove near Víznar (Granada) and a remote village in northern Uganda, where the Lord’s Resistance Army marched in and executed the entire village. It is the silence of the dead.

A small concrete block marks the spot where around three hundred men and women were executed during the Civil War: Republicans, political dissidents, liberal thinkers and just about anyone who disagreed with the vision of the Nationalist state that was to come. They were dragged from their homes during the night to this lonely stretch of forest, summarily shot and thrown into one of a number of mass graves that can be found less than a hundred metres from the Camino itself.

This is the fate that might have befallen my great-grandfather Mateo, had he been any more outspoken in his beliefs than he already was. Instead, he was dismissed from his post and sent away to a village where he would not cause trouble, and only when he went to hospital for a minor operation did they find a way to deal with him quietly, leaving him on the hospital bed to die.

I suspect this, however, is what happened to the rest of his friends: the circle of poets, free-thinkers and philosophers to which he and his wife Mercedes belonged, before Franco and his nationalist forces turned their world upside down.

Many of the trees here are new: plantations of pine trees that were planted after the ancient oaks burned down in a fire some fifty years ago. Somewhere beneath them all are the remains of other victims of the war, concealed by Spain’s painful attempt to forget. The official Pacto del Olvido – the Pact of Forgetting – passed in 1975 after Franco’s death was an attempt to move on from the divisive horrors of the past and forge a new country, but for many, the memory of the silenced dead is still very raw. Even the birds of the forest seem to abide by it, nearly a century later.

A jolly chappie called Ángel had set up shop in the spot where there was a food truck a few years ago, selling fruit juice and watermelon slices, and at 2€ a throw for the latter, it was simply too good to pass up.

We stopped for a snack lunch at San Juan de Ortega (if tostada con tomate can be considered lunch) before pressing on to Atapuerca. Today and tomorrow are going to be the hottest days for a while with an average high of 35°C, so we were keen to reach our destination before the sun got too high in the sky.

I brought the team to a halt at Agés, the village where I stayed the last time I came this way, to drink and re-supply before the final two kilometre push across the shadeless fields of Atapuerca. Being an average of nine years older than the others in my group (ranging from seventeen to twenty-five), I have somewhat fallen into the position of leader, which seems to happen rather easily these days. I guess it’s the teacher in me. I don’t resent it at all. It’s quite nice to be able to look out for them and to serve as their guide, especially since one of them is still at school and doing the Camino as part of an IB project.

There aren’t that many options for eating out in Atapuerca, so we might cook together tonight. That would be nice, as tomorrow will invariably involve a farewell meal out in Burgos, so a communal dinner of own creation would make a welcome change.

My pilgrim passport is looking a lot healthier. One whole side is nearly complete. It’s getting easier to pick up three or more stamps per day (which was near impossible in the first week or so). I may not need my third credencial after all, though I suspect I will still need my second! BB x

Camino XV: Grañón

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Albergue Cuatro Cantones, Belorado. 20.57.

The grand majority of Camino guidebooks operate in such a fashion that some towns become natural starting and finishing points. At 21km from Nájera, Santo Domingo de la Calzada is a perfect example (with your average pilgrim walking around 20km a day). On the one hand, this is a very good thing, as it means any deviation from the recommended staging posts may give you a feel of the Camino as it used to be. On the other, it means that some towns soak up all the trade and leave the others dry. So how do you fight the industry?

Grañón has the answer: by being the most memorable and unique albergue on the entire Camino de Santiago.

After leaving Santo Domingo just before midday, I used the last of the cloud cover to beetle across the plains for a further 6km to Grañón, feeling slightly guilty that I was abandoning my Camino family again but confident that I was making the right decision – I’d missed Grañón before out of ignorance, and I wasn’t going to do so again in full knowledge.

Upon arrival I was greeted by the hospitaleros Kevin and Juan Manuel, a Chinese-Australian and a sevillano. For the first hour and a half it was just me and three Koreans, and it looked to be a rather cosy night ahead, but then Alex showed up, followed by Audrey, Alonso and Talia, and then Johan and Max. For whatever reason (possibly the clouds) they’d all decided to push on to Grañón after me. I must have sold it pretty convincingly without meaning to. My heart was lifted and I was tremendously grateful.

I fell into conversation with Juanma in the garden who asked after my Camino story, I told him about my grandfather and the grim fate that had befallen my great-grandparents, both victims of Franco’s regime – one murdered, the other dismissed and sent into a sort of internal exile. I’ve told this story so many times that it’s become second nature, but that’s the first time it’s drawn tears in a listener. Juanma explained that it had touched him deeply: his family, and so many others in Andalusia, had suffered a similar fate after the Civil War, which left thousands of families across the country broken, scattered and changed forever.

I’ll make a beeline for any Spanish accent, wherever I can find one, but I will always have a soft spot for an Andalusian. He was the only person thus far to recognise my Virgen del Rocío wristband for what it was, which was a tremendously good start for me: it’s not often one encounters a fellow devotee of the Mother of the Marshes on the Camino (or even another Catholic, but that’s another matter).

After preparing dinner – where for some reason I was assigned the role of sous chef and tasked with handing out jobs and ordering the entire operation – the hospitaleros requested some music. Johnny, an Irishman, was one of two who could play the guitar, but his repertoire and mine were worlds apart. The other guitarist, a young Danish kid fresh out of school, had only been learning a few months. So (not for the first time in my life) I ended up singing a cappella the only song I could think of that works: Pata Negra’s Yo me quedo en Sevilla.

It’s a gypsy love song to the city of Sevilla itself, and one that I’ve known since I first heard it on my mother’s Rough Guide to the Music of the Gypsies aged seven or eight. Back then, of course, my language skills weren’t really up to scratch, and I knew the song as “Single Feather”; my little brother and I used to run around the house holding a pheasant feather or something like that when it was playing in the old CD player. Ironically, it’s been a mainstay of my repertoire ever since, and one I usually wheel out if I’m called upon to sing in moments like this.

It’s amusing enough to be mistaken for a Spaniard because of the way that I speak, but delivering a gypsy ballad with all the frantic passion and duende that I can muster is both an ego trip and an out-of-body experience. I don’t think I have any gypsy blood at all, but the music speaks to me on a deeper level, touching my heartstrings in its dance through the blossom-scented squares of Sevilla.

God knows what the other pilgrims made of it but the Spaniards were impressed.

Later, after Mass, we had to go to the village bakery to collect our potatoes, as the albergue has no oven. There followed a strange ritual where we had to sing for our supper, divided up into nationalities. The Italians did two numbers (one I didn’t catch and Bella Ciao) and the Spanish committee (to which I defected) was psyched up for a tongue-in-cheek rendition of La Macarena, but since we were almost entirely hospitaleros (yours truly temporarily excluded), we were let off the hook. The English-speaking team (about 75% of the pilgrims, including my family and all the Koreans, Germans, Slovenes and Japanese) came up with… uh.,, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

Turns out they could easily have done Bohemian Rhapsody, but they didn’t organise in time. Never mind! One way or another, we got the potatoes.

After dinner, we went back into the church for a candlelit reflection in the choir. Prayers in multiple languages followed by the passing of the flame (the “pilgrim candle”) where we had a chance to say something: a reflection, a prayer, a wish for the Camino. Most of them just said “Buen camino” and passed it on. I held on for a good couple of minutes, I think.

I prayed out loud – something I don’t do all that often. It felt like the right thing to do. I prayed for my grandfather, José, and my great-grandparents, Mateo and Mercedes. I prayed for David, the father of one of my closest friends, for whom I have chosen to walk the Camino this year. I prayed for all of us, for a safe and spiritual road to Santiago. I prayed my thanks to God and to La Virgen del Rocío for all she has done for me this year: through heartbreak and healing and natural wonders, she has always been there to guide me.

Maybe it was a bit much. That would be very me. But it was (and may easily be) one of the only chances to worship together on the Camino and I took it with both hands.

I’d just brushed my teeth for bed when Juanma asked for a favour: he was taking over the albergue as hospitalero the day after and wanted help with translating his script into English. I worked it out with him from a notebook in a bar in town over a caña while he ordered his “usual” (a Maxibon ice cream).

We discussed a lot of things. Why there aren’t many Spaniards on the Camino (they’re all on bicycles, competing against each other to complete it in the fastest possible time). Why there are so many Koreans (it’s nationally regarded as a major CV booster, as well as a temporary solution to widespread youth unemployment). And where the Germans, who used to be everywhere, have gone (the Via de la Plata and the Via Mozárabe, to avoid the crowds on the Francés).

I’ll have more to say later about our next stop, I suspect. But I wanted to get this all down now while it’s fresh in my mind. It’s taken at least an hour, but it has killed the time and allowed me to stay and wait for the others to wake up, and that’s no bad thing. BB x

Camino XIV: Black Eyes

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Cafetería La Concha, Grañón. 16.15.

A red sky in the morning is usually a herald of rain. I saw the rising sun for just a fraction of a minute as I left Nájera: a huge blood-red disk, perfectly circular, disappearing almost as soon as it appeared behind a low curtain of cloud that stretched at least as far as Aragón, and perhaps beyond. It’s certainly true that it was a cooler and cloudier morning than most, but whatever promise of rain the sun made it the early hours was forgotten once it was out of sight, like a fickle lover. The clouds have almost entirely disappeared, leaving behind the immense blue heavens for which Spain is so famous.

I’m here in Grañón – ice cream in hand – and it couldn’t have worked out for the better.

I was woken in the night by a pillow to the face. In the half-light I saw the pilgrim on the bunk below standing there. He said something, but it was in German and I was half-asleep, so I neither understood nor recall what he said. I guess I might have been snoring, though that’s not usually a problem these days – but I was on the top bunk, which had no railings, so my sleeping posture probably wasn’t the best last night.

The others – my Camino family, as it were – were all still fast asleep, and their intention was to reach Santo Domingo de la Calzada (the guidebooks do have a strong hand in where pilgrims end up), so I set out alone. I have somewhat mastered the “Irish Exit” strategy, and the Camino lends itself very well to such a move.

The reward for striking out alone was a nightjar – and not just the sound of one, but the sight of one as well. They’re bizarre creatures, nightjars: shaped like a cuckoo, or maybe a small hawk, with an owl-like face, a whispered beak and enormous black eyes. They’re often heard in the places they frequent, but rarely seen due to their nocturnal habits, so it’s remarkable that they should have left such an impression as to have such an intensely evocative name in each language.

In German they’re nachtschwalben – night swallows. In Spanish, chotacabras – goat-suckers (the Italian succiacapre is much the same). The French use the term engoulevent – literally, wind-eater, on account of their hunting habit of flying through the twilight air with their beaks wide open. In English, I can only assume the name is phonic: because the nightjar’s call can only be described as a long, rasping jar or churr, which it can go on producing for hours with seemingly no need to rest.

I only saw it a few times as it moved beneath the forest canopy, with the jerky motion of a child’s toy glider, its wings held high as it manoeuvred dextrously through the trees. But it was enough. I consider that a very good start to the day.

I came this way during the spring a few years ago and I remember needing gloves, it was so cold. There was even frost on the ground. Not so today: the endless green fields of shimmering wheat have since turned to gold, as though by the hand of Midas. With the merciful cover of the clouds, they were not blinding to the eye, so the loss of my sunglasses in Sansol the other day was no concern, though I did buy a new pair in Santo Domingo; it would be nothing short of madness to attempt the ceaseless flat of the Meseta without them (where it sometimes feels like you’re walking on the sky).

I stopped in Santo Domingo to have the rest of the pâté and bread I bought yesterday as a light lunch. The last time I came here, I was with Mikkel, Lachlan and Sophia and so I never got around to visiting the cathedral, so I made good on that today. Apart from netting me another couple of stamps for the credencial, it also housed a number of treasures that I wanted to investigate – not least of all the famous “resurrected chickens” that feature so prominently in the town’s history.

Santo Domingo de la Calzada, like so many towns along the Camino, was born on the pilgrim road, founded by the same Domingo García who gave the town its name. Its most famous legend tells of the execution of a young German pilgrim who, passing through the town, attracted the attention of the mesonera (innkeeper). After rejecting her amorous advances, the spiteful mesonera concealed a silver cup in the pilgrim’s bag before he left, for which he was accused of theft, sentenced to death and hanged on the spot. When his parents came to identify the body, they found him alive, claiming Santo Domingo had saved him. The sceptical mayor, who was fairly sure that the boy they had hanged the day before had been executed properly, claimed he was as alive as the chicken on his plate – which promptly stood up and crowed, testifying to the truth of the pilgrim’s fate.

Ever since, a pair of the descendants of the resurrected chickens (don’t ask me how they check) have been kept in the cathedral, together with a piece of the scaffold where they hanged – or tried to hang – the innocent pilgrim, all those centuries ago. Go figure.

Santo Domingo’s cathedral, like many in Spain, is full of hidden treasures. I was particularly taken – as always – by the mythical creatures that pop up in the stonemasonry. Harpies, dragons, demons, griffins… for a faith that spent so much time and money driving all traces of paganism from the land, it sure is amusing to see that Spain’s churches are full to the rafters – quite literally – with frozen memories of that dark world.

One really stands out, especially after some recent reading. In one alcove, an icon of the Virgin Mary and child stands above the carved image of a griffin – in fact, there’s quite a few griffins watching over the chapel from the surrounding pillars. There’s a deeper poignancy at work here: griffins have been symbols of maternity since their invention over a thousand years ago.

Unlike the other mythological beasts of the ancient world, like centaurs, unicorns and minotaurs – which have a solid grounding in Greek mythology – the griffin seems to spring into existence out of nowhere, but already fully-formed.

Adrienne Mayor has a very convincing theory that the griffin is an unmistakeable reimagining of the protoceratops, a Cretaceous era dinosaur often found protecting its young in the lands where griffins were believed to reside (Central Asia). As stories of such “griffins” reached Europe, they entered our heraldic system, and are often to be found around the Virgin Mary, the single most important symbol of maternity in the Christian faith. A seemingly bizarre pairing – but a perfectly logical one. Two ancient beliefs meeting in the middle.

Under the cathedral, where Santo Domingo is buried, a relatively recent mosaic stares out at you from a thousand shining tiles. The design is modern, but the style is almost Byzantine: teardrop-shaped faces line the wall with huge, almond eyes the colour of midnight.

This is the kind of religious art that I have always found especially compelling. There’s an otherworldliness to it that borders on the mystical, a connection to the faith of those first believers long ago. That’s what I sometimes think the modern church is missing, why so many lose interest: the more it tries to modernise, to catch up to the new generations “on their level”, the more it loses the mystery that made the early church so compelling. I know that for me, at least, it’s that connection to the ancient ways, to tradition, that speaks to me. And I get a piece of that when I see this kind of art, even in imitation. A mirror to the ancient world, when faith was new and hot like a flame.

It’s nearly half past five. I’d better head back to the albergue – I’m on dinner duty. That’s the price for arriving early! BB x

Camino XIII: Milady

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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

Camino XII: Tormentón

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Albergue Parroquial de Santiago, Logroño. 19.20.

Last night, quite out of nowhere, a summer storm swept across the north. No rain, no hail; nothing but the unfettered might of the wind. One moment the sun was shining, the next the wind had reached gale force and the shutters were slamming against the windows as a dirty vortex of dust, leaves and debris slammed into Sansol like a hurricane.

It didn’t last long – five minutes, tops – but it darkened the sky, and lightning bolts fell in silent flashes all through the night.

When I left Sansol the following morning, after a long night of waking dreams, it was to a battered world. A pool full of leaves. Branches uprooted and cast across the path. Trees felled. A solitary stone curlew cried its mournful call in the darkness amid the devastation. Perhaps it’s the same bird I heard six years ago. As I tiptoed through the debris, I nearly stepped on a baby toad, almost invisible amid the scattered stones.

It’s a fair hike from Sansol to the next town, Viana, but it is the last stop before Logroño, which you can see from the hills long before you get there. This is also where we say goodbye to Navarra and the last glimpse of far-off Aragón, before they disappear behind the hills for good.

We’re now in the wine country of La Rioja – the rolling fields of wheat are still with us, but they’re interlaced with green vineyards now. Rioja wine is famous the world over, so it should come as no surprise that one of Spain’s smaller regions can’t handle the demand all on its own. In fact, most of the grapes that make a good Rioja actually come from neighbouring Castilla La Mancha, one of Spain’s largest regions, before being processed here. La Mancha produces its own incredible wine (which, realistically, should be up to the same standard), but it isn’t quite as famous as the world-renowned Rioja. One day, perhaps.

The wind picked up again as I reached Logroño. I didn’t much like the look of the clouds, and it looked like the storm had done even more damage here than in Sansol. Several of the trees lining the Ebro river had been ripped up by the roots and lay where they had fallen across the pavement. A quick glance at the Spanish news implied that it had looked even worse this morning, so perhaps they just hadn’t got around to fixing the park yet.

A flash of electric blue caught my eye as I crossed the bridge – a kingfisher. Who could ever lose that sense of wonder at such a sight? It didn’t hang around for long, but long enough for me to see it dive into the river in a halcyon blur before speeding away downriver.

It was still a good three hours until the Albergue Parroquial opened its doors, so I stashed my luggage in a locker which I hired for 6.50€ and set out to explore, unencumbered. It costs about the same to have the Jacotrans couriers deliver your rucksack to the next town for the day, but I felt a lot less guilty about this minor transaction. It’s difficult to justify lugging a whopping great backpack around a museum, after all.

The rain came down while I was in the Museo de La Rioja, so I managed to dodge the worst of it. It wasn’t as impressive as the collection in Jaca or Santa Cruz de Tenerife, but I was rather taken with one of the paintings, which featured a blonde Virgin Mary. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her painted with blonde hair before. Jesus seems to have more colourings than a Pantene catalogue, but Mary is pretty consistently dark-haired, so this one stood out for… well, looking so odd. Beautiful, but… odd. Like an understudy. Was she the artist’s unrequited love, I wonder?

Once the rain had cleared, I grabbed my bag and checked in, before nipping back out for another wander. A tuna band was in town, dressed in their usual medieval splendour and serenading ladies left and right.

I’ve always loved tuna bands. If I’d done an Erasmus year or studied abroad, which was my original intention, I’m pretty sure I’d have launched myself at one. My uncle Rafael was in a tuna in his university days, and I suspect my grandfather and great-grandfather were also involved to some degree. It’s a tradition that goes back to the 13th century, so it’s a little bit grander than the a cappella groups that have taken the university music scene by storm. However, it is limited to Spain, and it is fundamentally a social and busking enterprise, so it’s not likely to break into a world championship anytime soon. After all – surely the real prize is a smile from the serenaded lady in question, be she twenty-one or seventy-three!

Logroño’s tapas street was absolutely packed, and with good reason: it’s famous for its gastronomy (not just the wine), with around fifty bars serving tapas and pintxos all within the city centre. There were at least six stag/hen do’s in town, all with matching t-shirts (together with one fairy godmother and one Jafar) so I was quite relieved to have a communal dinner with the other pilgrims at the Albergue Parroquial.

Dinner was a lovely affair, and a linguistic hurdle for me, constantly switching between English, French, Italian and Spanish. Sometimes I get bugged by the language barrier (I’m not fluent in Italian), but it does me a lot of good to listen and learn as I walk.

Tomorrow is still up in the air. I have in mind a rest day of sorts, going only as far as Navarrete. I’m not a huge fan of rest days, but I figure I might need it if I’m going to stay fit and healthy on my feet for the next four weeks. It might also be nice to shuffle the pilgrim pack a little. I haven’t really found my scene yet.

It’s gone twenty past ten. The Slovak flirt in the next bunk has finally stopped yapping away with the American girls and gone to bed. I should head, too. I might change my mind and make for Nájera tomorrow, or I might not. I’m still undecided. And that’s the best thing about the Camino. It allows me to be free. Every day. If only every day could be like this. BB x

Camino X: Hellmouth

/ Benjamin Barnabas / 1 Comment

Albergue Municipal, Estella-Lizarra. 20.39.

Excuse the late entry – I’ve chosen to be sociable today and have spent most of the afternoon in the company of fellow pilgrims from around the world. It’s been a welcome change after nine days of silence! But a promise is a promise, and I have a duty to uphold! So here’s today’s report.

I was up early this morning – five to four, to be precise. Falling asleep around ten didn’t help my sleep pattern, I guess. I couldn’t quite justify striking out for Estella so soon – it is only just under 22km from Puente La Reina – so I dawdled until five, at which point several pilgrims were already getting ready to go. Again, I dawdled, not wanting to arrive in Estella with two hours to kill before being able to jettison my rucksack, so I carved the names “Niña” and “Pinta” into my sticks (after Columbus’ ships – the Santa María, the third of the trio, is my rosary). It’s not especially visible, as all I had to hand was a kitchen knife, but it’s a start.

I was one of the first to strike out, but I gradually let a fair number of pilgrims overtake me. I stopped frequently; waiting for the sunrise at Cirauqui, sketching a lonely cemetery, grabbing a tortilla sandwich at the same bar I ate in when I walked this path with my mother six years ago. I also managed to collect a few stamps, which is always a plus.

I spent a lot of time today looking at the decorations on houses and doors, which suddenly become more elaborate upon entering the Basque territories. Many houses bear a heraldic crest, and around here the motif of the knight’s helmet with the visor raised is fairly common. In heraldry, this is usually the sign of high-ranking nobility. Many of medieval Spain’s most prominent nobles were of Basque extraction (or Basque adjacent), like the Mendoza, Loyola and Haro lines.

Curiously, scratched beneath one of these crests were two symbols. One is easily recognisable as the Índalo, an ancient fertility symbol from Spain’s southeast. The other is… well, I’m not entirely sure. I’m fairly certain it’s an invention by the artist who left the Índalo, in much the same style, with what seems to be a serpent drawn out of the end. Graffiti usually has a point to make – I wonder what it could mean?

I couldn’t help noticing the door knockers as I passed through Cirauqui. My mother used to fill memory cards with photographs of these things, which in the south (and here) often take the shape of a woman’s hand holding a metal ball, known as a Hand of Fátima. It’s an ancient Moorish motif used to ward off the evil eye, and appears in a lot of Mediterranean and North African jewellery. The lion’s head – a style much more familiar to those of us who live on the other side of the Pyrenees – does much the same thing, warding off evil spirits with its frozen roar.

I am, of course, reading far too much into this. I imagine your average Joe (or José) probably doesn’t consider how effective this or that door knocker will be at warding off evil spirits. Still, it’s one of those things that’s so deeply embedded into our psyche that we don’t even realise we’re doing it. Like Christmas, in a way. Most of us don’t give thanks to God for the birth of Jesus Christ on the 25th December, but that doesn’t stop us from opening presents and celebrating late into the night.

I spent so much time hobnobbing with fellow pilgrims this afternoon that I didn’t really get to explore Estella much. It was also a sweltering 36°C, which didn’t exactly encourage an afternoon wander. Fortunately, I stayed here for two whole days the last time I came through, so I’ve seen all of Estella and its charms before.

One thing I did seek out, though, was the remarkable archway of the Iglesia del Santo Sepulcro. It caught my attention today for the same reason it did all those years ago: the horrifying maw swallowing sinners, and dragging them into Hell.

This motif is not unique to Estella. It can be found all over Europe. I’m fairly sure I saw one in Bordeaux last week. It’s known as a Hellmouth, and it can be found in Anglo-Saxon artwork at least as far back as the 8th century. It’s thought to be a representation of the “Crack of Doom”, the Day of Judgment – crack having a dual meaning in English, being both a harsh sound (like a thunderbolt or trumpet blast) and a chasm or pit. It may even have ties to an old Scandinavian legend of the Fenris Wolf, who was destined to swallow up Odin, the Allfather, and thus the world entire.

It’s certainly funny to think that such an English (read: Anglo-Saxon) blend of Christian and pagan imagery should find its way onto the doorway of a Spanish church, over a thousand kilometres to the south. It’s just one more reminder of the power of a good story: dropped in the right place, and told in the right way, it can send ripples that cross entire oceans.

Tomorrow I make for Los Arcos, a town I bypassed last time in favour of the ice baths of Sansol. Let’s see what I missed! BB x

Camino VIII: A Hundred Eyes

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Albergue de Peregrinos, Monreal. 15.10.

One of the best things about the Camino – at least, for somebody who does not particularly enjoy sticking to a strict plan – is its absolute freedom. You can aim for a particular destination at the end of the morning, but if you overshoot, or find a place you like along the way, you can always change your plan. And – it goes without saying – there is no “true” Camino. There never has been. There is simply your route to Santiago, wherever that may lead you.

Today, I decided to take a major detour through the Foz de Lumbier, deviating from the “official” Camino by some six kilometres, in search of one of the most striking landscapes to be seen on all of the routes to Santiago de Compostela.

Google Maps suggested the detour would take around eight hours, so I set out early, leaving Sangüesa’s albergue at around 5.15am (5.20, technically, as I left my sticks behind and had to double-back to get them). The Camino turns off about half a kilometre north of Sangüesa, just before the Smurfit industrial complex, but I pushed on along the road towards Liédana. There was quite a bit of traffic at first, but it was mostly workers going to the factory: after leaving the complex behind, I hardly saw anyone on the road.

There were a few scattered yellow arrows west of Liédana, indicating that this must once have been one of the many Camino routes, if not perhaps one of the more commonly known alternatives. I had timed my arrival at La Foz for sunrise, knowing that any earlier would have been far too cold and dark and any later would risk a merciless march along the roads later on. Plus, in the first hour after dawn, it’s always possible you’ll find something unexpected, as the animals of the night make their final rounds before retreating into the dark places where they hide during the day.

I had not counted on the wind. A fierce north wind was blowing this morning, almost strong enough to knock the sunglasses off the top of my head, and easily powerful enough to make it impossible to listen to the audiobook I had on (Robert Harris’ Conclave – a little late to the party, I know).

La Foz de Lumbier is one of two major canyons that can be found in the Sierra de Leyre, formed by the southwest passage of two rivers, the Irati and the Salazar. The other, La Foz de Arbaiun, is even grander still, but stands some twelve kilometres to the east of Lumbier, putting it well out of reach of even this overambitious pilgrim for today.

The north wind was still howling down the canyon when I arrived, which made the tunnel access all the spookier: the only way in and out of the canyon is via two long tunnels cut into the cliffs, neither of which are lit. The southern tunnel curves around to the right, pitching you into total darkness for half a minute or so.

Once inside, a gravel track known as a Via Verde (a converted railway line) leads you along the gorge. Had I arrived later in the day, perhaps, I might have seen some of the canyon’s famous Egyptian Vultures: bizarre, chicken-faced creatures with white plumage and diamond-shaped tales that migrate to Spain from their winter quarters in Africa each year. However, they were nowhere to be seen this morning, presumably sitting on their nests deep in the many caves within the cliffs.

The gorge’s other resident vultures, however, were everywhere.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that my passage through the canyon was being very closely watched, as though hundreds of eyes were following me along the river. My guess wasn’t far off the mark: once my eyes adapted to the twilight of the canyon, I realised that many of the bushes atop the canyon walls were in fact a great host of griffons, staring down at me with bobbing movements of their snakelike necks.

Every so often one or two of them would spread their monstrously huge wings and take off into the morning, before returning, feet dangling, to land on some other outcrop downriver, before turning their hulking shapes to see how much progress I had made.

I make no secret of my love for vultures. They are far and away my favourite animals on this planet, and especially griffons. I have never recovered from seeing one for the first time during that first trip to Spain: never accustomed to anything larger than a herring full, I was spellbound by the sheer size of the beasts, with their hulking shape, their silent circling flight and the long, trailing fingers on the end of each wing. That obsession only intensified when I came face to face with them during a solitary climb up the misty mountain of El Gastor, where I spent an incredible hour watching the giants appear suddenly out of the mist at eye level, merely feet away from my perch at the edge of the mountain.

So perhaps you’ll understand why I was so quick to slap an extra six kilometres onto today’s 27km hike, if only to spend some time in the presence of these magnificent creatures. They truly take my breath away.

But Lumbier had more than just vultures to sling at me. Just before leaving the gorge, I noticed something moving in the water below. It might have been the wind, which had been making shapes across the surface of the river all morning, but this was moving slowly against the current. Something long, snake-like, with a white-whiskered face: an otter. Talk about a stroke of luck! Just like the lynx I encountered in Doñana earlier this year, this was a first: I have never seen an otter in the wild before, or at least, one that I could call with any degree of certainty. iPhone cameras are good, but they can’t zoom and they’re not brilliant at moving objects in low light, but if you look closely you can just about tell what you’re looking at!

Really, I ought to have hung around at the other side of the tunnel to see if it reappeared, but I wasn’t entirely sure how long it would take me to get back to the Camino, so I played it safe and left the otter to his morning swim. I certainly couldn’t have done an awful lot better with my phone camera even if it did return. I’ll just have to come back someday with the rest of my kit.

Instead, I skirted the town of Lumbier and made my way back to the Camino. This was easier said than done: the “official” route meanders through the turbine-topped hills on the other side of the roaring A-21. Getting back to it was no easy feat, so I followed the old concrete road to Jaca for about 8km.

Normally, road stretches along the Camino can be quite hairy, with grim or even challenging looks from drivers. A spate of pilgrim deaths on the “original” Camino, now overlaid with concrete highways, led to the move toward the current network of tracks and footpaths. However, thanks to the A-21, which runs parallel, there was hardly anyone on the road at all, which made for a very peaceful (if monotonous) walk.

The sun was well on its way to its throne in the Castilian sky by now, and with it, the vultures of La Foz de Lumbier came drifting out on the thermals, as though to see me off.

I had a veritable fleet of raptors to keep me company today. As well as the vultures, a few kestrels, buzzards and booted eagles were circling the hills around Izco, along with the usual red and black kites. Today added two new encounters to the mix: a pair of short-toed eagles – exceptional snake-hunters – and a young hen harrier, my first (and hopefully not last) of the Camino. I have an especial fondness for harriers, especially the ghostly grey males, whose long, tapering wings and bouncy flight always conjure up images of the endless meseta in my head.

The cattle-crowded foothills of the French Pyrenees seem like an age ago. We are now very much in crop country. It hasn’t had much of an impact on the flies, which are everywhere this summer (I suspect the two months of rain Spain had this spring has caused their numbers to explode this year), but it does make for considerably easier terrain.

Contrary to what the guidebooks say, Monreal does have a working bar/restaurante. The hospitalera should know – it’s her husband who runs it! So I will grab a pizza there tonight, before the last long march of the Camino Aragonés tomorrow toward Puente La Reina and the start of the next stage of my journey: the busier Camino Francés. At least, I hope it will be busier! There’s no guarantee in July, but it should at least have more than one pilgrim in the albergue from night to night! BB x

Camino VII: Out of the Woods

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Albergue de Peregrinos, Sangüesa. 16.06.

I overslept today – by Camino standards, anyway. I’m pretty sure I set both alarms last night, but I have a habit of turning them off and falling straight back to sleep. Either way, it was gone six o’clock when I woke up today. Mari Carmen, the seventy-eight year old Valencian who is the only other pilgrim on the road, had already packed and gone. I dressed quickly and had breakfast, which had been left out for me in the dining room. I wouldn’t exactly call two slabs of bread with butter and jam and tea-making facilities a bargain – that cost me 6€ yesterday – but Ruesta is so cut-off from everything and everywhere else that there were no other options, and beggars can’t be choosers.

Gronze (the Camino website I’ve been using to map out the Voie d’Arles and the Camino Aragonés) describes today’s stage as “melancholic”. I thought that was probably a bit melodramatic, but it’s actually a pretty accurate adjective for the first hour and half. Leaving the abandoned village of Ruesta behind (I was genuinely the only person in the entire village when I left), the Camino snakes downhill to ford a narrow stretch of the Embalse de Yesa before climbing slowly back up the other side over the space of an hour. I usually like the forested stretches, as they can be more mysterious and refreshing than the unforgiving plains, and yet… something was off about this forest. It was far too quiet. There’s usually some birdsong in the early hours before the sun crests the hills, but over the space of an hour, I only heard one sound, and that was the screech of a jay far off.

I’ve often experienced this feeling in the presence of Spain’s false lakes. The Embalse de Yesa and its surrounding pine forests are entirely artificial. I saw a doe racing through the trees near the summit, and a red squirrel high up in the branches of a tree, but the lack of birdsong was chilling. It’s as though they keep a mournful silence for the drowned valley below, unwilling to disturb the rest of the watery dead.

I sometimes wonder if nature is laughing at us when we try to shape the world like her, or if she is just quietly disappointed.

As for me, I was quietly relived when the trees cleared and I was in the sunlit fields once again. The quails had returned, along with a host of finches and larks, and with my spirits restored, I set off toward Undués de Lerda.

Undués looks like many Aragonese hillside towns: built of the same stone upon which it stands, it has a habit of vanishing from sight under the cover of cloud, becoming obvious to the eye only when the sun reveals the shadows of its doors and windows. I arrived shortly before nine, but the town was still fast asleep, and everything from the bar to the church was shut up tight. So I moved on.

Near the Aragonese frontier, I saw something in the grass at my feet that made me pause. It was a swallowtail, and it wasn’t leaping into the air as they are wont to do when people draw near. On closer inspection, I think it must have had a run-in with a predator, because one of its swallowtails was missing and part of the same wing was damaged.

Known in English as the scarce swallowtail (on account of its rarity as a migrant in the British Isles), this species is actually fairly common in Spain. It’s not often you get to see one so close outside of a butterfly sanctuary, however, and the markings on its wings are really remarkable. They’re actually made up of thousands of scales, each one containing pigments like melanin or papiliochromes, that create a vivid array of colours used for sending messages, either to potential predators or partners. I saw a sign in a butterfly sanctuary on Tenerife where somebody had managed to make an entire alphabet just from close-ups from butterfly wing patterns. With nearly 20,000 specified of butterfly in the world, perhaps that’s not surprising.

This little fella was in a dangerous spot, right in the middle of the road, so I gently coaxed it onto my hand and then found a more sheltered spot in the verge where it might be out of harm’s way. Unless it recovers the ability to fly, it will probably end up as a snack for an enterprising bee-eater – a bird both large and nimble enough to deal with a swallowtail – so I hope it finds its strength.

A small stone marker in Basque lettering indicated that I had left Aragón and was now in the former kingdom of Navarra. The landscape has changed: the high mountains of Aragón, ever at my side for the last few days, have been replaced by a series of endlessly rolling hills, a patchwork of gold and olive green. This will be the scenery for the next week and half, until I reach Burgos and the meseta begins in earnest.

I was lucky to see one of Spain’s oldest traditions in action shortly after crossing the border. One of the cañadas reales crosses the Camino here, specifically the Cañada Real de los Roncaleses. These are the old migration routes across the country, where shepherds have led their flocks from north to south in search of fresh pastures since the medieval period. A source of milk, cheese and the precious merino wool, Spain’s sheep were a highly valuable commodity and the cañadas received royal protection and their own guild, El Honrado Concejo de la Mesta, which had tremendous privileges.

Nowadays, of course, merino wool can be found all around the world – you can thank Napoleon’s invasion of Spain for breaking that monopoly – but the shepherds still use these ancient pathways, as their ancestors have done for over a thousand years.

It’s been a pretty mild walk today, so it was surprising to see a mass of estivating snails on the way in to Sangüesa. They must have done this during the heatwave, when temperatures in some parts of Spain soared into the forties. They’re not dead, as such, but in a state of dormancy, waiting out the worst of the summer until they can return to life when the temperatures cool down.

Well, Sangüesa is the busiest town I’ve seen so far. The albergue is nearly full, though not with your usual pilgrims: these are almost entirely Spanish bicigrinos, a term used to describe pilgrims who travel by bicycle. It’s a portmanteau, but one can’t help the feeling that it’s almost always just a little pejorative, with many pilgrims feeling that their lycra-clad one-night companions are not true pilgrims in the strictest sense. The decibel count in the albergue has certainly gone up since they arrived, just in time to replace the building site next to the albergue and the slamming windows.

Still – it’s a good ease-in to the popularity of the Camino Francés, the most popular of all the roads to Santiago. I’ve enjoyed my own company for the last week, and though I’m looking forward to meeting all sorts of interesting people on the road, I will miss these long stretches of quiet. BB x

Camino VI: The Ventriloquist

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Albergue de Ruesta. 16.20.

Picture this, if you can. Call upon all of your senses.

First, sound. Wind, cool and dry, blowing in the branches of the pine trees above, their branches coated in trailing clumps of lichen. A blackcap singing an enchanting solo in the forest, and an endless percussion of cicadas, assailing the ear with their rasping ostinato from every side. You can’t see them. But they’re there. Hundreds of them.

Next, smell. The fresh scent of pine bark, mingling with the dusty trace of crumbling masonry. The occasional coolness of water blowing in off the lake. Mingling with taste, a hint of fried fish from the bar, which closed up shop half an hour ago.

Touch, then. The feel of carved wood, nearly two centuries old. The trace of numbers in stone, chiselled in many hundreds of years before even that. The uneven cobbles of a road long since neglected, and the powdery feel of the houses that line it, within which a thousand plants have weaved a citadel of their own.

Finally, sight. Picture an entire village abandoned a hundred years ago. See the stone balconies, carved with Roman triumph, presiding over an empty world. A church, with fragments of brilliant blue still visible in the decaying fresco above the spot where the slate once stood, stripped bare and opened to the heavens. A lonely watchtower, manned now by thirsty crows, their beaks agape in the heat of the afternoon.

This is my stop for tonight: the abandoned village of Ruesta, one of the last stops before leaving Aragón.

I left on time this morning, shortly before six, sent on my way by Lulu and Nicole with a packed sandwich, an orange and a boiled egg. It felt like being sent off to school. Some hospitaleros really do push the boat out to make you feel at home during your brief stay!

I missed the sign in the darkness and so headed north for a kilometre before joining the road and returning to my westward trajectory. It added about fifteen minutes to my time, but it did give me an unrestricted view of the morning.

Camino sunrises are something of a tradition on the way to Santiago, but I am going to miss these Aragonese mornings. There’s something about the mountains that makes them that much more mystical. Maybe it’s the way the light turns each row of hills a different shade of blue, always fading toward the base.

I spent a considerable part of the morning chasing quails. They’re almost impossible to see with the naked eye, standing at around 16cm tall (that’s just over half a ruler) and seldom taking flight when alarmed, preferring to sit tight and rely on their cryptic camouflage to avoid detection. They were all over the place, though – I must have counted at least forty individuals calling from different spots along the Camino in the hour or two after sunrise. They can throw their voices around 150 metres, which can make them very hard to locate, especially when there are four or five in the same field calling at once. I flushed one completely by accident at the side of the road and it took off into one of the vast wheat fields on sharp, whirring wings.

England must have sounded like this, a long time ago. There are places you can go in the UK and hear quails, which do migrate that far (some make it all the way to Scotland), but not on the same scale as you can here in Spain.

Along with the quails, I saw a grey partridge – a rarity in Spain, confined to the north – and goodness knows how many corn buntings, but I think it’s the foxes that stood out the most. There must be plenty in the area, as I saw three within a rather short space of time, including one sprinting across a field near Martés.

A major feature of today’s walk were the badlands de yeso: strange, wrinkled mounds of gypsum, a distinctive feature of Aragón, Navarra and Almería. This is the kind of terrain that contains fossils like the shell I found yesterday: a prehistoric stockpile of marine life, buried deep beneath the soft grey hills. They’re really quite striking, and since there are no Caminos that pass through the Bardenas Reales to the southwest (one of the strangest lunar landscapes you can find in Europe), the Camino Aragonés does at least provide an introduction.

I stopped for water shortly after a brief exploration of Artieda and its gypsum hills (to the great confusion of a local who thought I’d lost the Camino). Here, at my feet of all places, I found one of the ventriloquists: not a quail, but a cicada. They usually conceal themselves high up in the trees, where their voices carry and their mottled bodies blend perfectly into the bark. This one was clearly an amateur, however, as the motion of its churring was trembling the blade of grass in its legs, making it stand out like a sore thumb.

Not to be outdone, my final hour was a butterfly parade, with a scarce swallowtail taking centre stage. I have fond memories of this little creature as it’s one of the ten animals I recorded on my first trip to Spain as an eleven-year-old. Contrary to the famous adage popularised by Muhammad Ali, most butterflies don’t “float”, having a rather manic and jerky flight. Swallowtails, however, are on the larger side, and they do float, or at least seem to, fanning their wings out midflight to glide on the air. They’re skittish, like most butterflies, so it’s hard to get close, but their size, acrobatics and striking colours make them a delight to watch.

Which brings me to Ruesta. There’s really all sorts on the Camino, and Ruesta is very much one of the sorts. Abandoned in 1959 after a lengthy decline – largely because of the construction of the nearby Yesa reservoir, which flooded most of the agricultural land the village depended on – the village has largely fallen into a slow state of disrepair.

Ruesta’s church had some spectacular frescos, which were carefully transferred to Jaca’s Diocesan museum to prevent them from being lost forever. I imagine the place might once have looked not too dissimilar to Artieda, a hilltop town not too far from here. From some angles, you can still just about imagine life as usual: children running down the street to school, the bakery in full swing, old locals gathered at a street corner to gossip…

Ruesta has two functioning buildings: a casa de cultura (of all things) and an albergue, complete with a lively bar/restaurante. The secret to Ruesta’s survival is its acquisition by the CGT, the Confederación General del Trabajo, one of Spain’s larger trade unions. There are plenty of clues for those who don’t recognise the red-and-black flag: the raised fist, the quotes and dates graffitied across the walls and the plethora of signage in Catalan, Galician and Basque (the CGT, being anarcho-syndicalist in its outlook, has strong ties to the local separatist movements).

To their credit, they’ve done a wonderful job. The regional government won’t step in to rebuild Ruesta, as it’s just one of over two hundred abandoned towns in Aragón, so the syndicate has stepped in. They’ve carved out a fully-functioning community in the heart of the old village and are carefully coexisting with the place, without feeling the need to develop or bulldoze what doesn’t serve. The result is a very unique staging post of the Camino de Santiago. There’s not many places along the profitable pilgrim road that have been allowed to fall apart, and yet at the same time been so carefully curated.

I wonder how the future will see us? The creatures of the past left their traces in the rocks by chance. We’ve been deliberately stamping our seal on the earth for thousands of years. Will they marvel at tyre tracks in the mud and put them in museums? Will they weave fantastical stories around the objects they find, like discarded vapes and perfume bottles? What will we make of it all, a thousand years from now?

The Camino gives you a lot of time to think. Six hour walks through the countryside, every day for six weeks… It’s a test of resilience, if not of your sanity. Thank goodness I’m perfectly happy with my own company! BB x