Pilgrim's Road

spirits were restored with a bowl of thick soup and a plate of delicious locally cured ham.
    After that, the day improved still further. As the road continued to climb, gently enough not to be too taxing, the landscape grew progressively wilder. To crown my enjoyment the sun finally broke through the cloud and added a rich flush of colour to the scene. The few villages I passed through did not have the polished look of Castrillo de los Polvazares and were all the more attractive for that. But many of the squat stone houses were empty, and it was clear that life here was at the end of an era; an ageing population had seen the younger generation depart to different lives and occupations. There seemed little farming other than animal husbandry in this broken hill country, and it was difficult to imagine how a large population had ever supported itself.
    By late afternoon, after endless stops to admire the constantly changing windswept panoramas I arrived at the village of Rabanal del Camino where I knew that the Confraternity of St James was converting the old priest’s house into a refugio. It was not finished yet so I would not be able to stay the night there, but while I was admiring the newly restored façade, a woman from the house next door came out and, finding that I was English, invited me in for tea.
    Charo and Asumpta were known in the village as lasmadrileñas , the ladies from Madrid. They had discovered Rabanal a few years back, and had been so charmed by it and its position that they had decided to come and live there. Both were scholars and they had brought their extensive library with them and they worked there on various projects. They were equally interested in the countryside and in conservation work, and planted trees, grew vegetables and altogether did more than I could take in during one conversation. Of all the people I had met on the Camino , Charo and Asumpta were two I would have liked to have spent more time with. It was they who explained the immediate history of these high Maragatos villages to me.
    As I had suspected, this rough hill country had never been able to support communities without some additional income. In the days of the Roman occupation, only the lower sheltered valleys were worked and mining for gold and other metals was the chief interest. The Maragatos who settled the area some time after the collapse of the Roman Empire were thought to be descendants of Visigoths. The men had become the traditional muleteers, transporting merchandise all over Spain, while the women had worked the small holdings and looked after the sheep and cows. With the advent of the railways, the long-distance mule trains largely disappeared overnight, and the exodus of the mountain people began. In wilder places, that the railways could not reach, there remained some need for animal haulage, but motorised traffic soon ended that, and still more of the population was forced to leave. There were fewer than thirty souls altogether now in Rabanal.
    But in the summer, when the pilgrims poured through, the tiny population was host to as many as two hundred visitors a night, and the water supply dried up. ‘Only the summers are horrible here,’ said Charo forthrightly. And fearing I might think she disliked pilgrims in general, added quickly that pilgrims who came in the spring or autumn, or even the winter, the ‘real pilgrims’, were always welcome. ‘We enjoy having interesting people to talk to,’ said Asumpta, ‘but such numbers as come in summer are an invasion.’
    Even so they had nothing but praise for the Confraternity of St James who were their next door neighbours. They had come to know some of them well from the working parties which had laboured away there, rebuilding the ruined priest’s house and converting it into one of the finest refugios of the route. They unlocked it so that I could see over it, and when I realised the extent of what had been accomplished I felt a new sense of pride in being a member of such an enterprising organisation. A lot of thought had gone into the planning, as well as an extraordinary amount of hard work, not to mention the fund raising to pay for it all. The accommodation was appropriately simple, but it was attractive too and had all the necessities, like a place to wash clothes and, equally important I thought, there was a room set aside for reading and quiet reflection, furnished with a small library. And although there was no obvious religious