The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

students always go hiking together, and at night we light the camp fires and sing Catalan folksongs. Donde hay música no puede haber cosa mala (where there’s music there’s no evil). For us a pilgrimage means above all nomadic life and adventure. We students lead too supervised a life and we need to liberate ourselves and live closer to nature. Quod Natura non dat, Salmantica non praestat.”
    “You remind me,” I said, “of the youth Don Quixote and Sancho met on the road, who went along with his bundle of clothes slung on his sword, singing seguidillas to enliven the boredom of his journey. When the Don asked him why he travelled so lightly he replied:

    “I’m off to the wars for the want of pence,
    If I had any money I’d show more sense.”

    “Today,” said the student, “I’ve no money and there are no wars for me to go to. Our great war ended when I was three years of age, but all I know about it is that I lost a father and an uncle in it, and many of my companions are in the same position. We children of the Civil War are a restless generation. We long to break away from our narrow life and become pioneers in the great world. If I were not an engineering student I should like to be a missionary in the East, for we Spaniards have always been a missionary race. That is why some of us who live in residential colleges join up in these pilgrimages which remind us of the great days when Spaniards were dynamic and roamed the world as conquistadores.”
    After the village of Valdelafuente we reached the hill of Portillo, from which we had a wonderful view of León dominated by the majestic silhouette of Pulchra Leonina, the loveliest cathedral in all Spain.
    The country around León is even browner and more undulating than Castile; and even more primitive, for the pueblos scattered over the plain look as if they were molehills that had risen out of the ochre earth, but as a contrast there was the wide river bed with its vast stretches of grey pebbles relieved by interminable avenues of poplar trees. In spite of motor buses and touring cars, we might be back in the sixteenth century, for the essential scene had not changed. Along the road we met peasants riding donkeys, shepherds with their flocks, like ragged regiments on the march, muleteers chanting in dreary monotone as they lay in the bottom of their carts, gazing up at the blue sky and leaving the patient animals to plod along at their own sweet will. The student pilgrim insisted on stopping to speak to every shepherd or goatherd he met. “They fascinate me,” he said, “for they are closer to nature than we are, and they have not stunted their souls as we have by mechanistic civilization. That is why I talk to them, for I am a pilgrim and belong like them to the brotherhood of the road.”

    Aymery Picaud calls León urbs regalis et curialis, cunctisque felicitatibus plena, and today it upholds its ancient reputation of being one of the cities on the Jacobean road most hospitable to pilgrims. Even in the ancient world it had been noted for its foreign population, for under the Romans it was the garrison town of Legio VII Gemina, which was recruited in the Cantabrian mountains. Then in the early Middle Ages, as a sixteenth-century poem says, León had twenty-four kings before Castile had laws. Only at one period—namely, in the second half of the ninth century, when the fortunes of Oviedo were in the ascendent —did León sink into obscurity, but after Alfonso III the Great, when Ordoño II came to the throne, it became the most important city in Christian Spain.
    It is significant that among the many Roman remains unearthed at León are a number of funeral steles carved with Syrian emblems and horseshoe arches. These, according to some scholars, have talismanic value and allude to Mithraistic and other Oriental rituals which the Seventh Roman Legion, like the Crusaders of the Middle Ages, brought back to western Europe. *
    As a pilgrim in León my first visit was to the shrine of St. Isidore built by Alfonso V over an earlier church of St. John the Baptist, which had been sacked by Almanzor. In 1063 the relics of the Saint were transferred there from Seville by order of Ferdinand I and buried with extraordinary pomp at a ceremony in which no less than five saints, including St. Domingo of Silos, took part. Immediately the fame of the church spread through Christendom, owing to the number of miracles performed by the Sevillian saint, and