The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

circle on the ground and stand within it before the leader had time to hand him the cross and holy water. Otherwise he had to go on blindly following the whispered orders of the Santa Compaña until he would have the good luck to meet as big a boob as himself to whom he could hand over.”
    “Surely you do not believe all those superstitions.”
    “I’m too old, señor, to change my beliefs. It was my grandmother taught me about ghosts of the Santa Compaña when I wasn’t two feet high, and when I go to church below on Sundays I pray for the souls in Purgatory and I give the priest every year money and gifts for them.”
    I can understand the fascination the local legends, miracles, myths and superstitions must have had for the pilgrims in ancient times who plodded along this road which is still haunted by relics of past beliefs. The modern pilgrim who is a receptive, not to say an inquisitive, traveller absorbs them no less than his Jacobean pilgrim ancestors and he revels in the shrewd traditional wisdom of the fishermen, mountaineers and especially of the nomadic populations he meets on his journey through the north of Spain. And my journeys have taught me the truth of the Shakespearean phrase: ‘He’s gentle, never schooled, and yet learned, full of noble device.’ Fishermen like Xuanín received their only education from nature itself. His wisdom sprang from the soil and was independent of the written word. Anyone who wanders through Spain even today will gradually absorb this ancient philosophy of nature.

CHAPTER II

THE ROAD THROUGH THE BIERZO AND GALICIA

    I N July of the Holy Year, 1954, after passing the Hospital of San Marcos and leaving the city of León, I followed the pilgrim road across the bridge of San Marcos over the river Bernesga and, continuing to Trobajo del Camino, ascended to the noble church of the Virgen del Camino with its beautiful loggia, which overlooks the plain. According to tradition Our Lady appeared in 1505 to a shepherd, Alvar Simón by name, and instructed him to tell his bishop to have a hermitage built in her honour in that spot. The shepherd, fearing that his story would not be believed, asked Our Lady for some sign that would manifest the miracle, and she, asking him for his sling, fired a stone six hundred paces from where they stood, telling him the stone would be a testimony of the miracle and that it would be easily recognized by him and his companions, because it would grow in size. At the place where the stone fell, a hermitage was erected and later on the church was built nearby. *
    The image of Our Lady of the Wayside worked other and even more famous miracles, as, for instance, the truly Jacobean one which was performed on a certain Alonso de Rivera seventeen years after the former miracle in 1522, when he was a captive of the Moors in Africa. The sacristan told me the story as follows: Don Alonso de Rivera had great devotion for the Santísima Virgen del Camino and when the date of her festival came round he prayed that he might be allowed to take part in her romería, so he asked his Moorish master for leave to go, and promised he would return to captivity after the festival. The master, a true Moro de la Morería, refused, whereupon the Christian knight answered that if it was Our Lady’s will that he should go, go he would, Moors or no Moors. On the eve of the romería the Moor locked him in a chest, fastened it with heavy chains and sat upon the lid, jeering at his captive within, saying: “Now I shall see what your Virgin will do.” The captive meanwhile prayed to the Mother of God, and that night the chest with the Christian inside and the Moor sitting on top were miraculously transported through the air and deposited in a place near the shrine. Early next morning the Moor awoke, rubbed his eyes and cried: “What bells do I hear?” and the Christian answered joyfully: “Our Lady heard my prayer. These are the bells of my church and we are now in my fatherland.” The Moor was baptized and died a saint, and on one of the walls of the church today hang the chains which fastened the chest in which the Christian knight was imprisoned.
    After Valverde del Camino I passed Villadangos, where the parish church is dedicated to Santiago, and in the central niche of the retable above the high altar there is a figure of the Apostle Santiago on horseback.

THE HONOURABLE PASSAGE OF ARMS AND THE ANCESTOR OF DON QUIXOTE

    Five kilometres after the village of San