The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

as described by Strabo existed among the Maragatos as among the Vaqueiros. In personal appearance the peasant men and women I saw in the streets of Astorga and in the neighbouring villages were mostly squat, ruddy-complexioned, sleek-haired, with square faces and snub noses, and reminded me of the people in the West Riding of Yorkshire.
    One of the festivals which is celebrated here in the New Year illustrates the matriarchal basis of their civilization. A youth dresses up as a woman and drives a plough through the frozen fields. The plough is pulled by a team of youths, also disguised as women, called Zamarracos, and by others dressed in animals’ skins with little bells attached. While the youths plough the furrows, the rest taking part in the ritual, who are called Xiepas, declaim satiric verses which resemble those recited by the masqueraders in Asturias. These traditions which have continued century after century in León and Asturias, apart from the religious rites of the community, are, nevertheless, survivals of religious beliefs held in the dim past, even in the days of Strabo. According to Julio Caro Baroja, it would be difficult to discover in Europe a region wherein modern civilization is so finely balanced with the traditions of a remote past as León. * It is this projection of millenary rites on to modern mechanistic life that gives such poignancy to Concha Espina’s novel La Esfinge Maragata, which describes the life of the Maragato woman: the Maragata is a shy, silent and persistent sphinx, the matriarch of antiquity, ‘personification of a mysterious petrified people, peering like a rockbound isle out of the surging tide of history’. In a matriarchal society a woman of her own free will chooses her destiny: she may refuse to accept her wooer when, according to the strange tradition of the rastro among Maragato suitors, he lays the trail of straw on the ground from his home to the home of her parents, for she may slip out by night and continue the trail laid by her suitor, making it end in the river or the lake, a sign that she has rejected his suit. Once she has accepted her suitor and becomes a bride, however, she models her life on that of the stork, the bird so beloved of the Maragatos, which nests in the church tower beneath the Cross and presides over the women working in the fields. When I mentioned the storks of the cathedral to the wife of a Maragato friend she became sentimental and with tears in her eyes described how tenderly the stork and his mate behaved towards their nestlings. “Those birds identify themselves so completely with our lives,” said she, “that we Maragatas see in them the sum total of all Christian qualities, for they preside over our lives from the cradle to the grave: they are the bringers of good tidings at the birth of our children: they personify fidelity in marriage and the return home every year of our beloved mate, who is toiling in a distant country, and while we work in the fields, every now and then one of them will fly down and stand near us, perched on one leg, cocking its head on one side, watching us gravely.”
    Before I left Astorga I saw the Maragatos, dressed in their traditional costumes, perform their ancient folk-dances in one of the plazas. The women in their embroidered bodices and long aprons and their elaborate jewellery, the men in their broad-bottomed zaragüelles and polainas. Their dancing was measured and had the dignity of an ancient ritual, reminding me of the Danza Prima I had seen in So miedo. It was incongruous to see the ancient ritual performed unselfconsciously by these young members of the ancient tribe in the middle of a square crowded with motor lorries, and the music at times was submerged in the hooting of klaxons and the rattle of city traffic.

THE CASTLE OF THE TEMPLARS

    Saying farewell to my friend, whom I had arranged to meet in Compostella on the day of the Apostle, I set out on the main road from Astorga to Ponferrada by the Pass of Manzanal and San Román de Bembibre. On my previous pilgrimage to Compostella I had taken the more primitive road by the Pass of Rabanal del Camino and Foncebadón, and had ridden by mule the distance between the latter place and Ponferrada, spending a few days at the charming little pueblo of Molinaseca—a little oasis in a dreary journey. On this occasion in 1954, however, I needed to ‘burn’ the stages in order to reach Compostella in time, so I made straight for the Pass of