The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

hundred doors, I plodded on to Puente la Reina, the town where the various pilgrim roads from France meet and become the single Road of St. James. Puente la Reina had always been important because it lay on a main road, at the crossing of the River Arga, but its importance grew when the bridge was built and the pilgrimage reached its zenith in the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. In those days the small town gathered people from all over Europe. Lombards, Provencals, Normans rubbed shoulders with English, Irish, Italians, Dutch, Hungarians and Turks. The crowds that gathered in the long narrow streets were not all pilgrims, for the town was known universally as a mart for goods from distant parts of Europe and the pedlars leading their donkeys laden with bales had come from the great commercial cities in Italy and France, following in the footsteps of the Jacobean pilgrims.
    At the entrance to the town I halted at the church of El Crucifijo, where there used, in ancient days, to be a hospice of St. James. Today there is a college run by the German order of Padres Reparadores, who restored the building. I was offered hospitality by a bright-eyed young monk, who showed me all over the college. It is a flourishing residential college and boards ninety students from all over Spain, and it will expand in the near future to one hundred and fifty. The church was originally of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries but, according to Miss King, was not finished until after 1487. In 1448 the Chancellor of Navarre founded a hospital of Frailes Comendadores to undertake the pilgrim relief work which had been originally performed by the Templars. The crucifix is the most celebrated in all Spain, I was told, even more famous than the Santísimo Cristo de Burgos. It is the X-shaped cross of St. Andrew and the raised arms stretched out give great poignancy to the representation of Jesus.
    As I strolled through the streets of Puente la Reina I felt as if I had suddenly been spirited back to the Middle Ages, for the calle Mayor is the actual ancient Road of St. James and the crowds walking along it in the evening towards the bridge at the end of the town make us think of the ancient pilgrims. Then at nine and ten o’clock at night when the church bell rings forty times, the illusion of living in the heyday of the pilgrimage becomes complete, for the forty peals were in the Middle Ages to warn the lonely pilgrim plodding wearily in the night that a haven of rest was at hand. The bells also perpetuate the ancient legend of La Chorí, which is connected with the statue of Our Lady in the Church of San Pedro. According to the legend, a bird, after moistening its wings in the river, flew one day into the Church of San Pedro and dusted the statue of the Virgin. Hence the title La Virgen de la Chorí (chorí in Basque means a bird).
    I had brought from Pamplona notes of introduction from Don Matías Anó and his crony Manolo Huici, so I found no difficulty in entering the society of Puente la Reina. My neighbour at table in the inn was a very energetic young doctor, who had just qualified at the University of Saragossa and was eager to raise the health standard in the town, his first post. He told me that today Puente la Reina had a population of two thousand, only half its population in the past. The town had always been famous for its wines and every house possessed huge cellars that were centuries old, but twenty years ago the phylloxera had ruined the wine industry. Today, however, just as in south France, there is too much wine and the people cannot obtain a big enough market for it, with the result that many farmers are pulling up their vines and planting wheat. “And why not,” added the young doctor, “seeing that the name of Puente la Reina was originally Gare, a Basque word, which means ‘wheat’.”
    At this point, one of the other guests at table chimed in with the remark: “Don’t forget that our celebrated Virgin is called the ‘wine-producer’ or Arnategui.”
    While I was in Puente la Reina I made great friends with the local schoolmaster, Don Maríano la Tienda, who accompanied me on my expeditions to the neighbouring villages. Every afternoon we strolled the full length of the calle Mayor to the old bridge, which dates from
    11 oo and is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen, with its six arches sloping from each bank up to the very high arch in the centre. In the sunset as we lingered on the far side of the