The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

de Ortega, or St. John of the Nettles, I left the main Burgos road at Villamorico and followed the rough road to the right which skirts the stream of Roblegordo and eventually reaches the upper pilgrim road of St. James at Quitanapalla.
    No shrine on the Jacobean road is as difficult to find as that of St. John of the Nettles. On every occasion I have visited it I have lost my W ay, but I console myself by reflecting that the seasoned traveller, Laffi, in the seventeenth century lost his way in these oak woods and had to feed himself on the mushrooms he found by the wayside. In some parts the road becomes a mere path or a series of tracks which mislead the traveller. To add to my distress on this occasion there was a thick fog through which I wandered aimlessly, guiding myself from oak tree to oak tree, vainly searching for the village. No landscape is sadder than the lonely upland of San Juan de Ortega and not a single person did I meet after leaving Villamorico. I had resigned myself to bivouacking all night in the open when all of a sudden I saw lights through the haze and I came upon the tiny hamlet of the saint which today consists only of thirty-six buildings and about seventy-three inhabitants.
    Nowhere in all the course of the pilgrimage did I receive more generous hospitality than in the house of the parish priest, who keeps alive, in that remote spot in Castile, the spirit of St. John of the Netdes, for St. John, even more than St. Dominic of the Causeway or San Millán de la Cogolla, possessed the gentle and childlike spirit of Il Poverello of Assisi, who called Poverty his bride.
    St. John of the Nettles is less of a legendary figure than St. Dominic or San Millán, for we may follow his life step by step in documents. He came from the tiny village of Quintana Ortuno near Burgos and his father and mother were of noble stock. After being ordained he became a disciple of St. Dominic of the Causeway and helped the latter in his building and in charitable work for the pilgrims and the poor. After St. Dominic’s death' he left Spain and went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and on his return his ship was wrecked, but he was saved, by the intercession of St. Nicholas of Bari, the Saint of his particular devotion.
    When he arrived back in Spain he retired to a lonely spot on the Road of St. James full of brambles and nettles ( urticae ) which had been hitherto the hiding place of highwaymen. Here with the help of two nephews he built a Romanesque church to St. Nicholas of Bari and founded a college of canons of St. Augustine.
    All his family fortune he spent on the poor and, when he had nothing more to give the pilgrims, it was said that God used to replenish his larder that he might succour them.
    So spontaneous was the welcome given to me by the parish priest of San Juan de Ortega when I arrived that night weary, footsore and famished that I told him of my foot-slogging adventures in South Italy in 1919, when I had plodded along the Via Appia to Brindisi and on to the shrine of St. Nicholas at Bari, where I obtained the oil of the saint which cures soul as well as body and which is known as the Manna di San Niccola.
    “If you are a devotee of St. Nicholas,” said the parish priest, “you have come to the shrine of his greatest disciple who inherited many of his attributes.”
    “At Bari they believe,” I said, “that St. Nicholas always appears to ships in distress as a white-robed figure at the helm guiding them safely to port.”
    “That is how he appeared to his devotee, St. John of the Nettles, or, as he called himself, Senior de Hortega,” replied the parish priest.
    “St. Nicholas,” I said, “like St. George, the Greek patron saint of the Gypsies, was always helping the underdog. He didn’t turn a deaf ear to picaroons and thieving vagabonds whom we used in the days of Shakespeare to call St. Nicholas’s clerks, and knowing their tricks he protects us against robbery if we invoke his name. And more than once when I have had to pawn my watch and chain I’ve prayed to him with his three golden apples which have become the emblem of his devotees, the pawnbrokers. In northern countries we give the greatest importance to him as the saint and protector of little children and we call him Santa Claus. And because he gave his gifts to men secretly we leave our presents where the children may find them and say that Santa Claus has brought them down the chimney.”
    “Have you not wondered why so