Bike Ride Day 5 - Pontevedra to Caldas de Reis

The symbol of the Camino is a scallop shell, the idea being that many different roads lead to Santiago de Compostela just as the many different lines on the shell converge at what I guess is the back from the scallop’s point of view. Regardless, now that I’m only one day out from Santiago, I have experienced what I shall call the “Curse of the Camino” in which crowds of pilgrims are clogging the paths as they come together at the back of the shell.

There are so many people converging here on their spiritual journey (or as I put it “in my way”) that I rode on the shoulder of the highway for a while today because I found it more peaceful.

These are some pilgrims in a temporary holding facility that the church uses to even out the flow. Ha ha, actually they’re having cappuccino and yogurt on the Camino at one of the many cafes called the “Pilgrim [insert second word here].”

Why all the fuss? In the 9th century, back when people had opinion-based versions of reality and were susceptible of believing all kinds of crazy stories as long as they fit with their existing beliefs, kind of like today, news spread rapidly of an amazing discovery. The remains of one of Jesus’s apostles, St. James, appeared in northwestern Spain. How is this possible? Simple. When James died, angels placed the body in a solid stone boat on the Mediterranean in the Middle East and it drifted randomly toward Spain, then through the Straits of Gibraltar and up the Spanish coast, where it landed and then got itself buried in Santiago de Compostela, where it was found hundreds of years later. Everyone agreed that all of this was totally plausible so they built a church there.

As news spread, people from all over Europe started coming to see St. James. Up to this point Spain had been kind of isolated from the rest of Europe because it’s surrounded by water on three sides and mountains to the north. So while Europe was getting all cultured, Spain was out of the loop. But now that hundreds of thousands of Europeans were travelling across northern Spain to see the remains of St. James, many of them started getting ideas about civilizing the place, like “I should start playing my native music here,” or “We should build a church like the ones back home in France,” or “Why don’t they eat oysters here? Let’s start selling oysters and using forks.” 

Because of this, to grossly oversimplify the next thousand years in a way that would get you kicked out of a freshman college history class, northern Spain became cosmopolitan, wealthy and diverse. And to this day there is a cultural and economic divide between northern and southern Spain, which has led to strong separatist movements in the north that still exist (see sign from my ride today).

OK, enough of all that. Tomorrow, Santiago de Compostela, where the religious relic shops outnumber the tourists.

But in the meantime, I’m staying in a converted old paper mill up in the mountains with flowing water on two sides, a river-fed pool and manicured gardens, giving me slightly less to complain about.