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And they say that he got crazy once and that he tried to touch the sun…

By mLu.fotos from Germany – Perseids 2015 – Compilation 1 (All in One), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42351494

One of the most beautiful sights on the Camino is the sky above.  I recall lying in a field one night in August 2016 along with my friend Jay and a group of five or six other companions outside Carrión de los Condes, watching the annual Perseid meteor shower over the Meseta — the inspiration for the line ‘I’ve seen it raining fire in the sky’ in John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High.  The clear darkness was streaked with flecks from a cosmic arc welder and we sat eating cheese and bread, all wrapping up against the heavy dew and sleeping briefly and fitfully, before hitting the road with dawn lighting upon our backs.  At Tardajos, west of Burgos, in 2018 the warlike Mars showed red in the sky as the town prepared for a night-time concert that would start long after we peregrinos were peacefully tucked up in bed.  And like so many others I remember the sun setting over the ocean at Finisterre, and sharing a cigar with my friend Tyler on the pleasant walk back to the town in the evening gloom and deepening night.  But the sky is filled with more than just lights (there’s rain too, and by God plenty of it in Asturias!), and it’s also home to some of the Camino’s most interesting inhabitants.  Not least among these is the Red Kite (Milvus milvus), which was once native to Ireland until driven to extinction in the nineteenth century, although a breeding programme has helped reintroduce it to the Wicklow mountains using birds from Wales.[1]

By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90658674

The Red Kite is a reasonably large bird of prey, with a reddish-brown body about 60 cm long and a wingspan of 1.8m. You’re most likely to spot a Red Kite in the sky above you than on the ground or trees, so its profile rather than colour is what to look for, especially as it may look dark when silhouetted against the bright sky.  You’ll probably see it glide on outstretched wings that are white toward the edges and have five dark feathers, almost like fingers, at the end of each wing.  Its wings are angled (the leading edge is flat farthest away from the body but then angles in toward it), and these along with its deeply-forked tail give it a distinctive profile.  Other large birds of the Pyrenees include the Griffon Vulture, which is much bigger (body of about a 1m long and wingspan of 2.5m), which presents a much straighter wing edge when gliding (indeed its wings look almost rectangular),[3] and of course the large Golden Eagle, which also presents a flatter wing profile and seemingly more ‘fingers’ at the ends.[4]  The tail is the real giveaway, as the Griffon Vulture’s rounded diamond tail and the Golden Eagle’s longish flat tail both look nothing like the deep-v shape of the Red Kite.

If you do walk along the Camino in the regions around the Pyrenees, make sure to look up, and you’ll probably agree with John Denver:

And the Colorado rocky mountain high
I’ve seen it rainin’ fire in the sky
I know he’d be a poorer man if he never saw an eagle fly
Rocky mountain high.[5]

[1] Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, ‘Red Kite’: https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/red-kite.

[3] Image: https://www.rondatoday.com/griffon-vulture-of-the-serrania/ Image:

[4] Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, ‘Golden eagle’: https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/golden-eagle.

[5] John Denver, ‘Rocky Mountain High’, https://youtu.be/eOB4VdlkzO4.

Featured

A recipe for pleasure: Tarta de Santiago (Santiago’s Cake)

By Katrin Gilger – Tarta de Santiago, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89958476

Tarta de Santiago (or Torta de Santiago in Galego, the language of Galicia) is one of my favourite deserts and is a wonderful expression of what is best in Spanish cooking — good ingredients used simply but effectively.  Essentially, it’s a flat cake of almonds, eggs and sugar, in roughly equal measure, which mightn’t sound very adventurous, but I always get excited when I see it on the menu and I’m willing to risk a diabetic shock every time for that crumbly sweetness.  Since 2009 it has had Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status, meaning that only tartas made in Galicia and adhering to certain quality guidelines (e.g. percentage of almonds) are permitted to be sold as Tarta de Santiago.

During the first lockdown in 2020, my friend and fellow peregrina Zoe and I had a remote bake off, where she clearly put my effort in the shade.  I’m not going to embarrass myself by putting up the photos. We both followed the same recipe by the Galician chef Alfonso López Alonso, which you can watch here on YouTube, or read here from the website of the Spanish newspaper El País.  I’ve translated it below, with a few additional notes.

Ingredients

  • 250g peeled almonds
  • 5 large eggs
  • 250 g sugar
  • 1/2 lemon [My note: rind only]
  • 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
  • 1/2 shot of spirits [My note: Galicia is known for spirits like orujo (grappa to Italians), if you don’t have anything similar just use something dry, like gin]
  • Icing/powdered sugar for decorating

Method

  1. Heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
  2. Toast the almonds in a pan over a gentle heat, taking care not to burn them.  Remove and let them harden.
  3. While they are frying, beat the eggs with the sugar until they turn a pale colour.  Grate in the lemon and add the spirits and cinnamon.
  4. Blend half of the almonds thoroughly, until they’re like flour.  Blend the other half for less time, so that they retain a coarser texture.
  5. Add the almonds to the eggs with the sugar and mix with a spatula until smooth.
  6. Grease a detachable tin or flexible mould of 28cm diameter with butter.  [My note: make sure it’s well-greased, as this is a crumbly cake and you want it to be able to get it out of the tin without falling apart on you].  Put the mixture in the oven for 30 minutes until the surface is golden.  Cover with aluminum foil and bake for another ten minutes.  The exact time varies depending on the oven.  The best thing to do is check it by pricking it with a skewer or fork: if it comes out clean, it’s ready.
  7. Take out of the oven and leave it to cool for ten minutes before removing from the tin.
  8. When it is completely cool, sprinkle with the icing/powdered sugar.  If you want, make a stencil of the Cross of Santiago, which you can download from this blog. [My note: make sure it really is completely cool, otherwise the icing sugar will melt into it, instead of giving it the snow-covered appearance you want]

Finding love on the Camino

Convento franciscano de San Sntonio de Herbón. Image: Galicia Tourism.

The title of this post might be a bit misleading because although it’s inspired by St Valentine’s Day, it’s not about those pilgrim romances that somehow develop while we’re all daily in a physically unattractive state that would never pass muster for a date in civil society.  Rather it’s about a practice I encountered on the Camino Portugués, where locals at the Franciscan monastery near Herbón (just southeast of Padrón and about 30km from Santiago de Compostela) would drown a statue of St. Anthony in the hope of finding a lover.

Herbón’s claim to fame is that there pimientos de Padrón were first cultivated in Europe.  These small peppers, fried in oil until blistered, are said to be sweet with one in twenty being spicy, and whether they were looking for sweet or spicy, locals would pray to a statue of St Anthony of Padua in the monastery grounds in the hope of finding love.  If he didn’t deliver, they would upend the statue in a nearby water fountain until he provided.

Anthony of Padua by Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664). Image: Public Domain.

Such an action might seem disrespectful and impious to us now, but it has good medieval pedigree.  We are well acquainted with stories of the saints punishing those who show disrespect to their relics, cult sites etc. (e.g. the tenth-century Muslim soldiers who supposed left a trail of dysentery all the way home to Andalusia after plundering Santiago de Compostela), but the relationship worked both ways.  The medievalist Patrick J. Geary in particular has written on the ‘coercion of the saints’, in which ordinary people would take the saint to task for their failure to abide by the unwritten social and devotional contract between saint and the community.  Just as the people would afford the saint respect, honour and devotion, so too they were expected to intervene and provide for their followers.

Geary notes that actions taken against the saint’s relics or their representation (e.g. a statue) was carefully choreographed and carried out in a respectful manner.[1]  One did not simply get the hump at receiving no Valentine’s Day cards and decide to waterboard the nearest statue of a Doctor of the Church.  Rather rituals such as fasting were performed, the saint was politely addressed, and their options made known to them in advance.  Only with the saint’s continued obstinacy were they to be Guantánamo-ed.  It was a serious business, and could backfire if done disrespectfully.

So, if you do decide to take action post-February 14th, be sure to mind your Ps and Qs.

[1] Patrick J. Geary, Living with the dead in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2018).

Padrón, peppers and preaching

The stone to which Santiago’s ship supposedly moored, now in the Igrexa de Santiago, Padrón. Image: author’s own.

The town of Padrón lies about 25km south of Santiago de Compostela (for those of you who use alternative measurement systems, in miles that’s 15.5, or in Camino it’s a day’s walk), and is perhaps best known internationally for the pimientos de Padrón (Padrón peppers), small peppers fried in oil until they blister and are then sprinkled with salt and eaten as tapas.  In Jacobean lore, this town on the river Sar is where the ship carrying Santiago’s/St James’ body supposedly miraculously docked on its own, after which his disciples journeyed on to bury it at the divinely ordained spot that is now the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.  Inside the Igrexa de Santiago (church of St James) in Padrón, the supposed mooring post to which the ship was tied now lies beneath the altar.

The Camino Portugués runs south-north through the town parallel to the river, but over the bridge by the igrexa de Santiago, and to the west (lefthand side), is Monte Santiaguiño/Santiaguiño do Monte, a hill accessible by a series of steps.  A photo of the cross at the top of the hill was used by the late John Brierley as the cover photo to his guide to the Camino Portugués, and as he points out the site has an interesting (and perhaps unique) association with the life of Santiago, rather than with his death or posthumous miracles/cult, as Santiago is said to have preached at this site, during his time in Iberia.

Rock formation at Santiaguiño do Monte, Padrón. Image: author’s own.

The hill has a hermitage (reconstructed in the nineteenth century), which like many hermitages in towns across Spain (or rather just outside towns across Spain) is the site of a romería or short local pilgrimage, where various traditions and practices have grown up, e.g. the fountain by the hermitage is said to have sprung up when Santiago struck the ground with his staff to quench the thirst of a woman who showed him kindness and its water is considered to have healing powers when gathered at particular times.  Another such tradition is that pilgrims have to climb over a series of rocks by the hermitage, and if they don’t do so while alive, they will have to return to do so after death. 

From the little I saw in the early morning, Padrón seems like a nice town and would be worth returning to anyway, dead or alive.

Santiago’s other feast day — 30th of December

Spanish soldiers in Santiago de Compostela
Spanish soldiers in Santiago de Compostela on the feast of Santiago (25th of July) – on the look out for Italian merchants? [Picture: author’s own]

As Christmas rolls around and Camino kids get excited at whether Santa Claus or the Reyes Magos will leave a pair of hiking boots in their stockings, a few might notice that the Christmas period also sees the feast of Santiago/St James.  Some of you will have enjoyed the celebrations of the feast of Santiago in Santiago de Compostela and say, “Hang on, isn’t that 25th of July?”, and you’d be right.  But he has another one, 30th of December.

Most saints’ feast days fall on the anniversary of their death, with a very few notable exceptions, such as John the Baptist, whose feast falls on the 24th of June.  According to the Gospel of Luke, at the annunciation the archangel Gabriel told the Virgin Mary that her cousin Elizabeth (John’s mother) was already six months pregnant, and so the feast of John’s birthday falls six months before Christmas.[1]  (His beheading is also remembered on the 29th of August).  However, Santiago’s second feast day is that of his translatio or ‘translation’.

The translatio is the formal movement of a saint’s relics from one place to another (usually its final resting place/cult centre), frequently accompanied with elaborate religious rites.  While often a formal process, sometimes it was just plain theft, as in the case of St Nicholas of Myra, whose relics were stolen by Italian merchants in the late eleventh century and brought to Bari in southern Italy.  They used the classic relic-stealing excuse that if St Nicholas had wanted to stay, then they wouldn’t have been able to take him; his passivity was acquiescence.[2]  In many respects, the translatio was a one-off mirror of pilgrimage, for just as the people travelled to the holy through pilgrimage, so the translatio was the holy travelling to the people; it was the movement of the saint’s relics to somewhere they would be more accessible to the populace.

Santiago’s translatio is celebrated on the 30th of December, and as such it commemorates the movement of his body from Jerusalem (where he was martyred) to his resting place in Santiago de Compostela.  However, feast days of saints have been known to change over the centuries, and it appears that the movement from the Mozarabic Rite (the liturgical rite of the Christian Church of the Iberian peninsula) to the Roman Rite, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, saw a change in the celebration of Santiago’s feast.  The Mozarabic Rite had kept 30th of December as the feast of his martyrdom, but with the adoption of the Roman Rite under French influence in the cathedral of Santiago, his feast day was displaced to 25th of July and the 30th of December became a subsidiary feast.[3]

[1] Luke 1:26–38.

[2] Jonathan Sumption, The Age of Pilgrimage: the Medieval Journey to God (1975, rev. ed Mahwah, NJ, 2003), 38–9.

[3] Catherine Saucier, ‘Voices of Thunder: Sounding Nature and the Supernatural in the Legends and Liturgy of St James the Greater and St John the Evangelist’, Religions 16:11 (2025), 1–27: 5.  Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16111385.

Santiago peregrino (‘the pilgrim’): a saint just like you?

Santiago as a pilgrim, depicted on the Praza de Quintana facade of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (image: author’s own).

Since literacy levels were low in the middle ages, artists used a variety of iconographic means to communicate to their audiences, not least to help the viewer identify the subject of their works.  Saints, in particular, were recognizable by how they dressed and by items associated with a defining event in their lives or their deaths.  St Peter almost inevitably holds a pair of keys, in reference to the occasion when Jesus’ promised him the ‘keys of heaven’,[1] and St Paul bears the sword with which he was supposedly beheaded.  More striking examples include St Agatha of Sicily, who presents her severed breasts on a platter.  The Sicilians subsequently honoured her with an erotic pastry, the Minne Di Sant’ Agata, with a cherry on top. 

Minne Di Sant’ Agata. (Image by Stefano Mortellaro from Catania, Italy – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, available here).

Santiago/St James the Great is unusual in that he is normally depicted in one of two guises — peregrino (‘the pilgrim’) or Matamoros (‘the Moorslayer’) — both of which aren’t connected with his earthly life or death.  Here I’m going to touch on his peregrino incarnation.

Perhaps uniquely among Christian saints (and certainly among the major saints of the early church), Santiago is often depicted in the guise of one of his followers, the pilgrims who travel the Camino de Santiago.  To my knowledge, no other saint is normally sculpted or painted to look like those on pilgrimage to his/her tomb.  In his classic form, Santiago peregrino is identifiable by his broad-brimmed hat, staff, scrip (leather satchel) and scallop shell.  It is a confection of artefacts that only developed gradually, and early depictions of him as a pilgrim often lack one or more of these (e.g. in the fourteenth-century statue of Santiago in the church of Santiago in A Coruña he is bareheaded).[2]  Only from about the fourteenth century does Santiago regularly bear all the accoutrements of a medieval pilgrim. As an added twist, the popular French saint San Roque, is usually shown dressed as a peregrino bound for Santiago de Compostela, with a dog at his side and hitching up his tunic to display his ulcerous leg.

Of course, images are not simply stylised but also fossilised.  And if one were to apply the principle that Santiago should be depicted like those who travel to his tomb, then he should probably be wearing lycra, bearing a rucksack, covered by a poncho and using carbon fibre poles… you know, he should look just like you!

[1] Matt 16:19.

[2] Bernadette Cunningham, Medieval Irish Pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2018), 89–91.

Remembering John Brierley (1948-2023)

John Brierley outside the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, by Patti Silva (used with the permission of the Camino Society Ireland)

A while back I was asked to pen a tribute to John Brierley (1948-2023), for the Camino Society Ireland. He was the author of the most significant set of guides to the Camino in the English language (I discussed the maps in them previously) and a key figure in the modern history of the Camino in the English-speaking world. That tribute may be found here on the Camino Society Ireland website, or by clicking the portrait image above.

What is ‘authentic’ on the Camino?

Statue of Santiago in the Pórtico de la Gloria
Santiago in the the Pórtico de la Gloria. Image from Wikimedia Commons, by MarisaLR – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, available here.

What is ‘authentic’ on the Camino?  It’s a word that gets bandied about a lot but — having recently looked at the Pórtico de la Gloria app (available to download here) — I want to put a thought out there.  Speaking as a medieval historian, I have no problem saying that the Pórtico is the single greatest collection of Romanesque sculpture in the world, and what is more, it is still in situ.  Naturally, after eight centuries of facing Galician weather, it has seen its good and bad days, and has been subject to various interventions, most recently a 12-year conservation project financed by the Fundación Barrié, which ran between 2006 and 2018.  The conservation project appears to have been undertaken with unprecedented thoroughness, and a feature on it in the ever-interesting RTVE programme La Aventura de Saber can be found by clicking here.  The project’s investigations and activities prompt the question, what is it to be ‘authentic’?

The Pórtico has experienced various interventions, including additions to its ensemble (e.g. the nimbus/halo with crystals over Santiago in the central mullion (pilar)) and repainting in the Early Modern period that rouged up a few of the cheeks in the style of the time (comparable with the angels that hold up the canopy over the high altar inside).  Would a conservationist be justified in removing the halo or the paint?  You might argue that they would, as these were later additions, but if chronology is the yardstick for authenticity, when — or more importantly how — can we set a cut off date?  The sculpture of Santiago has bourn that jewelled halo for more than half its existence and the prophets their face paint; more pilgrims have seen them with these than without them.  They have become part of the fabric of the Pórtico. 

Pilgrims at the Cruz de Ferro in 2016.
Pilgrims sharing a moment at the Cruz de Ferro (2016). Image: author’s own.

The danger lies in conflating ‘authenticity’ with ‘originality’.  Just because something was not there the first day, it does not mean that it does not belong.  The Cruz de Ferro (Iron Cross) to the west of León marks the highest point on the Camino Francés, yet to my knowledge was only erected in the 1950s.  Does that make it inauthentic?  For many, it is a deeply symbolic and emotive feature of their/the Camino.  In 2023, I had the pleasure of meeting Len McDonald from Canada, a seasoned peregrino and man with great life experience, who was on a mission to deposit a portion of his brother’s ashes there, and swore to buy a glass of good whiskey for everyone to toast him afterwards.  Sadly, I was ill for a couple of days and didn’t meet him, but before I made Santiago de Compostela I raised a glass in absentia, and nobody can tell me that those experiences connected to this 1950s monument were inauthentic.

Sanctified in Stone: the consecration crosses of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela

Interior view of the Holy Door of Santiago de Compostela cathedral.
Interior view of the Holy Door of Santiago de Compostela cathedral, with one of the thirteenth-century consecration crosses above it. Image by Jl FilpoC – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, available here.

When you walk into the great cathedrals like those of Burgos, León or Compostela, it is easy to focus on the spectacular, like the Chapel of the Constables in Burgos, the stained-glass ensemble of León, and the high altar of Santiago de Compostela. Quite often these are architectural, artistic and spiritual gifts of later eras, but most of these buildings also contain modest vestiges of their early days, a common example being the presence of consecration crosses.

By the eleventh century, the rite of consecrating a cathedral (dedicating it as a place of worship) had become quite complex, and part of it included the presiding bishop anointing the interior of the building, by marking a cross with chrism (holy oil) twelve times on the walls.[1] This act was often memorialised in paint or stone, as in the case of the consecration of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela by Archbishop Pedro Muñiz in 1211AD — 136 years after construction began. Cathedral-competitive Catalans might point out that even the Sagrada Família in Barcelona reached this point quicker, as it was consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010, 128 years after the foundation stone was laid. However, Galicians might retort that at least theirs was finished.

Detail of the thirteenth-century consecration cross over the Holy Door. Image adapted from Jl FilpoC – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, available here.

In Santiago, the twelve consecration crosses are works of stone, consisting of a cross within a circular belt, with an alpha and omega hanging from its arms, and a sun and moon occupying the spaces above them. Each belt contains an inscription, either recording the date of consecration or relating to an aspect of the ceremony. Although some were moved over the centuries, due to new construction works within the cathedral, over half are still in their original locations on the interior walls and bear witness to 800 years of Camino history.

[1] Vincent Debiais, ‘Writing on medieval doors: the surveyor angel on the moissac capital (ca. 1100)’, in  Irene Berti, Katharina Bolle, Fanny Opdenhoff and Fabian Stroth (eds), Writing matters: presenting and perceiving monumental inscriptions in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (de Gruyter, Berlin, 2017), 285–308: 295.

Cash is king: money on the Camino

Castilian gold dobla of Alfonso X of Castile (1252–84). Image source: From Drachms to Euros: A History of Spain in Coins (Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid).

The euro, SEPA (Single European Payments Area), Revolut — they’ve all made paying for things on the Camino a lot easier in recent years.  It’s not that long ago (only a little over twenty years) that a pilgrim would still have had to go to their local bank and put in an order for pesetas before travelling.  Calculations would have to have been made about how much was necessary per day for accommodation, food, etc. on the basis of dubious information (probably by chatting to a Camino-know-it-all like myself), a wedge of notes might take a while for the bank to obtain, and it had to be husbanded over the course of the journey.  In some respects, the medieval or early modern situation was not that much different.

Depending on their starting point and route, a pilgrim might have to travel across several kingdoms, each with its own coinage (no notes), which was nigh-on impossible to obtain in advance.  When moving on, they had to be conscious of not being lumbered with coinage that would be impossible to exchange and essentially represent lost money.  A pilgrim often carried the entire sum of their return journey with them and accident, theft, or bad luck at cards or dice, could leave even a well-to-do pilgrim reliant upon charity.  Some pilgrims ran up bills and did a ‘dine-and-dash’ (or what would probably be a ‘dine-and-hobble’ on the Camino), like the infamous Gerald of Wales, who for all his chauvinistic self-righteousness proved himself to be nothing more than a thief when he high-tailed it out of Rome in 1203, with a string of creditors behind him pursuing him all the way to Bologna.[1]

As Jonathan Sumption has observed, from the fourteenth century onwards the life of a wealthy traveller became easier, with the development of international banking systems, such that pilgrims could obtain bills of exchange and hoteliers on certain pilgrim routes acted as bankers of sorts.[2]  Certain coinage systems became more widely accepted, and within the Iberian peninsula Castilian coins — many of which were based upon the coinage of Al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) — were probably accepted generally.  Regardless of how well a pilgrim managed their finances, it could still be an expensive enterprise.  It has been estimated that the cost of travelling from Scotland to Rome in the middle of the fifteenth century was the equivalent of the annual income of a well-to-do knight (£66 sterling or £200 scots), but passage on a ship from Ireland to Spain on a Jubilee Year during the same period might cost as little as 7s 6d, making it a vastly more affordable option and opening up pilgrimage to people a lot less wealthy.[3]

For today’s pilgrim, the move to a cashless economy needs to be treated with caution out of consideration for those operating the Camino infrastructure.  Very few albergues/hostels have electronic payment systems, and the few remaining donativos (whose generosity is being stretched to breaking point, causing many to abandon the donation system) are particularly vulnerable.  A few notes in your wallet won’t weigh you down, but may lighten their load considerably.

[1] Jonathan Sumption, The Age of Pilgrimage: the Medieval Journey to God (Mahwah, New Jersey, 2003), 291–2.  (Originally published as Pilgrimage (London, 1975)).

[2] Ibid., 292–3.

[3] Bernadette Cunningham, Medieval Irish Pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela (Dublin, 2018), 20 and 113.  Bearing in mind that the 7s 6d probably only got you the right to sleep somewhere on the ship’s exposed deck and covered none of the rest of your expenses.