O Cebreiro’s Famous Cheese

July 2025

One of the gastronomic delights unique to Galicia is ‘queso do Cebreiro’ - the fresh cheese from O Cebreiro and a designated area of Lugo’s Alta Montaña. It’s made from the pasteurised whole milk of Rubia Galega, Pardo Alpina and Friesian cows, and apart from the animal rennet used to separate the curds from the whey, it contains no additives.  Its D.O.P., or ‘denominacion de origen protegida’ indicates its protected status (a bit like champagne in France), so it’s hardly surprising that it has an interesting history.

Some scholars believe that the ancestors of Galicia’s Rubia cattle were brought to O Cebreiro from the Auvergne in 1076, by the reformed order of French Benedictines founded by St. Gerald of Aurillac. Quite when O Cebreiro cheese acquired its characteristic ‘chef’s hat’ shape is unknown, but documents affirm that Spain’s king Carlos III (1759-88) considered this mountain delicacy from Lugo ‘one of the best cheeses in the world’. King Carlos introduced it to his sister, the queen of Portugal, whose court for many years maintained a standing order for it. It’s hard to think of a product enjoyed as much by royalty and landowners as by their peasant tenants, but for much of the 19th century, O Cebreiro cheese was such a product. In contrast, political upheaval and the rural depopulation of Galicia during the 20th century brought its decline, to the point where by the 1960s it was only produced domestically, and in danger of disappearing altogether.

A reversal of fortune came in 1989, when one cheese-making family from Castelo de Brañas, near Pedrafita do Cebreiro, decided to try to launch it commercially. The artesanal ‘Castelo’ company in Piedrafita, still family-owned, grew out of that venture. While ‘Castelo’ is the largest and best-known producer, a number of smaller ones have arisen in recent years, but regardless of size, they must all conform to Spanish and European hygiene and refrigeration standards.  In our area’s restaurants, ‘queso  do Cebreiro’ is increasingly used as an ingredient by adventurous young chefs. It also remains a favourite dessert, served with either a drizzle of local honey or a slice of homemade quince paste -  though visitors, especially pilgrims, are often invited by kindly servers to try both.

Sowers of Joy and Resilience

June 2025

This month’s Memory is dedicated to that champion of Galician culture, the band of singers and instrumentalists who came together more than 50 years ago to form the folk-group ‘Fuxan Os Ventos’. The name means ‘Let the Winds Flee Away’, and was the title of the song that won a  secondary school choir from Lugo the First Prize at a music festival back in 1972.

After nearly 40 years of fascism, Spain, and particularly Galicia, was isolated from most modern cultural influences. Despite this, radio brought the protest songs and folk music of the United States, France and Britain to Spanish audiences. The students who formed Fuxan Dos Ventos, aged between 16 and 19, were inspired by such music, but even more inspired by social activism. Their decision to promote Galicia’s own musical tradition, playing its historic instruments and singing in their own language, was a brave and radical stance, since the region’s identity was at that time harshly repressed.

Images below: Left, Traditional Galician bagpipe, or ‘gaita’ and on the right: Traditional Galician hurdy-gurdy, or ‘zanfona’

The young musicians began by performing to crowds in the big cities - Santiago, Vigo, Coruña, Lugo and Pontevedra - on the major religious feast-days, then at the many open-air fiestas all over Galicia. They soon gained a following among the radio clubs so common in rural and mountainous areas. The ‘transition’ to democratic government that followed Franco’s death in 1975 allowed the group greater self-expression, and their popularity soon brought recording opportunities and television appearances. Fuxan’s repertoire soon ranged from medieval ‘cantigas’ to folk-songs, many of which were universally known, but had seldom been sung openly.  Members of the group set the work of Galician poets such as Rosalia de Castro and Manuel Maria to music, bringing them cultural vindication and a wider audience.

Group photo of Fuxan os Ventos during the concert “Terra de soños” at the Auditorio de Galicia in Santiago de Compostela on October 18, 2008.

Touring abroad, and later, the internet, has made Fuxan Dos Ventos famous far outside Galicia and Spain, but through the decades the group’s raison d’etre has remained what it always was: the celebration, through music, of Galicia’s cultural and political identity. Since the 90s it has recorded more and performed less often, but twelve of its original members, now in their 70s, are still with it, and took part in the concert that marked its half-century in 2022.

When the city of Lugo’s new 900-seat auditorium was nearing completion, the residents  were asked to suggest a name for it. No medals for guessing the suggestion that won by a landslide!

‘Me gusta Colaborar….’

May 2025

Here’s an uplifting story that I hope brings smiles to your faces, as it does to mine.

At the Memorial service for Mary Ivens held in November 2023, the idea arose of placing a commemorative bench in the garden of Refugio Gaucelmo, the pilgrim hostel that Mary and her husband Walter did so much to create. I’m the friend who actually lives closest to it, so finding someone to make the bench tacitly fell to me. Once Spring 2024 came, I was phoning around the district, asking everyone I knew for guidance. A few names  arose, then one man whose work I went to see and of which I sent a few photos to Mary’s family. Luckily we all agreed in liking one piece more than any of the others, so we asked the craftsman to give us a price and sat back to wait. His price, alas, was more than twice the budget, so we gently withdrew, and as of the end of July, were back to square one.

One morning soon after, I was telling this tale of woe to a friend, Jose (Pepe) Espin, over coffee, and showed him the photograph of the bench we’d liked. He studied it, and suddenly said ‘I could make something very similar to that, perhaps even nicer’. It turned out that he’d learned carpentry at his father’s knee. ‘Really’, he said, seeing my surprised expression, ‘I’d enjoy doing it: I love helping out. I’ll settle for the cost of the timber - and I’ll go to the sawmill and choose it myself’. I was touched and delighted by such a generous offer. We agreed that the bench would be ready by late October, spend the winter in Pepe’s workshop to allow for leisurely varnishing, and be taken to Rabanal in the Spring, to be dedicated and placed in the garden for pilgrims to enjoy.

That was how, on the morning of Saturday, 3 May, five members of the Ivens family coming from England, friends from various parts of Spain, and Pepe Espin’s large car with the bench safely stowed, converged on Rabanal del Camino. As we saw when the finished object was finally placed in the spot chosen for it, the bench  is splendid, fashioned in aged pine and cherry in a traditional rustic style. Pepe added the typically Galician finials as a reminder of its provenance.  Joining us at the simple ceremony in Refugio Gaucelmo’s garden were the current volunteer wardens, two of the monks from the monastery next door, and members of the local ‘Amigos del Camino’. The rain held off as Mary and Walter were remembered aloud by us all, and the bench blessed and dedicated. Then Pepe, the hero of the hour, was congratulated and profusely thanked by the Ivens’ son Robert, replying only that ‘it’s been my pleasure’, and thanking Robert and the family for the opportunity. The photo of him seated on the bench is worth any number of words.

Another beautiful memory for the rucksack, no?

35 Years On

November 2024

Much of my 2024 has been spent translating into English a book written by Luis Celeiro Alvarez, formerly professor of Sociology and Communications at the University of Santiago de Compostela, and still in retirement an associate professor of Communications Sciences in that university.

I’ll get to the book in a moment, but first want to mention that from 1990 to 1993, its author also served as personal assistant to Victor Vazquez Portomeñe, then in charge of planning the first ‘Xacobeo’ as the Xunta de Galicia’s Councillor of Culture. Luis is thus one of the few people to have witnessed every stage, from inception to execution, of the modern renaissance of the pilgrimage to Santiago between the 1960s and the present day. He comes from a village near Sarria, and recalls vividly the overgrown and all but forgotten pilgrimage route as it was when he was growing up.  The subject of his book - the man who came to be known as ‘the priest of O Cebreiro’ and later, as ‘the man who invented the yellow arrow’ - was still unsung then, but Luis knew him, and like many others, now considers him the pivotal figure in reviving the pilgrimage and the roads to Compostela to the point where the whole phenomenon aroused the interest of politicians and economists in the run-up to the 1993 Holy Year.

This is where Luis’s path and mine cross, because that pivotal figure was Fr. Elias Valiña Sampedro, whom I met when I walked to Santiago in 1986, whom I came to know well and whose last guidebook to the Camino I translated into English. There is a pleasing symmetry in having translated Luis’s own book about Elias Valiña into English in time for the 35th anniversary of its subject’s death on 11 December 1989.  ‘Pilgrim Spirit: Elias Valiña and the Revival of the Camino, 1959-1989’ will be formally launched at the Museum of the Pilgrimages in Santiago de Compostela on 12 December. On the evening of the 11th there will be a concert of sacred and pilgrim music in the church of Santiago ‘A Nova’ in Lugo, and on the 14th, an all-day gathering in O Cebreiro, in the church where Elias Valiña is buried and the village he saved from ruin.

Fr. Elias Valiña Sampedro

This will be an occasion that invites friends from the earliest associations of ‘Amigos del Camino’, local people, fellow pilgrims and members of his family to share personal testimonies and anecdotes. Luis Celeiro will act as moderator of what promises to be a moving and memorable tribute.

An Exhibition to Remember

October 2024

This year has seen the 27th exhibition in the series organised annually by the Spanish foundation ‘Las Edades del Hombre’ - ‘The Ages of Mankind’ (or ‘of Humanity’, to translate its name for a modern sensibility). These exhibitions bring together paintings, sculpture and artefacts drawn from all over the autonomous region of Castille and Leon, and display them, usually in one of the region’s cathedrals, to illustrate a given theme. On occasion they have been held in two or three churches in the same locality, or have travelled abroad - notably to New York City in 1998, and to Brussels in 2004. This year, reinforcing the link between its theme of ‘Hospitality’ and the pilgrim roads to Santiago de Compostela, the exhibition has been held in two centres: Villafranca del Bierzo, and Santiago itself, where it occupies both the crypt of the cathedral’s Portico de la Gloria and the monastery of San Martin Pinario.

It is surely cause for congratulation that the Foundation has chosen to focus on Hospitality, as understood and extended to pilgrims for millennia in much of Europe, precisely at a time when the practice of such hospitality on the Caminos is increasingly under pressure from political and commercial interests. In self-defence, two dozen of the so-called ‘Albergues de Acogida Tradicional’, or ‘donation-based pilgrim hostels’ formed an assocation a few years ago, and last February appealed to UNESCO to have the traditional hospitality of the pilgrim roads recognised as part of Humanity’s non-material heritage, or ‘Patrimonio Cultural’. Protection of this kind would challenge the discrimination in favour of private facilites to which the AATs are often subject.

A group of American pilgrims, 1988

The best defence, of course, is a well-informed public. An exhibition such as the current one on Hospitality seeks not only to appeal to the aesthetic response of its thousands of visitors, but also to offer them, in multiple depictions, the ways in which the stranger, the pilgrim, the person in need, has been and should be received and cared-for as a brother or a sister - indeed, as Christ Himself. This goes gloriously counter to today’s commercially-driven and transactional ethos, but it is, and always has been, the motive behind what is freely offered to pilgrims on the roads to Santiago. The transformative power of this experience in creating a better world should not be under-estimated. I for one am deeply grateful for having seen this splendid exhibition, and to the Fundacion Las Edades del Hombre for having created it.

The former monastery and Hospederia of O Cebreiro cared for pilgrims from 1076 until 2012.

Amelia Valiña Sampedro

August 2024

A Generous, Guiding Spirit
Amelia Valiña Sampedro, April 21,1927 – August 19, 2024

As most pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela know, the modern revival of the pilgrimage came about largely through the efforts of Elias Valiña Sampedro, priest of O Cebreiro from 1959 until his death 30 years later. What is far less well known is the supporting role played in that, and in the restoration and life of O Cebreiro itself, by his sister Amelia, who died last week at the age of 97.

Amelia was two years older than Elias, and in 1959 was attending a cookery and catering school in Gijon. She accompanied him to O Cebreiro on 22 September (the day he took up his new appointment), to create a habitable space for him on the upper floor of the ancient monastery. This was easier said than done, since O Cebreiro had no electricity or running water back then, and the building, like the village, was all but derelict. From then until she qualified, she spent every weekend there, and after that...the rest of her life.

Elias Valiña soon began his campaign to restore O Cebreiro, appealing by letter to every conceivable source of aid. When the rebuilding of the church began in 1962 and Elias went up onto the scaffolding as one more among the workmen, it was Amelia, in a place with no telephone and barely any decent road access, who procured the supplies and firewood to provide meals for everyone, winter and summer, on a stove reputed to date from a previous century. Inspired by her brother, as everyone was, there was soon nothing she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do to help lift O Cebreiro out of its destitution.

Her role became more settled, though no less demanding, with the opening of the Hospederia San Giraldo de Aurillac in 1966. Now that there were rooms available for visitors and pilgrims, she was effectively cooking for, and running, a small hotel. The Hospederia, however, was still the rectory, and the villagers trailed in and out of what they considered ‘their space too’, in need of one thing or another, all day, every day, and Amelia’s personal kindness became legendary. Like ‘Don Elias’, she  gave the impression of being everywhere and attending to everything at once, with never an idle moment. While her brother was on his parish rounds, prodding the local authorities to provide O Cebreiro with electricity and sanitation, planting trees and writing his doctoral thesis, Amelia provided the practicalities, stability and good humour that kept his frenetic schedule on course. She found happiness in her marriage to Manuel (Manolo) Gómez in 1970, and in the birth of their son José Manuel in 1972. A few years later, their niece Pilar came to share the workload, and what had become a full and satisfying way of life.

During the 1980s, Elias Valiña was creating the informational and associative network that would bring new life to the moribund Camino de Santiago. Increasing numbers of Camino colleagues,  pilgrims and friends were passing through the doors of the Hospederia, which - thanks to Amelia’s cooking, and the warmth of the welcome – was by this time famous from the Pyrenees to Finisterre. Elias’s illness and death in 1989 were terrible trials, but Amelia decided to carry on at the helm of the Hospederia, and the rest of the family agreed. Their determination to keep offering reasonably-priced accommodation to pilgrims and visitors alike was challenged by the financial tyranny inflicted upon them by the man appointed to succeed Don Elias, but they stood their ground valiantly until 2006, when Amelia was finally obliged to retire and the Hospederia ceased to function. The Xunta de Galicia awarded her its Silver Medal for her contribution to culture in 2003.

It’s too early for decisions about how best to honour her, but honoured she will be, as she will be remembered.

Perplexing Changes

July 2024

Everyone in O Cebreiro is talking about something that’s been conspicuous by its absence these past few weeks: pilgrims. In mid-July, a point in the year when the place used to be buzzing, there’s nobody here but the locals. ‘It feels like a rerun of the pandemic’, somebody said, and I had to agree. On a sunny evening, the tables in the plaza are empty, the bars are empty, the two little craft shops are empty.

There are pilgrims, of course, and if you happen to be in O Cebreiro in the morning, you will see them enjoying a well-earned rest after the stiff climb to get here. Those same tables are full, hedged round with rucksacks and walking poles, as their owners chat happily over cold drinks and coffees. They don’t stay long, though. Eventually they stand up, wrestle their rucksacks back on, and make their way down the village’s only street to rejoin the Camino. What has changed, and why?

I think there is a simple, two part explanation for this. I remember well the blazing hot day in June 1986 when I toiled up the slope to O Cebreiro for the first time. It was my destination that day, and like almost all pilgrims back then, I’d set off that morning from Villafranca del Bierzo. Villafranca marked the beginning of the 11th ‘etapa’ of the Camino Frances, ending in Triacastela, according to the stages of the route set out by Aimeric Picaud in the twelfth century. Back in the 80s pilgrims stuck to the ‘etapas’, partly to honour tradition, but partly too because there were so few places to stay if they didn’t. The first half of the 11th stage was a good example of this, and was also notorious for the challenging ascent from Herrerias to O Cebreiro that added 8 kilometres to the 20 from Villafranca to Herrerias. Today, when there’s no lack of small hotels and private albergues along this whole section of the Camino, pilgrims are increasingly inclined to stop for the night earlier and leave the ascent to O Cebreiro for the following morning, taking a break there before carrying on.

Similarly, years ago many pilgrims used to start in O Cebreiro, aiming to reach Santiago in time for the celebratory fireworks on the evening before St James’s feast-day on 25th July. (I recall how, a week before the feast in the 1993 Holy Year, more than 1000 pilgrims slept in field tents supplied by the army.) What has all but eliminated this practice in recent years has been the over-promotion of Sarria as the starting point of the 100 kilometres needed to qualify for the ‘compostela’. From Sarria onwards, the newspapers tell us, the Camino is not just a stream of pilgrims, it’s a river. Some would say it has burst its banks.  If pilgrims - especially retired and foreign ones, families, and people on tight budgets - fear that they won’t find beds from Sarria onwards to Compostela, perhaps they are choosing other routes over the Camino Frances, or ceasing to come in summer. Whatever the reasons, the effect of these tendencies has been that O Cebreiro is fast ceasing to be an ‘obligatory’ stopping-place, replete with historical and spiritual significance, and is becoming a mere pit stop: somewhere to obtain a stamp for a credencial and a quick coffee, but not a place to devote time to exploring or learning about and certainly not a place of discernment. This is clearly a loss for pilgrims, whether they realize it or not.

Unchanging Beauty

May 2024

Here is the view from O Cebreiro, which every pilgrim will recognise as one of the most stirring panoramas on the whole network of the Caminos. This photo was taken one evening last summer, as Mount Capeloso basked in fading sunlight and  the valley below fell into shadow, but the view is just as glorious on a clear winter’s day, or under grey skies. To me, the graceful form of this landmark bears companison with Mount Fuji or Mount Kilimanjaro. Whatever the weather, the mountain-scape endures.

The view of Capeloso (and its companion, ‘El Faro’, ‘the Lighthouse’), is one that Galicia’s Bronze Age inhabitants would have known, as would the Celts and the Romans. Both these civilisations left their traces in the settlement at the top of the pass, the gateway to Galicia that became O Cebreiro. Through the centuries this glorious panorama has been the backdrop to countless lives: men and women who tilled the land, people who prayed and fought here, the makers, sellers, servants and craftspeople of earlier ages. Thousands, if not millions, of travellers - among them the medieval crowds of pilgrims making their way to Compostela from every corner of Europe - have passed this way and marvelled. For those who made this ascent to O Cebreiro in an era before maps were common, the mountain was a point of orientation, a waymark. Moving on, the travellers would have taken the image of it with them as a memory. Today’s  pilgrims, sitting cross-legged on a stone wall and enchanted by the vista before them, do the same - and are in good company, whatever the season.

The Revival of the Camino in 217 Pages

April 2024

It’s late April, and four days after it was almost too hot to sit outside, I’m watching the snow fall on the hydrangeas outside my kitchen window. From Rabanal del Camino comes news of a wildfire nearby, prompting plans to evacuate the village which thankfully did not have to be enacted. What next, in the way of disconcerting weather phenomena, I wonder? I have a small counterweight to such anxious thoughts right here on the table in front of me: the 13 issues of the tiny Boletin del Camino de Santiago, a total of 217 typed and photocopied pages that tell how the pilgrimage to Compostela was brought back to life in the two years between the summer of 1985 and that of 1987.. It’s an extraordinarily detailed little publication: what was the Boletin, and who created it?

In May 1985, a meeting known as the I Encuentro Jacobeo took place in Santiago de Compostela, convened by the then Archbishop (later Cardinal Archbishop of Madrid) Antonio Maria Rouco Varela. It was intended as a forum for discussion about how to revive and promote the pilgrimage to Santiago along its ancient ‘Camino’. Thirty-eight people attended, most of them already involved in some way with the pilgrimage as parish priests, medievalists, art historians, town hall officials or local enthusiasts.

Chief among them was the scholar-priest Elias Valina Sampedro from O Cebreiro, author of one Camino guide-book and co-ordinator of another. He was unanimously elected ‘Commissioner-Co-ordinator’ of the project, and the Boletin was the means he devised to set it in motion. From July 1985, it appeared bi-monthly, and was a compendium of editorial comment,  notices and newspaper cuttings on Camino-related topics. There were no grants back then, so Elias funded the Boletin himself, and typed it up at night when his parish work was done.  Later, he introduced a modest annual subscription to cover postage. Members of his family helped by photocopying the material sent to him by a host of avid news-gatherers, then folding and stapling the pages into booklets, never imagining that they were creating Camino history.

Elias wrote passionately of the responsibility to defend the Camino as well as promote it, of the need for refugios (what we now call albergues), route-clearing, way-marking and fountains. He took politicians, highway authorities, church dignitaries and town hall officials to task when facilities were slow to materialise, or when the route was treated with disrespect. By listing new subscribers, the Boletin helped to form the associations of ‘Amigos’ that made the route viable. This, and the fact that it soon gained subscribers in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and the United Kingdom as well as in Spain, gave it a vital role in re-establishing the international character of the pilgrimage. All this emerged at the now legendary Jaca conference in September 1987, when the Boletin was subsumed into the far more ambitious Peregrino magazine, still a major source of Camino information today.

The 21st century’s Camino phenomenon is an oak with many roots and many branches, but the ‘acorn’ from which it grew was a small but mighty artisanal newsletter called Boletin del Camino de Santiago….

The Rucksack's Winter Rest

Until next Spring, readers and friends.

‘Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future…’
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

A stone scallop-shell made by the L’Arche community in East Sussex, England, some 30 years ago, now mounted on the wall outside my front door in La Laguna.

A December Ritual

December 2023

A sketch made at the only matanza I ever attended.

It happens less often than it used to, given the depopulation of rural Spain in the past few decades, but it’s still a tradition that brings families and neighbours together in December when it’s cold enough and there are hands available to do the work. I’m referring to the traditional family matanza, or hog slaughtering, from which emerge the pork products so integral to Spanish cuisine. Nowhere is it more truly said than here in rural Galicia that ‘people eat every part of the pig except the squeak’. The amount of nourishment that can be obtained from even one pig is astonishing – and a matanza usually involves at least two and sometimes as many as six. Turning this into a year’s worth of food is an immense amount of work. A matanza is usually spread over three days, but it’s also a communal, social and reciprocal occasion. In a village, or an extended family, everyone lends a hand, knowing that when they hold their matanza, they can count on help too.

Nowadays, a skilled man arrives on the morning of the first day to kill the pigs. His time has been booked and paid for months in advance, so he does the job quickly and departs. Others then scorch, scald and shave the pig’s body meticulously before washing it with a pressure hose. Once the carcass is hung up and opened, the viscera are removed and the body left to chill overnight. The parts that will become casings for embutidos, or cured meat products, are taken to the nearest source of running water to be washed. Evening brings everyone to the table for a supper of liver stewed with onions, brandy, breadcrumbs and herbs, followed by filloas, or crepes made with some of the blood collected that morning.

The second day is the most intense, and begins with the dismembering of the carcasses. Practiced hands wielding long knives separate the back legs from each body as jamones (hams) and the front pair as lacones, or shoulders. Then, in stages, the layers of fat are removed from the carcass and the quality cuts set aside for hanging, freezing, or preservation in salt. Some chops are fried up then and there, for everyone to try with the year’s new wine. Nothing is wasted, though children and dogs hang about in the hope that some tidbit may come their way.

Traditionally, men do the jobs requiring physical strength, but the ingenious preparation of extremities, heads and innards on the second and third days relies mainly on women, as does the creation of the mixture of meat scraps, fat, salt, garlic, herbs and finely ground roast red pepper (pimenton), that is kneaded together for stuffings. Dishes that employ this include botillo (stomach or large intestine, filled with short ribs and the seasoned meat mixture), chorizos (lengths of small intestine into which the seasoned mixture is fed, then tied off with string in 15-cm. lengths), and morcilla (blood sausage). All of these will be cured for several weeks, sometimes by being smoked. Like them, items such as manitas (trotters), codos (hocks), orejas (ears), and rabo (tail) are winter mainstays. The second day ends with a festive meal featuring zorza (fried, highly-seasoned pieces of lomo, or pork shoulder), with potatoes, chestnuts, corn bread and greens in the form of caldo, or broth. It remains on the third day to ensure that hams are well buried in salt, that chorizos are hung where there’s good circulation, and that implements are clean and properly stored for the following year. Everyone is weary, but larders are full.

How ‘Santiago Peregrino’ Found His Niche

November 2023

Not surprisingly, images of ‘Santiago Peregrino’, or ‘St. James the Great in the guise of a pilgrim’, are everywhere along the ways to Compostela. You see him carved and painted, full-size and minuscule, medieval and modest (with books, staves and scallop-shells), or baroque (in capes and cavalierish hats). The figure I want to focus on, however, is a little out of the ordinary. For one thing, he’s modern. For another, he’s English: carved in England, by an English sculptor, in an English stone called ‘Ancaster White’, to be exact. How did he get from England to a niche in the façade of Refugio Gaucelmo in Rabanal del Camino? It’s an endearing story, prompted by the recent death of Mary Ivens, who shared with her husband Walter the role of prime mover in the creation of Refugio Gaucelmo.

Back in 1988, two years after Walter cycled to Santiago, Mary wanted to mark his 60th birthday by giving him a small statue of a pilgrim St. James. She spent weeks looking for an artist prepared to accept the commission before finding the sculptor Beauford Linley – who, as Mary put it, ‘knew nothing of St James, but happily created the birthday present’ in a durable resin, using a photo supplied by Mary to guide him.

By 1991, Mary, Walter and the rest of the Confraternity were deep in fundraising for Refugio Gaucelmo. One evening, at one of the many convivial meetings held at the Ivens’s, the idea arose of creating a similar, but larger, statue for the Refuge. Mary went out of the room for a moment, then returned, flourishing her address book, and with it, Beauford Linley’s contact details. Luckily, as she later recalled, ‘he remembered me, and St James’, and within minutes we had an appointment to meet him at his home near Grantham in Lincolnshire.

There followed a sequence of visits, as Walter, Mary and I watched ‘Santiago Peregrino’ gradually emerge from the block of white stone in Beauford’s garden workshop. It’s a long way to Lincolnshire, but the Linleys’ hospitality was reminiscent of the Camino’s. Tea and conversation were enjoyed in equal measure, largely thanks to Mary, whose genuine interest in people made friends everywhere. When at last the metre-high statue was finished, it was bundled into a van and driven, first to Portsmouth and the ferry to Santander, then on to Rabanal. On the day before the official opening of the Refuge, with the help of a crane and a sturdy villager named Jesus, Joe May wrestled ‘Santiago Peregrino’ into the newly created niche. And there he remains.

Mary was a mainstay of the Working Party (and of many later ones): good-humoured and unflappable as she cooked, cleaned, painted, weeded and tended the inevitable cases of nerves as Opening Day approached. At the end of it, with typical thoughtfulness, she found a moment to phone Beauford and assure him that all was well. His reply, as I learned later, was ‘A blessing on you, Mary!’ (words which I and all who knew her now echo).

‘Ultreia’! : Onward and Upward From La Faba

October 2023

Years ago I attended a funeral in La Faba – a village I knew, of course, as one of the stops on the gruelling ascent to O Cebreiro. It was a late autumn day, but most of those paying their respects stood outside the church of San Andrés, quaking with cold. Before long, someone told me why, pointing out a crack six inches wide running from top of the church’s bell-tower to its base above the porch: damage caused by a recent earthquake. The building was on the point of collapse, and while the officiating priest was clearly trusting Providence, the mourners, on the whole, were not.

Not long after, the Stuttgart-based cultural association ‘Ultreia’, inspired and largely financed by the retired businessman Manfred Hartmann, offered the diocesis of Astorga half the cost of restoring San Andrés, and the conversion of the house once occupied by its last parish priest into a pilgrim albergue. (The German and Spanish sides of this project were brought together by Fr. Angel Fernández de Aránguiz, whose astonishing contribution to the Camino was the subject of this blog back in June.) The restored buildings opened in 2004, and have brought new life to La Faba. Like the Confraternity of Saint James’s Refugio Gaucelmo in Rabanal del Camino, Ultreia’s albergue is staffed by volunteer hospitaleros and operates on pilgrims’ donations. Set in beautifully tended gardens and equipped with a well-stocked kitchen, it’s an exceptionally pleasant stop for pilgrims.

This can be a remarkably resonant stretch of the Camino for those who do some reading beforehand. Well-read pilgrims who stop in La Faba will be aware of its ancient bridge, mentioned, like the village itself, in many of the accounts written by medieval pilgrims, especially German ones such as Hermann Künig von Vach. Similarly mentioned, just below La Faba in Herrerias, lie the vestiges of ‘Hospital Ingles’ and its cemetery for English pilgrims. Just past the monument marking the boundary between the autonomous regions of Castilla-Leon and Galicia (and the provinces of Leon and Lugo), there is a sloping field on the right known as ‘Campo dos Santos’. Residents of La Laguna de Castilla tell me this field was once the site of a hermitage that supplied pilgrims with water on their way up the steep incline, though today it is visited only by mushroom-hunters. The annual plethora of the prized funghi in that particular spot, and no other for miles, is as much a mystery as the long-vanished hermitage, but the folk memory of the latter is just as real.

A Long Gestation, but Worth the Wait

August 2023

The Thirteenth International Conference organised by the Federacion Espanola de Asociaciones de Amigos del Camino de Santiago (‘the Spanish Federation’) took place in Orense, Galicia, in April of this year, the latest in the series of triennial gatherings begun in Jaca in 1987. Through the years I’ve attended most of these conferences (and count myself lucky to have been present in Jaca, too), but I had a particular reason for wanting to be in Orense.  A European Federation of Camino-related associations – an idea first mooted in Jaca some 36 years ago – was finally on its way to becoming a reality. In other words, ‘history was in the making’.

Why has it taken so long? That’s a question without a very clear-cut answer. Good intentions were there from the beginning. The Jaca conference’s 4th Conclusion urged that the Council of Europe and ‘other International Organisations’ recognise ‘a Federation of associations’, while its 10th not only adopted the slogan ‘Camino de Santiago – Camino de Europa’ but invited every cultural group promoting the Way of St. James anywhere in Europe to do the same. The next FEAACS conference, in Estella in September 1992, even took this motif as its title. Subsequent conferences raised the subject, even debated it, but it was not until the one in Ponferrada in 2005 (‘The Camino de Santiago – a Bridge Towards a New Europe’) that it again surfaced as a concrete aim. Another decade went by…and the better part of another…. Perhaps the challenges implicit in the tremendous growth of the pilgrimage during those years simply absorbed all the dedication, funds and energy available. The Council of Europe had, in fact, recognised the Camino de Santiago as ‘Europe’s first Cultural Itinerary’, back in 1987, but thirty years later, there was still no organisation uniting the Camino-based associations of Europe.

Whatever the obstacles may have been, they were overcome by the general resurgence of the Camino spirit as the Continent emerged from the pandemic. The Camino community took up the idea again, this time with a renewed will to see it through. There is much still to be done, but here we are, in Orense’s Centro Cultural Marcos Valcarcel , watching as the representatives of six founding associations sign the Declaration of Intent that will create the new Federation, Europe Compostelle. Its fundamental aim - but on a pan-European scale - is much the same as that of any of our existing jacobean associations: to promote and protect the great cultural legacy of the Caminos, in all its aspects. May it fulfil all the hopes invested in it, for the benefit of pilgrims everywhere.

‘Padre Angel’

July 2023 

There’s an old saying that goes: ‘You can do a great deal of good in the world, as long as you don’t mind who gets the credit for it’. As anyone who knew him will agree, this perfectly sums up the genial, generous approach to life, and to Camino projects in particular, exemplified by the late D. Angel Fernández de Aránguiz, better known as ‘Padre Angel’.

When I first met him, back in 1989, he was the much-loved Principal of the residential college in Veguëllina de Orbigo, León, run by the ‘Padres Pallottinos’, the teaching Order founded by the Italian priest Antonio Pallotti. Later, as its Superior in Spain, he was based in Ponferrada, and later still, at Carranza, in his native Basque country, as Administrator of the Order’s retreat centre.

These would have been full-time jobs for most of us, but Padre Angel was not just highly capable, but endlessly sociable and energetic, and even more so once he became involved with the pilgrimage to Compostela. By the early 90s, pilgrim numbers were rising and the associations of ‘Amigos del Camino’ along the Camino Frances were seeking links with similar groups outside Spain. Angel’s fluent German enabled him to bring Spanish and German organisations together to create seven pilgrim albergues along the route. If you have ever stayed in the albergues in Azofra, Hospital de Orbigo, Santibañez de Valdeiglesias, Foncebadon, El Acebo, Ponferrada or La Faba, you can say ‘thank you’ to Padre Angel, who shepherded each of them into being. His guiding spirit was everywhere, from persuading donors to finance them to organising working parties to build them and later, to finding the furniture. Add to this the fact that several were built with the help of dozens of young people from both countries, for whom these projects became milestones in acquiring life skills. The result has been an ever-widening circle of good for the benefit of pilgrims, set in motion by a remarkable man who never sought or accepted personal recognition.   

I’ve said nothing about his work for the Archicofradia de Santiago Apostol, nor about the book he co-authored with a German friend and later translated into Spanish as El Camino Lleva a Casa (and I into English as Pilgrim Journey, Homeward Way). For years, around the edges of his other responsibilities, he acted as a guide for the German tour group Biblische Reisen, introducing travellers to the art and architecture of Spain’s pilgrimage roads.

Padre Angel died on 13 June 2009. He remains unrecognised by officialdom, but Camino friends revere and miss him still, and the good he did lives on.

Reviving the Camino Ingles

June 2023

This summer marks the twentieth anniversary of a rather special journey along the Camino Ingles. Back in the Holy Year 1993 it was still little-known outside Spain, though its two branches, a longer one from Ferrol and a shorter one from La Coruna, were popular local ways to Santiago. Not surprisingly, the 14 members of the Confraternity of Saint James who walked the shorter route that summer attracted significant media attention, since – as the group’s leader, Pat Quaife, later wrote - ‘We were possibly the first group of pilgrims from the British Isles…to walk the route since the early sixteenth century’.

British devotion to St James the Great, expressed in hundreds of church dedications and place-names up and down the country, became a casualty of the separation of the English church from Rome under Henry VIII. The veneration of saints and relics was suppressed and the practice of pilgrimage died out, but the memory of English pilgrims to Santiago lingered on in Galicia. The name ‘Camino Ingles’ came to be colloquially used to refer to the routes leading from the ports where they had once landed in considerable numbers, especially in compostellan Holy Years.

In 1993, re-enacting the historic pilgrim journey from La Coruna was only part of Pat Quaife’s aim of reviving the Camino Ingles. Her own research, and the example of the Camino Frances, persuaded her that this was possible. Enlisting the organisational help of the Confraternity’s half-dozen Galician members was a first step. As the trip took shape, press releases were sent out from London. The Archbishop of Santiago’s own Holy Year Press Officer agreed to lend a hand. As a result of all this, the Confraternity pilgrims appeared on TV Galega, and in Galicia’s leading newspaper, La Voz de Galicia. Braving atrocious weather, the 14 walkers made their way from Coruna’s church of Santiago to the historic halts of Sarandones, Hospital de Bruma (site of a 12th century former pilgrim hospital), and Ordenes, where they were received by the mayor (a fellow-enthusiast, who had already waymarked his municipality’s section of the route). Once past Sigueiro, the Confraternity pilgrims were soon in the outskirts of Santiago, then making their way to the Plaza del Obradoiro under a banner brought along by a Cornish member of the Bredereth Sen Jago. On the following day, the group received Holy Year certificates (the journey wasn’t long enough for them to be able to claim the compostela) and signed the pilgrim register. Pat later wrote up the journey for Confraternity Bulletin 50, and circulated the news to other European associations

Since then, of course, the Camino Ingles has been well and truly ‘revived’, taking its place among the documented and officially recognised routes leading to the City of the Apostle. Thanks to the strong promotion it now receives, it gets its share of international pilgrims, many of them British. Twenty years on from 1993, I think it’s worth celebrating the journey that began its revival, after nearly 500 years of being all but forgotten outside its immediate area.

Revisiting Rabanal

April 2023

April is on the horizon, and with it, the re-opening of Refugio Gaucelmo in Rabanal del Camino. Yesterday, I revisited Rabanal where – as in every year since its inauguration in 1991 - a working party was spending the week running up to 1 April prepatring for a new pilgrim season. I was there for a meeting, but I was aware of the activity going on in the background. Someone was using a sander, someone else was digging over the patio garden, while the smell of paint drifted in through an open window on what was truly a beautiful spring day.

Back in 1991, such basic pilgrim accommodation as there was along the Camino Frances was often called ‘refugio’; the term ‘albergue’ came into use only later, in the mid-1990s, with the increase in numbers and an improvement in the general level of facilities. None the less, with the agreement of both the groups that created it – the UK’s Confraternity of Saint James and the Bierzo’s Amigos del Camino de Santiago - Refugio Gaucelmo has preserved the name it was given by the Amigos. Gaucelmo was a late 11th century hermit-saint who cared for pilgrims, rather like Santo Domingo de la Calzada and San Juan de Ortega farther east. He built a church and hospital for them, places of rest and recovery on the arduous trek through the mountains of Leon. We of the CSJ had not known of him, but were glad of a name so linked to the pilgrimage, so rooted in local history. It was all of a piece with our commitment to rebuilding the ruined parish house as respectfully as possible, using an expert local builder, quality materials and traditional methods.

Coming back to Rabanal is always a pleasure, but yesterday’s visit was particularly so. It wasn’t just seeing Refugio Gaucelmo looking so welcoming and well-cared for, though of course that was part of it. Rather, it was seeing the whole village looking so welcoming and well-cared for. This is a village that is not just surviving, but thriving, a place whose tradition of hospitality finds expression in everyday dealings and conversation, as I noted when I went into a local shop, then into one of the bar-restaurants. This is what Walter Ivens dreamed of, all those years ago, when he spoke movingly about ‘bringing the village back to life’ when it was so depopulated that when he – and I – first saw it in 1986, it had only 16 residents, the youngest 62 years of age. As the 9th halt on Aymeric Picaud’s route to Compostela, Rabanal’s precious commitment to pilgrims comes down to us through the centuries: that’s why it made sense to create ‘refugio’ here back in 1989. But the best part of Rabanal’s story is that while Refugio Gaucelmo may have been a catalyst, the ongoing process of recovery came about, and continues,  largely through the agency of the people of Rabanal themselves.

Historic maps of a Historic Route

March 2023

Thirty years have passed since D. Elías Valiña’s last work, his splendid cartography of the Camino Francés, was posthumously published. The very existence of this book is a small miracle, and I can’t think of a better start to Memory’s Rucksack than to share the story of how it came about.

First, let me tell you about those maps. After the landmark Jaca conference in September 1987, D. Elias felt that the ‘movement’ had gained enough momentum to allow him to step back. He then turned to what he saw as an essential task: rewriting the ‘big red guidebook’ of 1985 and creating new maps for it, drawn to scale and in greater detail. In what remained of 1987 and through 1988, he travelled the Camino end to end, walking every metre of it multiple times and conveying every feature of it to paper with meticulous attention. Back in O Cebreiro, the pencilled draft was overlaid with translucent paper, and the maps redrawn in black, green, red and blue inks. The result was a set of 4 maps dedicated to the Camino Aragonés and 25 to the Camino Francés: a Camino captured ‘as it was’, before all the roadworks, deviations and ‘improvements’ that have taken place since. This cartography provided pilgrims with more practical detail, but it was also strikingly beautiful, the lettering precise and clear, the contours of hills truly evocative of hills, the forests made up of countless tiny trees.

Alas, their creator did not live to see the longed-for guidebook become a reality, for D. Elias died in December 1989.  When – two years later - his new Pilgrim's Guide to the Camino de Santiago was published by Editorial Galaxia in five languages simultaneously, the funds available were insufficient to reproduce the maps as he had intended. Other Spanish publishers were canvassed about producing the maps as a separate publication, but to no avail: some pleaded lack of cartographic expertise, while for others, five-colour printing was simply too expensive.

This was a grave disappointment to the friends who had managed to bring the work this far, but they refused to accept it as final. As a last resort the maps were brought to London, where Joseph May (a Confraternity of Saint James member with a lifetime’s experience of the newspaper and printing industries), took one look, pronounced them ‘magnificent’ and agreed to help. After a few false starts we found ourselves at the Brentford printworks of specialist cartographer Roger Lascelles, an engaging New Zealander producing maps and guides for, among others, the Daily Telegraph. He was captivated by Joe's description of the Camino and the pilgrimage (neither of which he had heard of), but what carried the day was Joe’s explanation of the printing processes by which the maps could be reproduced to the highest standard at the lowest unit cost. Roger knew he was hearing this from a pro and so was prepared to take a gamble.

There followed a year of trips back and forth to Brentford, long telephone conversations, endless proof-reading, and for Joe, months of working closely with the printers. The reward was our first sight of the maps, published handsomely as two editions, with introductions in English and Spanish, just as the 1993 Holy Year began. In due course the English edition was reprinted twice and eventually sold out, but D. Elias's family still has plenty of copies of the Spanish one in their shops in O Cebreiro. The Confraternity also has a few, available through the online Shop or the Office.

Roger, Joe and I remained friends, and ten years later we met for a celebratory ‘anniversary’ lunch. Roger still hadn’t broken even, but said he was "proud to have done it, and wouldn't have missed it". Joe grinned and said ‘it was worth every minute, and would have pleased D. Elias’. For me, the cartography remains a portrait of the Camino ‘as it was’ that grows more precious with every passing year. It also bears out my faith in what can be done when people of good will work together to make something worthwhile happen.

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