Eight Hundred Kilometers to Yourself

In the early nineteen-eighties, one of Europe's oldest pilgrimage routes was walked by almost nobody — a few dozen people a year. Not hundreds. Dozens. By twenty twenty-four, nearly half a million completion certificates were handed out. So what happened to this road — and to the people walking it?

The Camino de Santiago, the Way of Saint James, has existed for over a thousand years. But what it's become today is largely a story of the late twentieth century. In nineteen eighty-seven, the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho published "The Pilgrimage," a book based on his own walk. It did something radical: it turned the route from a strictly Catholic pilgrimage into a space for spiritual searching — open to people who might never have set foot in a church. Then in nineteen ninety-three, UNESCO added the Way of Saint James to its World Heritage list, cementing its status as a cultural phenomenon as much as a religious one.

On the first day of walking, you don't yet understand what's happening. The backpack chafes, your legs haven't found their rhythm, your head is still full of everything you came here to leave behind. But one thing hits you immediately: a scallop shell tied to every pack you pass. It's not decoration. In the Middle Ages, pilgrims used it as an actual utensil — to scoop water from a spring, to take soup from the communal pot at a wayside inn. And by that shell, householders along the road recognized who, by Christian custom, deserved a bed and a meal for the night. The shell was a signal: this person belongs to the "people of the road." Someone traveling light, trusting the world to provide.

That trust has a physical texture to it. Like the smell of old wooden floors in a pilgrim hostel at dawn, while everyone else is still asleep.

An albergue isn't just a cheap hostel. It's a direct continuation of the medieval tradition of pilgrim shelters. Ten to fifteen euros buys you a roof, a shower, a kitchen. But the real currency here is something else: willingness to follow an unspoken code. Rise early. Respect the silence. Don't hog a bed you might not need. Leave room for whoever arrives after you.

And here's a fact many people miss: the French Way, the most popular route today, wasn't historically the first. The earliest European pilgrims walked a northern route along the Atlantic coast, steering clear of inland Spain, which was gripped by wars and epidemics. Only later, once kings began deliberately building bridges, hospitals, and shelters along a more direct road through the Pyrenees, did the French Way become the main path. The northern route still considers itself the historical elder — and keeps its reputation as the wilder, more austere option.

At a single albergue table, you might find: someone freshly divorced, someone who's lost a loved one, a burned-out programmer, and a seventy-year-old who decided to walk eight hundred kilometers while his legs still could. They talk about the weather, about aching knees, about where the food is better. And somewhere in that stream of small human talk — something happens.

One older Spanish man told his story: he set out on the French Way after his son died. Not a believer — he simply didn't know what else to do with himself. And he found that grief he couldn't speak about with anyone back home somehow dissolved into this shared current of people walking. By the end of the route, he understood something: his personal tragedy was part of a long history of people who, for centuries, have come here carrying their own losses. The tomb of Saint James didn't heal him — his own words. But for the first time, it became possible to keep living.

The Compostela — a certificate on parchment that many treat as a souvenir — still carries, in Catholic doctrine, the idea of the forgiveness of sins. To earn it, you need to walk at least a hundred kilometers, or cycle two hundred, and state your motivation as spiritual or a personal quest. The Church officially distinguishes between "religious" pilgrims, the "religious-cultural," and those walking "for reasons of personal searching." It's a rare case of an ancient institution trying to fit a very modern existential crisis into old theological categories. Somehow, it comes off almost touching.

Most people assume the route ends in Santiago. But a good share of pilgrims keep walking — another hundred and twenty kilometers or so, to Finisterre. "The End of the Earth" — that's what the place was called in the Middle Ages, when the Atlantic seemed like the edge of the world.

There, on the cliffs by the lighthouse, a ritual plays out that guidebooks rarely mention. People burn their old boots — the very ones they walked in. Or a piece of clothing. They leave notes on the rocks, scraps of letters, sometimes a photograph. It isn't a church rite — closer to something pagan. But deeply human. After eight or nine hundred kilometers, a person gets used to measuring life in steps. That final bonfire is an attempt to turn everything they've lived through into something visible. To close not just the route, but some inner story too.

Today, the share of pilgrims who name religion as their motivation keeps shrinking. The Church's own statistics show it: more and more people are walking to "find themselves," to rethink their lives, to get through a crisis or a loss. Towns and villages along the routes now build their calendar around pilgrim season — while also trying to protect the road from turning into a purely commercial trail.

The Camino is becoming a kind of global laboratory for the search for meaning, in a world offering fewer and fewer ready-made answers. And the road is just as long as it ever was.

When you step out of the albergue at dawn and hear nothing but your own footsteps, and somewhere ahead, someone else's, one simple thing becomes clear. You're not the first. You won't be the last. And maybe that's exactly what you needed to feel.

What should we tell you about? Your own street would do. moygid dot online.