As 250,000 hardy devotees join the trek to Santiago de Compostela, Christopher Howse in The Telegraph explains the growing appeal of pilgrimages.
"I just saw Martin Sheen!” exclaimed a blogger on a site devoted to the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela. Indeed, the fictional President of the United States has been spotted, like some greying yeti, at locations all along the 500-mile route from Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees to the very threshold of the Galician pilgrim destination.
Sheen and his son Emilio Estevez have been making a film to be called The Way, about an American who carries his son’s ashes on the Camino to the Spanish pilgrimage city. “Great, all we need now is Madonna or Bono,” reacted another pilgrim-blogger, “no doubt with a lackey carrying the bags, and that will be it, the world’s largest theme park.”
However, Santiago can disprove the apophthegm that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, for it is a delightful old city where rare lichens soften the buildings of native granite. The vast cathedral square ebbs and flows with clusters of young foot-pilgrims, lolling exhausted but triumphant on the stone paving. On one side stands the 15th-century hostel founded by Ferdinand and Isabella, now a luxurious, and expensive, parador.
In the cathedral, pilgrims queue to climb steps behind the wildly rococo altarpiece, thick with gilt angels, in order to embrace the shoulders of the ancient statue of St James. They then file through the narrow crypt where the saint’s relics are revered in a silver sarcophagus topped by a star. Experts insist that Compostela does not derive from words meaning “field of the star”, but the notion endures.
Priests sit ready in confessionals to absolve penitents of the sins they confess in a dozen languages, as if they wanted their souls scrubbed as their smelly socks must be. Medieval pilgrims would burn their travel clothes in a brazier on the roof. You can see the very place by climbing 100ft up there, where children run happily along the pitched roof in a carefree Spanish manner.
The most thrilling sight of the completed pilgrimage comes after the crowded noon Mass, when the botafumeiro is brought out. This 6 st 8 lb silver censer, 5ft 3in tall, hanging from a pulley attached to the lofty vaulting, is hauled into the air by six men. At first you think it will swing like a clock pendulum, but they pull it ever higher, like a daring child on a swing. At the upper extreme of the 140ft arc, the rope is almost horizontal. If you stand in the transept, the heavy thurible hurtles down towards you like a steam train, with little streamers of fire and smoke.
