One of the pleasures of walking the Camino is the chance to see a slice of Spain at close quarters – I might say one of the privileges actually, since we mustn’t forget we are guests in this country, and the people we come across may not automatically think that having tens of thousands of pilgrims tramping through their towns and villages every year is a good thing. In some villages, the Camino is an important part of the economy, but by no means everywhere.

We have seen aspects of the strength of the economy of modern Spain. Today’s route from Santo Domingo to Belorado runs alongside the busy N120 for quite a lot of the way – not the most scenic – and there are plenty of big lorries and big cars about their business. The centres of the two main cities we have walked through so far, Pamplona and Logrono, looked smart. But change is evident elsewhere: there are several derelict factories on the outskirts of Santo Domingo, for instance, and rural depopulation is clearly an issue here as in the UK and France, for instance.

Four things in the last few days have given an insight into aspects of modern Spain.

The approach to the village of Cirinuela yesterday morning did look a bit odd – we had been walking for several kilometres through a rural landscape, where the olive groves and Rioja vineyards had given way to ploughed fields with the harvest now gathered in.  Ahead of us were rows of modern houses, of pretty uniform design, with no apparent signs of life – cars, people in the garden, or whatever.  But we were into siesta time, so didn’t think any more of it until after lunch, when we explored some more.  As far as we could see, Cirinuela is a ghost town, except that it has never been occupied for the ghosts of previous residents to come back and haunt the place.  

I’d read about how the financial crash had meant that some speculative building had left unsold houses on the hands of the developers. But I really hadn’t expected to see a whole new village, with its own road sign from a new roundabout, empty: park with nobody in, children’s playground with no children, block after block with Vende signs – For Sale.

The second thing was also to do with housing. Viana is a small town near the city of Logrono. Walking into it you can again see the new housing on the outskirts, near what is obviously the old town on the hill. Here the housing is occupied: the population has grown from 3,400 in 2001 to 4,200 in 2018. Spain’s population has grown rapidly over recent decades – Viana has clearly played its part. The villages today haven’t.

The third thing was rather different. The Cafeteria Buen Camino in Los Arcos is a small place, with a couple of tables inside and a couple of dozen in the square outside. On Sunday evening (22nd) it was full of people: with some locals putting the world to rights over a glass or two of wine, and dozens of pilgrims walking the Camino and needing to refuel for the next day. There was one waiter outside and one person behind the bar, both working like hell, keeping us all fed and watered – think the sort of pace worked by bar staff in the interval of a play or concert, but kept up for two hours or more. The following morning, the cafe opened at 6.30 to feed the pilgrims cafe con leche and croissants before the day’s march began. One guy behind the bar – thankfully a different guy but again working like hell. Spain has high unemployment. Is something in their labour laws or practices stopping them bringing in extra people, even from a nearby town, to help out for the peaks? Especially given that the peaks are predictable, since you know roughly how many pilgrims are pouring down the Camino in fairly set stages.

Finally, we walked past lots of Rioja grapes. Presumably the harvest hasn’t come round yet, because the only grape picking seemed to be the odd single tractor pouring a few bucket loads into a hopper for onward transportation. Last year we were in Champagne country during the harvest and there were vans from Poland and Portugal parked up with people out among the vines bringing in the precious harvest. Maybe that’s yet to come in La Rioja.

We won’t be there to see it, as we crossed today into the province of Castile and Leon, where we will be for close to three weeks. We saw an encouraging sign today, showing that we were one-third of the way to Santiago, but we are not looking too far ahead. Two more days walking, then a rest, but then a long day after that onto the meseta.

Six days in and tomorrow will be our last full day in the Basque Country, having started on the French side in St Jean Pied de Port and walked across the Spanish province of Navarre.  We saw the Basque heritage on our previous visit to St Jean in 1988, watching a reconstruction of an early 20th century Basque wedding, and buying some Basque table linen which we still use.  On the Spanish side, my impression is that the Basque identity has been reinforced.  Street signs and other notices are routinely in both Spanish and Basque – it’s like Wales in that respect.  About one person in seven in Navarre reports that they speak Basque, and about the same semi-speak it, though we haven’t picked any up (though since our Spanish isn’t much good, we might just have missed it!). And as well as the official notices, there is plenty of graffiti which has Basque messages, as in the picture above: one person has drawn the flag and written “This is Spain”, only for another to score that and rewrite it to read “This is not Spain”.  Fortunately the violence that was associated with Basque separatism a few years ago seems to remain in the past.

Navarre and its people get a bad vibe from the writer of the surviving medieval guidebook to the Camino, a French monk called Aimery Picaud.  He dishes out plenty of criticism, culminating in the accusation that “the Navarrese even practise uncharted fornication with animals”!  Goodness knows where he got that idea from – maybe political or church rivalries made him prone to spread particular stories?  We have certainly felt welcome anyway.  

Picaud did however like the town of Estella, where we are staying – “stocked with good bread and the best wine, and meat and fish and all good things”.  Time to go and check that out!

18 different nationalities at dinner

So after all the planning, the reading, the anticipation, the worrying away about what to take and so on, we are finally under way.  Today is day 3 of the walk, though the first was a short, if strenuous, day, about 8km up the hilll out of our starting point of St Jean Pied de Port.  Here are my first impressions.

First, the Camino is busy.  It’s hard to find accommodation in a lot of places so we have just booked ahead for 3 nights, which we weren’t planning to do.  The enormous hostel facilities at the monastery of Roncesvalles, linked to the Chanson de Roland, have about 200 beds: they were full last night.  We don’t know why it’s this busy now, or whether it will stay that way.

It’s international.  The picture above comes from the entrance to one of the villages on the route, Burguete. At our first hostel, they asked us to stand up after dinner and introduce ourselves.  With about 50 people, there were 18 different nationalities, from Australia to Korea to Canada to Scandinavia, as well as Western Europe.  We were the only English pilgrims.

We’d heard about the community spirit, and it seemed real even on that first night.  People do greet each other with “Buen Camino”, chat to strangers, and muck in together in the hostels.  Hopefully that will last as we get further in to the walk.

The walking has already been varied.  We have crossed the Pyrenees, at a height of about 1400m, and crossed from France into Spain at much the same time.  The path has involved some road walking, some mountain paths with steep descents, some beautiful forest paths offering much needed shade, and also a route round the Magna industrial estate in Zubiri, where they produce Magnesium Oxide for a range of customers in 60 countries.  So the Camino doesn’t just head through the pretty areas.

On a personal note, we are doing fine so far.  My shoulders hurt because my rucksack is very heavy, but otherwise we are OK.  But this is just the start: we clocked up 50km on the way down to tonight’s stop.  So lots to come, and chance to reflect on the phenomenon that we are part of, that was exemplified by the spirit in the introductions on the first night.  Why should people from so many countries travel long distances, to walk uphill and down dale in all weathers for several weeks, with shell emblems on their rucksacks, in honour – in some sense – of a saint whose miraculous powers might have attracted medieval pilgrims but don’t resonate today?  But something clearly does: that’s what we will explore and hopefully experience.