Some readers may have done the Camino and have their own routines, others wondering what it’s like.  Here is a quick summary of the routines we have observed and adopted.

0600. Camino life starts early.  In high summer, you want to walk before it gets too hot.  In dormitories, people can’t always sleep well so might as well get up.  We didn’t always start this early, especially later on.

0700 or a bit later: breakfast.  Most Albergues and cafes will serve coffee/tea, orange juice, and toast.  Some people do a few km before they have theirs.

0745. On the road.  Needing a head torch now. One of the rewards for the early starts has been the sunrises.

0930. First cafe stop.  Cafe con leche (hot milk), not normally my drink but very good here.  With a small bit of cake if we haven’t had much breakfast.

1100. Maybe visit a church if there is an interesting building on that day’s route, and it’s open.

1200. Lunch.  Another cafe, for tortilla or a roll with eg cheese and ham.  Coke Zero, Kas Limon, or Nestea.

1500-1600. Arrive at the next place, and book in.

1600. Washing.  With not many spare clothes, keeping ahead of the game means washing a few things every day, and hoping they get dry – here’s where there is competition for the best slots on the airers and washing lines!  

1630. Refreshment.  On a hot day, it’s hard to resist a cold beer.  This week, it’s been coffee and cake.

1700. Showering.

1900. Dinner.

2000. Depending on where you are staying, and the weather, you can go for a stroll round the town (if your blisters or injuries don’t forbid this), or sit and read.  But in the dormitories, people start to turn in amazingly early.  I don’t know whether it’s tiredness or lack of other things to do, but it’s not unusual to see six people all in their bunks by 2100, having a last look at their phones before lights out, hoping to get a good night’s sleep before …

0600. Get up and do the whole thing again.  And again.

One of the memories from our visit in 1988 was a village named El Acebo, between Leon and Ponferrada.  It was clearly a pilgrim village, with a narrow street and buildings dating back centuries, but it was showing obvious signs of rural decline, and frankly looked remarkably primitive.  I made a note at the time: from the cairn at Cruz Ferro, we went down “on one of the worst ‘proper’ roads I’ve ever been on, to Ponferrada.  Going through a place called El Acebo, the road isn’t metalled at all.  Some of it is derelict, but there are a few new houses among the old, and it’s bizarre that such a road survives.” I will post a picture from 1988 when we get back.

Things have changed over 30 years.  The road is now properly made up, and all the houses in El Acebo have been reroofed in the same way – it’s very striking as you come into the village from the mountains above.  Similarly, doors and windows are mostly modern, and the attractive balconies overhanging the still narrow main street (Calle Real).  At the far end of the village is a new pilgrim hostel with its own swimming pool, and half a dozen flags on tall flagpoles, like an international hotel, visible for miles.  

It’s not clear why this has happened, apart from generally greater prosperity and development in Spain, though the greater popularity of the Camino has clearly helped.  It’s the most striking transformation we’ve seen comparing what we remember of the 1988 visit and our current trip.

We are now most of the way across the Meseta, a high plain running from Burgos to Leon (where we are currently) and a bit beyond.  As you prepare for the Camino, you read about it – bleak, arid, bare, long stretches with no stops for food or water, and no shade from the hot sun.  One old Camino hand quoted us a remark that the first third of the Camino is for your body – you get better at the walking, I guess – and the last third is for your soul – might come to that when we get there (or not).  The middle third -the meseta – is for your mind, implying a tough mental test.

In practice, as with some other things in life, like the tax return, thinking about it is worse than getting stuck in.  We have been lucky in that the weather has been dry throughout, and not baking hot most days.  And it hasn’t been my favourite stretch so far.  But we haven’t found it as much of an ordeal as some made out, and nor have the many people we have talked to in the evenings and on the trail.

The first thing to say is that the territory does vary.  At times it is very bare: you can look in all directions and literally not see anything engineered by man or woman: no fences or walls, no farm buildings, no rusty old agricultural machinery (thankfully), just big fields and the very occasional tree.  But stretches quite this bare are the exception.  There is a certain amount of up and down.  The landscape varies, eg around Itero de la Vega, just after you enter into Palencia province, there was quite a lot of activity, with more traffic, corn still not harvested, woods, and vines planted.  That then dwindled to just fields with hardly any trees on the way in to Boadlilla.   At this time of year, many of the fields have been harvested, so look pretty bare, whether re-ploughed (see previous blog) or not.  In other areas, the farmers are busy getting the crops in, and we saw someone hoover up a field of sunflowers very quickly one afternoon – think we will still buy the seeds at the supermarket when we get home …

Changes are on the way.  Saplings have been planted in protective shells in places, presumably for commercial purposes, though in the last couple of days, there have been some offering shade to the walkers.  You see quite a lot of wind farms in the distance, though surprisingly few solar panels.  And there are some interesting cloud scapes: at one point, just over a crest, the hazy sky reminded me of  a seascape with islands, off the coast of Scotland or Ireland.  Wish I could paint a better picture in words, never mind use a brush.

The other thing is that I’m pretty sure that there are more villages with facilities than there were a few years ago, as part of the development of the Camino all round.  When we drove here in 1988, I remember concluding that I would not be able to walk the Camino, because I couldn’t carry the water I would need to cover the long and hot empty stretches.  But the gaps are manageable now.

Finally, I can’t resist a pun.  One human-made feature in the latter stages is a new rail line, presumably high-speed.  Until then, we hadn’t seen any trains on the Camino.  So with apologies to “My Fair Lady”, the train in Spain runs mainly in the plain …

Something I saw on the Camino the other day reminded me of a line in one of my favourite poems, “The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The line is “Sheer plod makes plough-down sillion shine.”  And here, indeed, a rich dark soil had recently been ploughed, and the sun was catching the cut earth at a particular angle that meant light glowed from it. 

Expert critics have analysed the layers of meaning in Hopkins’s line.  Did he, for instance, invent the word “sillion”, which doesn’t have much of a pedigree in English, though sounds very much like the French word “sillon” meaning furrow?  The interpretation which strikes a chord with me is regarded by the experts as at least plausible – that Hopkins was arguing that hard work will make anything look and indeed be better.

“The Windhover” is subtitled “To Christ Our Lord”, and is fundamentally about how the beauty of a bird in flight prompted him to think about the greater beauty of Christ.  He saw the hand of God in all things – another poem begins “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”.  And he would have had plenty to enthuse about on the Camino.  My own favourite moments have actually been walking at sunrise – the picture shows Carrion de los Condes yesterday – but there have been mountains, valleys, and big skies to enjoy, for instance.  There hasn’t been so much wildlife, though we did see some of the windhovers or other birds of prey that enthused Hopkins the other day.  In terms of man-made beauty, Burgos Cathedral stands out with a series of magnificent pieces of work, and some of the smaller churches are very fine.

The same day as we saw the ploughed field, however, we also passed through an area linked more to other explanations of human progress.  Near the village of Atapuerca, archaeological excavations have uncovered remains of from over 400,000 years ago, the earliest evidence of humans in Europe.  These are changing our understanding of human development.  Some of the finds are housed in the Museo de la Evolucion Humana, which has excellent explanations in English as well as Spanish of both the theory of evolution, and the accumulating evidence as to how our species developed.  Fascinating stuff.

I owe my love of “The Windhover” to an English teacher at King Edward’s Birmingham, Tony Trott.  So do thousands of others.  He died a year or two ago – RIP, Mr Trott, and thank you.

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.

When I tell people we’re walking the Camino in the autumn, reactions vary.  It’s striking first how few people haven’t heard of it: what feels like a rather anoraky pursuit is actually pretty well known, thanks partly to the sheer number of people who now do it, and partly to the Martin Sheen film from 2010 and a BBC programme last year.  Most people are envious, and we are certainly lucky to be able to take six weeks out from the rest of life, to have (we hope) the health and strength to complete the walk, and to be able to afford it.  But some do ask the blunt question, “Why would you want to do that?”  And it’s a very fair question: if you’ve got the chance to take six weeks holiday, it’s not obvious why you would spend it all walking across northern Spain, through landscapes of varying attractiveness, staying partly in hostels, to a destination you can fly to in a couple of hours!

For me, some of the reasons are clear.  I’m looking forward to the physical and mental challenge of walking 500 miles at a run rate of about 15 miles a day: I know it will hurt at times, that we will get both hot and wet, and that the walking may be boring at times.  But it will be very satisfying to complete the walk, and who knows when injury or illness may rule this sort of thing out completely?  The chance to observe a slice of modern Spain at close quarters will be interesting, as I covered in an earlier blogpost.  And it will be good to see the historic buildings and get a sense of the atmosphere that greeted medieval pilgrims.

Harder to pin down, but important, is the sense of going on a journey, and the reflections that will prompt – as Lawrence Durrell wrote, “Journeys lead us not only outwards in space but inwards as well.”

There is a difference between a journey and a trip.  A trip may also be quite long, and involve admiring landscapes and buildings.  But that doesn’t imply a development of the mind or, more speculatively, the soul.  A journey implies a change. 

It doesn’t have to be a physical journey.  The former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, calls his memoir A Journey, because it’s “a description of a journey through a certain period of history in which my political, and maybe to a certain degree my personal character evolves and changes”.  By coincidence, I was listening to Test Match Special this morning, in between working on this blog, and the former Australian fast bowler, Mitchell Johnson, talked about the highs and lows of Test cricket, and said that you learnt better how to cope through experience “on your journey”.

Journeys can change you for a number of reasons.  Most obviously, there is being in a different country, and going through it under our own steam.  Goethe wrote in Italian Journey, “Nothing is comparable to the new life that a reflective person experiences when he observes a new country.”  There will also be plenty of new people to meet, and by all accounts people from dozens of different countries and a variety of walks of life.  Then there are the experiences we will have, some planned -sharing dormitory accommodation for the first time in over 15 years – and others unplanned, though hopefully not too dramatic – please let’s not be seriously ill!

How you change will depend partly on the strength of these forces, but also on your mindset at the start of the trip, and how you react to the experiences it brings.  I’m fortunate again in not embarking on the journey in order to come to terms with a bereavement or other traumatic life event.  I’m not actively seeking God, nor another definition of the meaning of life.  But I am looking forward to the time to think, and to think while on the move, and I know I need to allow my mind to be open to whatever the journey brings.  The 19^th century essayist, William Hazlitt, wrote that “We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind much more to get rid of others.”  That will be hard for someone who likes to plan everything, and to know exactly what he will be doing for the next days and weeks.  But it’s part of the camino experience that I am looking for.

Finally, what’s the significance of the fact that this particular journey is based on a medieval Catholic pilgrimage, and that walkers and cyclists are still known as “peregrinos” or pilgrims?  That’s one for another blog!

Walking in Italy very close to the French border prompts some reflection on the nature of border lands, towns and villages  that are legally and constitutionally part of one country but are physically only a few kilometres away from the border with another country.  How do they relate to their neighbours?  How do they cope with whatever legacy history has thrown at them?

We are here as part of our preparations for walking the Camino de Santiago in the autumn: a burst of hill training, since the Camino will hardly ever involve the climbs we are doing here, but will involve more distance, so the days will be about as long or longer.  Here is a fairly remote part of Italy, two and a half hours from Turin by train and car, in the Valle Maira in Piedmont province.  It`s in the south western Alps, and today`s walk took us not just up to the French border but across it, at the Colle del Maurin, or Col de Maurin, depending on which country you are approaching it from.  The picture shows the stone marking the border, dating from 1857: since this was before Italy was formed as a country, it shows the fleur-de-lys for France and the cross for the Kingdom of Savoy.  

There is evidence here of different relationships between Italy and France.  The two were of course at war with each other from 1939, and one of our walks passed the ruins of a Second World War bunker.  But the nearby village of Saretto tells the story of a different kind of relationship.  In May 1944, the Pacts of Saretto were signed between the Italian Liberation Movement and the French Resistance, committing themselves to work together against fascism, on the basis that “Among the French and Italian peoples, there is no reason for resentment.”  These days, the Italian children learn French in primary school, and we have – thankfully if rather shamefully – been able to communicate with taxi drivers and some of the hotel staff in French rather than in our pidgin Italian.

In most borderlands where we have visited, people seem to get along across the border.  The Swiss have to manage not just multiple external borders, but also internal ones between the three main language groups.  The last two times we were in northern Italy, we were in the Sudtirol, where they still speak German as a first language.  And Judith spotted that one of our earlier walks, in the French Alps, was actually not very far from where we are now.

In Spain, the main border issue – as opposed to the huge internal political issue about Catalan independence – centred on the Basque country, which we will be walking through on the Camino.    The Basque area spans Spain and France: when we stayed in our starting point of St Jean Pied de Port, just the French side of the Pyrenees, in 1988, we saw a reenactment of a traditional Basque wedding.  The case for making the Basque area a country in its own right has been advanced for centuries. It`s a pity that perceptions of this interesting part of the world were shaped for some by the periodic outbursts of Basque terrorism in the `80s and `90s, while not much progress was made by their political wing.  Thankfully the separatist organisation responsible, ETA, ended its armed activity in 2011. 

The “autonomous community” within Spain called the Basque Country, with Bilbao as its capital, is actually not on our route, which goes straight into the province of Navarre.  But that is Basque territory too, so it will be interesting It will be interesting to walk through the area, very briefly in France, and for some days in Spain, and see then how it differs from other parts of the country.

The dynamics of borderlands have been studied by academics and investigated by people with local knowledge and the locus to ask questions: there has of course been plenty of this work in the context of the Irish border post-Brexit.  That`s not my purpose in a blog.  All I will say is that I hope the cooperation and mutual understanding we have seen in the southwestern Alps can be seen more often elsewhere.

One of the things I’m looking forward to, in walking the Camino, will be getting a close-up view of modern Spain.  Looking at a slice of England and Wales was a big part of my reason for researching and writing my book on the London to Holyhead road (“This Ancient Road” 2017, available online though sadly not from all good bookshops), along with the Roman remains and the industrial history.  And while much of the observation there was done from the car, this time we will be doing it at walking pace.

We last went to northern Spain in 1988, following the Camino route by car.  Perhaps because of the links through tourism, football, food, and dance, it feels as though Spain has always been a fellow open democracy.  In fact, in 1988, it had only been a democracy for 13 years, after 36 years of dictatorship under General Franco, and had only been an EU member since 1986. 

Economic prosperity was both fuelled and reflected in the development of the infrastructure.  Roads and hotels were sometimes pretty basic in 1988, but modernised rapidly afterwards, partly with EU money.  The length of the Spanish motorway network increased nearly four-fold between 1990 and 2015, and the pictures show a deliberately extreme contrast in the type of roads available.

Statistics only ever tell part of the story – that’s why I want to walk to see for myself – but the figures for those 30 years show striking changes.  Spain is relatively richer: the best overall measure of economic prosperity, output per head, shows Spain at 78% of the OECD average in 1988 and at 88% in 2018.  This conceals an even sharper rise and fall: at its peak in 2008, Spanish output per head was 96% of the OECD average, but the country suffered badly from the financial crash and the recession which followed.  Meanwhile, Spain has got bigger: the population has risen from 39 million to 47 million, with 5m of that growth occurring between 2000 and 2008, thanks to rapid immigration, though the rate of increase in Galicia (the region including Santiago), for example, was significantly lower.

A further important change since 1988 is that power is more devolved. Gradually, the regions took on more responsibility, eg for universities and aspects of health work, with more tax powers alongside.  By the mid 2000s, more OECD data suggested that only Canada and Australia were more decentralised.  The claims of some regions for greater autonomy is perhaps the dominant issue in Spanish politics today, thanks to the pressure for independence for Catalonia.  This bears out a prediction from John Hooper, in The New Spaniards: writing in 2006, he said that regional nationalism remained the “single biggest imponderable in Spain’s future”.  We took an earlier version of Hooper’s book, written when he was the Guardian’s Madrid correspondent, with us on the 1988 trip, and it was – and remains – a fascinating read.

For much of the time since 1988, Spain has been ruled by either the Socialists (PSOE) or the centre right People’s Party (PP).  More recently, as in some other European countries, things have become more complicated, with the emergence of more parties, partly under pressure from the Catalan independence movement, and the response made to it.  Not surprisingly, there are differences between the regions, and that will be the subject of another blog.