Words and Photos by Andrea Kirkby

I'd hiked over a thousand kilometres of the Camino de Santiago and stood now in the middle of a plastic marquee, just outside the little Spanish town of Villafranca del Bierzo, where a man called Jesus was kneeling in front of me.

His hands were held out towards my knees; close, but not touching. I could see the top of his head, with a little patch of thinner hair, or it might have been the way the light was falling.

He moved his hands gently in circles, as if he were polishing some invisible thing, carried on doing it for a quarter of an hour, and then stopped suddenly and got up without a word. It was time for a cup of tea with the other pilgrims.

The whole thing was quite surreal and I didn't believe it would help at all. But three-quarters of the way to Santiago, my knees had seized up and I was in real pain, and willing to do anything—even ask this man I'd met in the pilgrim refugein Villafranca del Bierzo to "dowse my knees"—to stop the hurt. And strangely enough, the next day my knees felt fine.

I don't think the Camino de Santiago—also called the Way of St. James—is really meant to produce miracles, but after being on the Way you start to accept the unusual, the strange, the downright weird, as part of your everyday life.

The Camino was one of the major medieval pilgrimage routes; pilgrims came from all over Europe to visit the tomb of Saint James. In the last twenty years, it's been rediscovered; tens of thousands reached Compostela last year. It's fifteen hundred kilometres, or thereabouts, and a good couple of months on foot, from Le Puy in the centre of France to Santiago de Compostela in the wet west of Spain, and somewhere along the route, your mind gets turned around, and you start believing.

Medieval pilgrims had the same tolerance for miracles. At Santo Domingo de la Calzada they still keep a pair of chickens in the church to commemorate the day a judge hanged an innocent man. "He's as dead as that roast chicken," the judge said to the man's complaining parents. Whereupon the roast chicken got up and crowed, and the dead man was found to be alive after all.

Most pilgrims start from Roncesvalles (the first village in Spain) or Pamplona, but purists start from Le Puy in the centre of France,or even farther away. I met one Dutchman who was walking the Way with his dog; he'd started from his front door and walked all the way. He joked that the dog had started as a Great Dane and worn its legs down en route. I think it was a corgi.

Some pilgrims never go home. I met quite a few who had decided to stay and run pilgrim refuges. (Making the pilgrimage, by the way, is a cheap holiday. The refuges are sometimes ten euros a night; some places, you end up sleeping outside under the
stars for nothing.) Read More...