The Terradillos de los Templarios, and dozens of villages like it, were built to accommodate medieval pilgrims who walked the 500-mile (800-kilometer) route through Spain to the tomb of the Apostle James in Santiago de Compostela. Today’s Camino travelers save them from extinction. “This is life for the villages,” said Nuria Quintana, who runs one of Terradillos’s two pilgrimage hostels. “In winter, when no pilgrims come, you could walk through the village 200 times and not see anyone.” In this village named after a medieval knightly battalion set up to protect pilgrims and all the way back, travelers – after pandemic-related unrest – help restore their lives and vitality. villages that were steadily losing jobs, population, and even social fabric. “If it were not for the Camino, there would not even be an open cafe. And the bar is where people meet, “said Raul Castillo, an agent for the Guardia Civil, the law enforcement agency that patrols Spain’s streets and villages. He has spent 14 years in Sahagun, eight miles (13 kilometers) away, from where agents cover 49 villages. “The neighboring villages, outside the Camino – make you cry. “Houses are falling in, the grass is growing on the sidewalks up to here,” he added, pointing to a table. From the Pyrenees on the border with France, hundreds of miles from the sunny plains of Spain to the foggy hills of Galicia to the Atlantic Ocean, once thriving cities of farmers and ranchers began to bleed for decades. Mechanization has drastically reduced the need for farm workers. As the young people left, the shops and cafes closed. Often so did the majestic churches filled with priceless works of art – the legacy of medieval and Renaissance artists brought on by prosperous city dwellers, said Julia Pavon, a historian at the University of Navarre in the first city of Pamplona. Furnace. But since the 1990s, the Camino has gained international popularity, with tens of thousands of visitors hiking and biking every spring, summer and fall. After a severe drop in the pandemic in 2020 and the start of the recovery with mostly Spanish pilgrims in 2021, 2022 looks like the “finally” year, as Quintana put it, with more than 25,000 visitors in May alone in the most traditional route. in the “French way”. With daily visitors outnumbering residents by ten times in the tiniest villages, the impact is huge. “Now all that works (in the city) is the hospitality industry,” said carscar Tardajos, who was born on a farm along Camino. For 33 years, he ran a hotel and restaurant in Castrojeriz, a hilltop village with stone buildings that was the center of the wool trade centuries ago, when half a dozen of its churches were built. The Camino helps create jobs and preserve cultural heritage, said Melchor Fernández, a professor of economics at the University of Santiago de Compostela. “Put a brake on the desert”, which is 30% higher in the villages of Galicia outside Camino. While most pilgrims spend only about 50 euros (dollars) a day, it remains local. “The bread on the pilgrim’s sandwich is not Bimbo,” Fernández said, referring to the multinational company. “It’s from the bakery next door.” In Cirauqui, a hilltop village in Navarre, the lonely bakery survived because dozens of pilgrims pass through it daily, baker Conchi Sagardía said as he served a patisserie and fruit juice to a Florida pilgrim. Apart from the pilgrims, the main customers of these shops are the older residents of the villages, where a few younger adults live. “In the summer, grandmothers sit along the Camino to watch the pilgrims pass,” said Lourdes González, a Paraguayan who has owned a cafe in Redecilla del Camino for 10 years. Its only road is the Camino. Its concern – which is widely shared along the way – is to keep this unique pilgrim spirit alive, even as the Camino’s popularity leads to greater commercialization. In increasing cases, yellow arrows lead to bars or foot massage companies instead of the Camino. One recent morning in the town of Tardachos, Esteban Velasco, a retired shepherd, stood at a crossroads pointing the right way to the pilgrims. “The Camino would have no reason to exist without a pilgrimage,” said Jesús Aguirre, president of the Camino de Santiago Friends Association in the province of Burgos. “One can do it for different reasons, but you keep impregnating yourself with something else.” For many, this is a spiritual or religious pursuit. The motivation to keep churches open for pilgrims is also revitalizing parishes in rapidly secularized Spain. The 900-year-old church of Santa María in Los Arcos is one of the most enchanting villages in Camino, with a tall bell tower and ornate altar sculpture. Pilgrims often double the number attending services on a daily basis, said the Rev. Andrés Lacarra. In Hontanas, a cluster of stone houses that suddenly appear on a dip after a hike in the wide open plains of Castilla, there is only the Sunday Liturgy, as often happens when a priest covers many parishes. But one late Wednesday afternoon, church bells rang – Priest Jihwan Cho, a Toronto priest in his second pilgrimage, was preparing to celebrate Eucharist. “The fact that I was able to do the Liturgy έκανε made me really happy,” he said. International pilgrims like him make some cities more and more cosmopolitan. In Sahagún, an English teacher instructs Nuria Quintana’s daughter and her classmates to shade the pilgrims and practice their language. In the tiny Calzadilla de la Cueza, “people have become much more sociable,” said César Acero. His fellow villagers called him “crazy” when, in 1990, he opened the hostel and restaurant where, one late afternoon, two farmers by tractor had a quick coffee next to a group of cyclists heading from the Netherlands to Santiago. “Now you see people I never saw when I was little, of all nationalities,” said Loli Valkarsel, who owns a pizzeria in Sharia. It is one of the busiest cities in Camino because it has come a long way in gaining a “certificate” of completion in Santiago. Far fewer pilgrims take the ancient Roman road through the Calzadilla de los Hermanillos, where as a child Gemma Herreros helped feed the sheep her family cared for for generations. She runs a bed-and-breakfast with her Cuban husband, a former pilgrim, near the city’s open-air museum that depicts the history of the ancient street. Herreros hopes the village will continue to thrive – but without completely losing the “absolute freedom and solidarity” of her childhood. In Hornillos del Camino, a one-street village with honey-colored stone houses, Mari Carmen Rodríguez shares similar hopes. A handful of pilgrims passed when she was little. Now, “the number of people almost makes you afraid to go out on the street,” she said as she walked out of her restaurant to buy fish from a truck – a common grocery supplement in many villages. But he quickly added: “Without Camino, we would have returned immediately to extinction.”
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