Is it okay to undertake the famed Camino de Santiago by car? Photo / Getty Images
With a group of friends, Erik Trinidad realises that you don’t necessarily need to go on foot to see the sights along Spain’s famed pilgrimage trail
The Camino de Santiago, or St James’ Way, is the world-renowned walking route that has been trodden on for over a millennium.
Originally, it was a religious pilgrim route following in the footsteps of Jesus’ apostle St James, which evolved into the iconic route that starts in the Pyrenees on the French/Spanish border, traverses across the Spanish countryside, and ultimately ends in the Galician town of Santiago de Compostela.
With that journey spanning roughly 800km, it’s quite a long distance to walk — the average person takes about a month to complete it — so it got me thinking, couldn’t you just drive that?
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Sacrilegious thoughts? Definitely.
But for decades, the Camino hasn’t just been a religious pilgrimage; many secular tourists have found alternative ways to “do the Camino” along the classic route from the French border, or a section of it, or along the many alternate paths that start in different places, like Lisbon or Sevilla.
Some go via bicycle, some on horseback, some on battery-powered e-bikes. That said, the four wheels of a motorised vehicle was my 21st-century way to see the sights along the Camino Frances — the classic route that also inspired Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage— since, like many, I didn’t have the time or energy to walk for four weeks.
Landing in Madrid, we hit the road and started our version of the Camino in the city of Burgos — two and a half hours straight north by car — although if we really wanted to start near the French/Spanish border, we could have driven the five hours to Roncesvalles in the Navarre region.
From there, the westbound road to Burgos would have brought us through Pamplona—worth a stop if you’re travelling in early July, when the famed “Running of the Bulls” happens during the Fiesta de San Fermin — and another notable pitstop: Logrono, the heart of Spain’s Rioja wine region, where we might have spent a day touring and tasting at local wineries.
We’d have plenty of wine along our road trip anyway, and being springtime, we forsook the town made famous by Ernest Hemingway. Our plan was to drive the rest of the route from Burgos more or less, and make pit stops along the way to see historic and natural sights, experience local culture and cuisine, and even stretch our legs a few times on the Camino itself.
Burgos was our orientation city to Spain, home of pleasant promenades adorned with pollarded trees, enticing tapas bars and vermuterias, and the unmistakable Burgos Cathedral, so grand and Gothic that it’s on the Unesco World Heritage List.
It was in Burgos that we acquired a blank Camino passport at the municipal hostel, so that we could collect unique stamps of each place we’d experience along the route. While the stamps of ink would not bring us an official certificate of completion at the end of our Camino journey since we “cheated” by car, the practice of collecting stamps— and almost becoming obsessed with collecting them — became our common bond with actual walking peregrinos (pilgrims).
After a day in Burgos, we drove westbound towards Leon. On the way, we made a pitstop in the village of Castrojeriz to walk a section of the Camino, back and forth from the 11th-century Convent of San Anton on the outskirts of town, to the town centre in the shadows of the hilltop Castrojeriz Castle.
It was in town that we got some of our first stamps inked into our passports during our visits to the Church of the Lady of the Apple Tree and the Church of San Juan. From there, we stopped in Fromista, site of what was once Spain’s biggest construction project of the 18th century, the Canal of Castilla, built for cargo boats to export grains north to the Cantabrian Sea.
Today, boats carry travellers like us up and down the canal on short scenic boat tours, where we waved to peregrinos walking along the towpath with the standard greeting, “¡Buen Camino!” (“[Have a] good Camino!”) The salutation was usually reciprocated —but one snarky pilgrim replied with “¡Buen barco!” (“Have a good boat!”) Touché. We may have been cheating with the use of vehicles, but at least we got another stamp from the canal boat.
Once in Leon, we embraced being in a big city again, the provincial capital that dates back to Roman times but is significant for its “newer” structures: the 13th-century Gothic Cathedral, the 12th-century Basilica of San Isidoro — now a museum holding the illustrious Chalice of Dona Urraca — and the 19th-century Casa Botines, designed by famed Spanish architect, Antoni Gaudí.
We toured these sights by day — collecting more stamps on the way — and by night we explored the Barrio Humedo district, which translates to “wet neighbourhood” — wet as in being the opposite of dry in a spirited sense, because its lively restaurant and bar scene flows with Spanish wines, beer, vermouth, and orujo (Spanish brandy).
It was only about a 45-minute drive to our next city the next morning, Astorga, where we arrived in time for a morning snack, merles, a custard-filled tart from acclaimed bakery Flor de Nata — a popular place for South Korean peregrinos ever since it went viral in their home country. The pastries tied us over until we lunched on cocido maragato, the hearty, regional dish comprising up to 10 different stewed meats, at Casa Maragata where it’s the every day special.
However, we didn’t spend all our time in Astorga eating; we visited the museum of Roman ruins, the Astorga Cathedral — so grand it was declared a National Monument in 1931 — and another one of Gaudí's buildings not in Barcelona, the Episcopal Palace, now a museum. Not surprisingly, we made sure to get stamps in our passports at each.
From Astorga, we continued our way through the rest of Castilla y Leon, up and over the Leon Mountains, to the Galician border. Our vehicle’s ascent in elevation brought colder temperatures when we arrived at the Iron Cross, the highest point of the Camino and an obligatory stop for peregrinos where stones are left at the base to represent their burdens being left behind.
From there, we made a pit stop at the Herreria De Compludo, Spain’s oldest blacksmith shop still forging away for visitor demos, and the Romanesque Castle of the Templar Knights in Ponferrada. However, our longest pitstop was in Bierzo wine country, where we wined and dined at the Palace of Canedo, site of resident winemaker Prada A Tope, whose restaurant prepared local dishes to pair with their fine Mencia and Godello wines.
It was raining when we arrived at the border between the two autonomous communities, and the chilly mood struck for a steamy bowl of caldo Gallego —traditional soup of white beans, cabbage, and pork — in the Galician border town of O Cebreiro.
From there, we used GPS to lead us to some notable places accessible by lesser roads, including the Monastery of Samos, which dates back to the 6th-century but sports some modern graphic novel-inspired murals within.
At a pit stop in the riverside village of Portomarín, we casually strolled amongst peregrinos who had just arrived after crossing the bridge over the Rio Mino, which lies at about the 700km mark from the French border. I could feel their exhaustion by looking at the anguish on some of their faces. Thankfully, there was a beer garden with a DJ for weary travellers near the 13th-century castle-like Church of San Nicolás.
Feeling a little guilty that we’d come this far with a relatively low daily step count, we hiked a section of one of the Camino offshoots, the Camino de Invierno (Winter Way), used in the winter months to avoid mountain passes when there’s heavy snow.
The trail took us from the village of Diomondi, down the valley of the Rio Mino, to the riverside town of Belesar in the heart of the Ribeira Sacra wine region. Here vineyards are practically vertical with the topography of steep hills, and we saw them up close on a boat tour that also brought us to Ecosacra to taste their vintages.
Back on the road, we continued to meander the Galician countryside on four wheels, mostly in search of artisanal treats and, of course, more stamps for our passports.
We made cheese during a workshop at the Arqueixal Centre in Alba, a family dairy farm open for “eco-agro-tourism”. We visited the beehives and sampled honey and mead at the Living Museum of Honey in Portodemouros. And at Pulpería A Garnacha in Melide, we devoured platters of the iconic Galician dish, pulpo Gallego (Galician octopus), boiled perfectly tender before salted and seasoned with smoked paprika and olive oil.
We had been informed that the little landlocked town was the best place for such a dish because it’s where locals went to avoid the tourist traps we were about to encounter in the Camino’s final destination.
The faces of peregrinos expressed mixed feelings of exhaustion, relief, and above all joy, when we arrived at Santiago de Compostela.
Our seven long days in a car was nothing in comparison to the four weeks of walking that they had endured to arrive at the same plaza: the Praza Do Obradoiro, flanked by the grand Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, which is a shrine and reputed final burial site of Santiago (St James) himself.
Not only does it represent the end of the classic Camino, it’s still an active church where some Masses are smoked with the scent of burning incense, which has helped curb the stench of smelly, sweaty pilgrims. However, instead of that, we simply checked into the Parador Hotel on another side of the plaza, got our passports stamped, and showered.
Santiago de Compostela is the nexus of many types of travellers — hiking peregrinos, bikers, road trippers, and tour groups bussed in for their port-of-call excursion from the cruise-liners on the coast.
Amongst them all, we wandered the city’s many churches, museums, parks, restaurants, bars, boutiques, and souvenir shops — collectively enough to warrant the city to be a Spanish destination on its own.
However, as lively as this traditional end of the Camino is, some peregrinos continue about another 80km to the Atlantic coast, where one physically cannot walk any farther.
There are two seaside towns that both mark the coastal end of the Camino with signage stating “Kilometre 0″ — both are easy to get to if you’re travelling by car, of course. Muxia is where legend says that the Virgin Mary appeared to St James, and it’s there that we crawled under a big arched boulder known as the Pedra dos Abalar, which is believed to have healing powers for many ailments.
The other coastal finale is Fisterra, which translates to “End of the World,” since it was actually believed to be so in medieval times because the map simply ended there.
It was there that we had our unofficial Camino celebration before backtracking to Santiago de Compostela, with group photos along the rocky coastline, toasts with orujo, and of course, one more stamp of ink in our passports from the bar by the lighthouse.
In the end, did I feel accomplished that we had completed some version of the Camino de Santiago, albeit with a car? Yes.
It is said that the Camino de Santiago is a personal journey for yourself, no matter which way you do it.
Perhaps one day I will have more time and energy to do the classic route on foot, but for now, I’ll be satisfied with all that I have experienced — and I have the passport stamps to prove it.
For more information on the Camino de Santiago, see santiago-compostela.net
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