With more peace and fewer pilgrims, this offbeat Spanish route rewrites the Camino experience. Photo / Mark Eveleigh
Forget the crowded Camino Francés. For a peaceful, lesser-known pilgrimage, walkers should try Camino del Invierno (Winter Way) for a journey through remote Galician valleys, medieval villages and wild landscapes, writes Mark Eveleigh.
Staring through the window of a launderette in northern Spain, I had the feeling that I was gazing back on a scene from a personal battleground.
Two years earlier, I’d limped into that same tiled sanctuary during a 1220km solo trek from Gibraltar to the north coast. And now, I was here again. It was doubtful that anyone would recognise in me the bedraggled and bearded hobo who’d passed this way, lumping hammock and groundsheet. That hike had become a travel book that, for obvious reasons, I’d titled Vagabond.
Far from attempting anything so challenging, this new walk would be shorter, slower, sweeter and – best of all – shared, with my wife walking beside me.
Narina and I were setting out to walk about 320km from the golden plains of Astorga (in Castilla y León) through a series of verdant Galician valleys to the sacred spires of Santiago de Compostela.
The first two days would take us along part of the well-trodden Camino Francés through the hamlets of Foncebadon and El Acebo, places that owed their survival to the estimated 230,000 who walk this route each year.
Then we planned to deviate off the main route, leaving the crowded trails behind, to slip into the holy city of Santiago through the back door.
The two days were intensely sociable as we mingled with the international convoy on the French Way. Conversations shifted from Sydney to Seoul, Berlin to Bogota, and Wisconsin to Wellington when we met over steaming cups of café con leche at highland food trucks and glasses of vino on sunny terraces.
We shared a communal meal at an albergue (pilgrim hostel) in a renovated Foncebadon convent where a few of the diners were Catholics walking the route – as their forebears had done for over a thousand years – specifically to pay homage at the tomb of Saint James (in Spanish Santiago).
The majority were in it merely for the adventure and among the hikers, there were people of all religions. Whatever the motivation, it was easy to spot those – hobbling like the stragglers in a zombie apocalypse – who’d walked the full 482km route from the French town of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port.
There’s no set rule dictating where you must start the pilgrimage. The Catholic Church merely stipulates a minimum of 100km if you want to collect the official pilgrim certificate with your name inscribed in Latin.
We weren’t in it for the paperwork. Under the 800-year-old walls of Ponferrada Castle, where the warrior-monks of the Knights Templar Order once sallied out to protect pilgrims, we veered off to follow an almost unknown 265km route along the lush valley that ran to the south of the mountains.
The route we were taking, traditionally known as the Camino del Invierno (“Winter Way”), was originally pioneered to avoid the snowbound peaks of the Galician highlands. Only recently have a few experienced hikers realised that it has great appeal at any time of the year. Unlike the French Way, which is well-served with cafes and bars, our biggest challenge on the Winter Way was likely to be the lack of water rather than the over-abundance of wine. We carried three litres of water each (plus a bottle fitted with a water filter) and took every opportunity to refill at crumbling fountains.
That first hot morning, we passed through sleepy hamlets with names like lost kingdoms: Villalibre de la Jurisdicción, Priaranza del Bierzo and Santalla del Bierzo. We didn’t find a single cafe or bar that was open but a woman with the poetic name of Amalia García García invited us into her garden for coffee and sandwiches.
“Make yourself at home,” she said. “We don’t see many hikers in this village. It’s quite a novelty to meet people from different countries here.”
An encounter like this would be almost impossible on the French Way where, during peak season, some hamlets see several thousand hikers in a single morning. On our first night on the Winter Way we slept in Villavieja – Old Village. Although nobody can say categorically just how old the village was, the neighbouring fortress (built by the Knights Templars to protect pilgrims on this trail) dated back to the 10th century. The tiny hamlet had just one albergue with an eight-bunk dorm. Over dinner at the long communal table, a small group of Basque pilgrims clued us in on slang terms for rainfall.
“Chirimiri is the kind of drizzle that looks innocent but soaks you to the soul,” Nacho, their support driver, told us over a shared bottle of wine. “In Galicia, they call it calabobos – rain that wets the fool. It’s tempting to shrug it off ... until you realise that your socks have started to squelch.”
The 13 days it took us to walk to Santiago stayed blissfully dry, however, and during all that time, we met just 10 other hikers. Paths would cross briefly with friends as we rested under ancient chestnut trees or in shady plazas where the only sounds were the staccato clatter of storks’ bills, like tiles falling from chapel roofs. Occasionally, we’d walk into a bar in a sleepy one-horse village to reunite with trail buddies (from Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, Ireland and even Zimbabwe) over frosty Estrella Galicia beers but in general, the Winter Way was a blissfully peaceful and solitary experience.
The Spanish wilderness is also delightfully safe and secure for those who hike.
“As a woman hiking alone, I was a little anxious about the solitude and wildness of the Winter Way,” Niki Davies, a 67-year-old Zimbabwean pilgrim, admitted later in the hike. “I’ve never had a moment’s regret, though. I never felt nervous, and the fact that pilgrims are rarely seen only means that villagers are doubly welcoming.”
The countryside became steadily wilder and hillier with increasing distances between hamlets that appeared to be almost deserted. We saw deer and wild boar and, one afternoon, we came across a pond surrounded by a mass of fresh tracks that may have been those of wolves. I knew that just a day’s walk to our south was the Sierra de la Culebra (Snake Range), famous for its large packs of wolves. Meanwhile, about 50km to our north, the Cordillera Cantabrica boasts a healthy population of brown bears that have also been known to migrate this way.
The bandits had long since disappeared, fortunately, but it was often easy to imagine how medieval pilgrims might have felt as they traipsed across these lonely Spanish hills. It was harder to imagine how modern-day hikers felt on the misty hills above us as they queued for coffee or raced to secure beds in overcrowded dorms.
In stark contrast to my long-distance hike from Gibraltar, we were now trying to delay the end of this blissful walk, slowing our pace as if we willed Santiago to retreat before us. Each successive village and valley felt like the last page of a book we didn’t want to finish.
Then Santiago appeared. Not gradually as it does from the French Way, but all at once. Suddenly, spires were stabbing the skyline at the end of a cobbled street. School groups buzzed through the old town like bees in a glass jar and hikers jostled for selfies. It was like stepping from a forest into a floodlight.
We realised that rather than the end of a journey, this felt more like a beginning.
Sitting on the sun-blessed stones of Praza do Obradoiro, where, for more than a thousand years, pilgrims had gazed in rapture in front of Santiago Cathedral, we were already planning our next Spanish hike.
The first new ship to service Cook Strait is expected to arrive in February 2029.