From Proof of Arrival to a Sign on the Road

The modern use of the shell reverses the medieval one. Today it is carried from the start rather than bought at the end, and it has become the emblem of the route as much as of the shrine. The waymarking system that developed with the revival of walking pilgrimage from the 1980s uses a stylised shell, its ribs converging, set into pavements, painted on walls and mounted on posts across Spain, France and Portugal. Walkers hang a real shell from a pack. Reading the ribs as many roads meeting at one point is a modern gloss that fits the modern situation, in which the routes matter to people who are not necessarily going for the reasons a medieval penitent went.

The routes have institutional weight now. The French roads and the Camino Frances were inscribed by UNESCO as World Heritage, and the routes of northern Spain were added later, which brought conservation obligations and a great deal of money to towns along the way. The claim at the bottom of all of it remains what it always was: that the body of James the Greater lies under the cathedral at Compostela. Leo XIII reaffirmed it in 1884 after the rediscovery of remains beneath the church. No historian has established it, and the honest position is that the shrine is medieval in its documented origins and apostolic in its claim, and that the two are not the same statement.