The Camino Frances

The French Way is walked today on a rhythm that almost no medieval pilgrim would recognise, and the difference accounts for most of what is now complained about.

A guidebook, not a tradition

The division of the road into roughly thirty daily stages is a modern editorial convention, fixed by the influential guidebooks of the late twentieth century and copied by every application since. Medieval walkers moved to the next shelter, the next relic, or simply until dark, and the length of the day was set by the body and the weather rather than by a printed table. The modern stage list funnels tens of thousands of walkers into the same villages on the same nights, which is why the shortage of beds, and the race for them, is the defining practical problem of the route rather than the terrain or the distance.

What the crowding measures

The strain is a symptom of success of an unusual kind. This road was rebuilt as a working pilgrimage only in the last two generations, and it now carries a largely post-religious European public in numbers the medieval road would have envied. The pressure on the villages is real, and it is also the clearest available measure of how completely the revival worked.

Book Five of the Codex Calixtinus, compiled around 1140 and generally attributed to Aymeric Picaud, is the oldest surviving guidebook to this road and reads remarkably like a modern one. It divides the journey into stages, lists the rivers and says which are safe to drink from, names the shrines worth a detour, warns about ferrymen who overload their boats and about toll collectors on the Navarrese passes, and delivers opinionated verdicts on the character of the peoples along the way, most of them unflattering. It also describes the cathedral at Santiago in detail, which makes it a source for the building as well as for the road.

The Camino Frances is not simply a path across an existing landscape. It made much of the landscape it crosses. The Navarrese and Castilian kings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries actively developed the route, granting charters to new towns along it, inviting French settlers, the francos, to populate them with trading privileges, and building bridges: Puente la Reina takes its name from the queen who paid for its bridge. Streets in Pamplona, Estella and Burgos still carry the name of the road.

The religious infrastructure followed. Cluniac and later Cistercian houses, the Romanesque churches of Fromista and Eunate, the pilgrim hospitals, and the military orders, notably the Order of Santiago, whose stated purpose included protecting pilgrims on the road.

The meseta, the high plateau between Burgos and Leon, is the section walkers argue about most. It is flat, treeless and hot, many skip it by bus, and a substantial body of pilgrim writing insists it is the part that does the work.