The Camino Primitivo

The Primitive Way claims to be the oldest road to Santiago, and the claim rests on a single early journey rather than on continuous use.

Over the mountains from Oviedo

The route runs from Oviedo in Asturias over the mountains through Lugo and rejoins the French road at Melide for the final two days into Santiago. It is short but strenuous, crossing high and exposed ground, and it passes the great pre-Romanesque churches of the Asturian capital, which are themselves a monument to the kingdom that first took an interest in the shrine.

The claim to priority

The name rests on the tradition that Alfonso II of Asturias travelled from Oviedo to the newly declared tomb of James in the ninth century, which would make his the first recorded pilgrimage to Compostela. Oviedo was the capital of the small Christian kingdom that survived in the north, and a royal journey from there is the earliest the tradition names, so the route can reasonably call itself the original one. It was inscribed by UNESCO in 2015 together with the other northern routes.

The Primitivo offers a choice a few days out of Oviedo. The valley road through Pola de Allande is the ordinary one. The alternative climbs onto an open ridge and stays on it for the best part of a day, with no village, no shelter, no water and, in poor visibility, very little to navigate by. It is called the Ruta de los Hospitales, and it is named for what is on it.

Three ruined buildings stand along that ridge: Paradiella, Valparaiso and Fonfaraon. They were pilgrim hospitals, and only their footings and low walls survive. Their siting is the point. A hospital was placed on the exposed high crossing rather than in the sheltered valley because that is where a walker in bad weather would die, and the mountain sections of these roads are where the medieval infrastructure of hospitality is still legible on the ground rather than buried under a modern town.

The route is closed in practice by snow and cloud for part of the year, and local advice against taking it in bad conditions is not a formality.

Lugo, two thirds of the way along, is the other reason to walk this road. Its Roman wall is complete, encircles the old city and is inscribed by UNESCO as the best preserved late Roman town wall anywhere. The cathedral inside it holds a privilege granted in the Middle Ages and still exercised: the perpetual exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, day and night without interruption, which is why the Lugo coat of arms carries a monstrance.

The Primitivo rejoins the French road at Melide for the final two days, and the change in traffic at that junction is abrupt.