The End of the World

For many the Camino de Santiago begins in Sarria. For others it is the beginning of the end. Not just because it is the final 100km - and by this stage, for the travelworn and gnarled, that’s 3-4 days at most - but because the entry of the day trippers, the school groups and the church expeditions shatters the solitude of the road. 

The difference is almost immediate. Where previously your encounters with pilgrims would come in waves, as you catch up and leave behind blocks of walkers who left at the same time or cluster together at cafés, bags strewn across the road and hiking poles leaned against plastic chairs, now the road is constantly thick with huge groups who bicker and cackle and play music, climb on walls, pose for pictures and flirt. The average age plummets to somewhere below legal drinking and the chance of running into anyone you know also vanishes as they are lost in the crowds. I hear about a repeat pilgrim who simply got a taxi for this final stage - he’d already done it once, and didn’t need the hassle. 

Perhaps that makes it sound worse than it is, because this is still Galicia, and I love Galicia. I love the verdant green, the eucalyptus trees, the moss and the farms. I love the bagpipers, who busk on lonely roadsides and offer homemade stamps for your pilgrim credencíal, the mournful tones drifting out towards you through the fog. The beer is still cold and the seafood is still fresh, though I will not eat octopus or pulpo, which they are obsessed with in these parts. It’s easy too because I have a glint in my eye now. Santiago creeps closer. 

The final few days are something of a blur. I don’t really remember what happens in them. I eat and I sleep. The trees grow taller and the fog thicker. I wait behind an Australian family who speak English in increasing volume to a baffled Spanish café owner until I have to step in and explain to them that the kitchen is closed before he runs one of them through with a stale bocadillo. A huge tour group does the conga around a village cafe at 1pm while their mortified children sit at a nearby table and think about being anywhere else. Nobody says buen camino any more. It doesn’t matter. Close your eyes and you can see the cathedral. 

How to write about arriving? 

I arrive in Santiago together with my friend Kate and her son, who has come to visit with the rest of her family. They are soon hustled away for greetings and lunch. I sit on the cobbled floor outside the cathedral looking up at towers framed by blue sky. A bagpipe player busks from a shady stairwell, and the sound of it floats across the square. Everywhere people are hugging, or sobbing, or sitting on the floor like me in a kind of daze. Unsure of what else I should do, I eat my sandwich. I see people I know and make a hundred promises to meet in the bar later. There is a single teetering moment where I think I might break (or perhaps be remade), but then an American woman I sort-of-know arrives to have a chat, and the moment passes. I don’t hold it against her. The moments come when they come. 

The night that follows is something of a blur, except to say that the streets of Santiago de Compostela were filled with music. I saw three bands in three separate squares. The first a kind of blues rock band, when the night was still young and my head still relatively clear, hammering out the classics to a steadily growing crowd. Jörg eats ham straight from the packet and offers slices across the table, dark red strips veined with white fat dangling not-exactly-tantalisingly in the evening air. The second is a traditional Galician band in full red and black costume. Mandolin, double bass, ukulele, accordion, guitar, probably a fiddle and a drum too, the exact composition escapes me. They strike up a jaunty, clattering tune in the alcoves facing the cathedral, and I find myself linking arms and dancing Polka-style with a German friend, Kim, around and around as I struggle to keep my sandals on. 

The third band, by this point dangerously unsteady after Julío the Italian disappears to his room and emerges with two bottles of wine which need drinking, is the headline act of a massive benefit for Palestine (as far as I can tell). There is a stage, a lighting rig, a full crowd of young people. The band themselves - I tell myself I will look them up but their name vanishes from memory - are a bizarre, post-punk, avant-jazz experimental christ-knows, who occasionally break out into something resembling a tune that gets the crowd thumping, only to skitter away from it like a rock across ice. It is an otherworldly experience. A Spanish (or should I say Galician) man leans in close to me and says, his voice heavy with emotion, this is Galego, this is true spirit. Saúde!

The next morning I experience a hangover which is commensurate with what I have achieved, if that gives an adequate sense of scale. The kind where you find yourself floating a few feet above your body like a trauma victim, your mind disassociating in self-defence. 

There are no more notes.

This is not the end. There is the end and there is the end. The traditional pilgrimage draws to a close at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where St James (San Tiago) was discovered to be buried. But there is further still, because we have not yet arrived at the end of the world.

Finisterre is the furthest West point in Spain that you can reach. Specifically a lighthouse which stands on top of a grey cliff on what is known as the Costa da Morte, because it has claimed the lives of so many seafarers. It is the point where the Camino de Santiago stops for good, because it meets the shores of the Atlantic. Go any further and you’ll reach New York. 

It is about four days’ walk, but I don’t have time, so I take a bus. The Costa da Morte is, like so much of Galicia, both strikingly beautiful and sometimes disconcertingly British. The seafood is again exceptional. As I drink wine just off the harbour I notice on the handwritten board that I can have a scallop on the plancha for five euros. I’m not made of stone. I then have a bowl of gazpacho with warm curls of bread straight from the oven, and I have another glass of wine. Finisterre is peaceful. 

The lighthouse is several kilometres out of town, so I set off after dinner, following the road which winds uphill past steep conifer woodland, the air heady with the smell of crushed pine needles and flowers. A wind begins to pick up. I turn a corner in the road and the woods recede. The way opens up into a rocky headland. There is a hotel, a bar, and the lighthouse. There is also a campsite and a line of camper vans overlook the road. Families pile out of SUVs. A busker yodels out some sort of Spanish aria. 

It would be dishonest to say there isn’t a moment where I wish everyone else was gone. That I had found a time to come up here alone, and take a moment at the true end of it. The busker is offensively loud. Children squabble and clamber over rocks. And then I look out to sea and see that out past the sandbank, across where the cold, deep water begins, is a cloud bank of such vast, biblical stature that it looks like the heavens themselves are rolling up to the base of the cliffs to consume them. I sit on a rock and time passes. 

I meet some friends. Nathan and Aly are American, Frankie and Abbie (or Franky and Abby) are English. I’ve never met a luthier before - some time is spent with a critical eye in the pilgrim museum, criticising the workmanship of the reconstructed hurdy-gurdy. We find a well-placed rock together to watch the sun set over the cloud bank. The wind whips up, perhaps sensing the drama of the moment, threatening to pluck us off and send us to die on the rocks below, the Costa da Morte claiming another tithe of blood. 

As you approach the end of the Camino, people begin to ask you the question: what have you learned? It is taken as a given that the purpose of the pilgrimage is to answer some sort of question, or learn something about yourself. It’s hard to know in the moment. It’s the kind of thing which takes distance (or a distance from the distance: nobody could accuse the Camino of lacking scale). Moments are transformative only in retrospect. But if I was forced to choose, I’d say I’ve learned a lesson about my own introversion. I was and remain far more comfortable in my own company than most, and can happily spend weeks in isolation if I need to (or choose to). But it strikes me that those periods are more like stasis or hibernation, shutting down into just basic subroutines and rhythms. I didn’t really come alive on this journey until I made some friends, and we began walking together, and the journey took on a texture which it never had before. 

As much as I’d have liked to have every other person gone, and to watch the sunset alone, it feels appropriate to do it among friends. 

I don’t think I have turned into a much more social person over the course of six weeks, and the itch for some mental silence after all this is rising up in me, but it’s easy to take shelter in solitude and convince yourself it’s because you don’t need other people. Needing company is for others. Sometimes that’s true, but sometimes it’s just retreat. 

That’s as far as I’ll go: no moral to this story yet. I have the shape of something I want to write about coming together, but that’ll have to wait. It’s so rare to finish something and feel like you have drawn a clear line under it. I don’t feel that I’ve done that. I didn’t have a single crystallised moment of revelation. I didn’t break down in tears in the aisles of the cathedral. I wonder if it’s waiting for me.