Camino de Santiago

Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, traditional burial site of the apostle James the Greater, is documented from the ninth century. The twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus functions as an early pilgrim guide, describing routes, hazards, and shrines along the way. The scallop shell became the pilgrim's identifying emblem.

A network of named routes converges on Compostela, the Camino Francés being the most walked. Pilgrims carry a credential stamped at albergues along the way and, on completing a minimum distance, receive a Compostela certificate from the cathedral. The Botafumeiro, a massive censer swung on ropes across the transept, is one of the cathedral's enduring liturgical traditions.

A late-twentieth-century revival, accelerated by Paulo Coelho's 1987 memoir-novel The Pilgrimage and later the 2010 film The Way, reframed the Camino for many modern walkers as a secular or personally spiritual journey pursued independently of Catholic devotional purpose — a shift in meaning layered onto an unchanged physical route.