Santiago de Compostela

Two days after the bullfight I left Gijón on a bus to the city of Santiago de Compostela. Santiago is located in Galicia, a region of Spain in the extreme northwest of the country, north of Portugal. It is Spain's holiest city and its cathedral the final resting place of St. James the disciple. After the death of Jesus James went to Spain, then a Roman province, to preach the good news. He was eventually beheaded in Judea for the crime of subverting the state religion but his remains were supposedly repatriated back to Spain and, again supposedly, interred at the cathedral.

In medieval times there was a pilgrimage wherein devout Christians walked, usually from the south of France but really from anywhere in Europe, to Santiago. This journey was called the Camino de Santiago. It still exists today, and while some people still do it for religious reasons most just do it for fun. From the customary starting point in France you walk some six to eight hours every day for a month to get there. All over Europe but especially in northern Spain seashells - the symbol of the camino as the grooves of the shell lead to the base just as all possible routes converge on Santiago - are pasted on signs, chiseled into walls, and painted on streets, accompanied by an arrow pointing in the direction the pilgrim needs to go.

I met many people at my hostel and around town who had done the camino. You can see them too just as they arrive in the main plaza, dominated by the magnificent facade of the cathedral. Some sit by themselves quietly, reflecting on their journey. Others jump for joy and embrace their friends and fellow travelers. And then there are some who are so overcome by emotion that they break down crying. This last type is a moving one to see. (I am aware the Camino would have been a fitting activity given the title of this blog. I had a great time traveling northern Spain by bus and harbor no regrets.)

The final step of the journey is attendance at a high mass said daily at the cathedral. I met a girl at my hostel who had walked the camino but had not yet gone to church. She was waiting for a specific mass where something would take place which she could only describe at "the swing thing." She asked me to go and wanting to check out the pilgrim mass anyway, and being curious about this "thing", I agreed. It was a five o'clock mass. We took our seats in a pew about halfway up the rows. Mass was in but a wing of the great cathedral and behind the pews snaked a line of tourists waiting to venerate the saint's remains.

This being church the mass had hardly started before I started wondering how long this was going to take. And did I mention the mass was in Spanish. I got through it and after communion a team of priests started preparing the show we'd come for. They brought forth a silver censer the size of a fire hydrant attached by rope to a pulley on the ceiling, a hundred feet high. They opened it, piled in hot coals and on top of those the incense. Then they fastened down the cover of the urn and hauled it off the ground using the counter-rope coming down from the pulley.

The swinging started. The priests pulled the rope up and down in steady heaves like men ringing a belfry. They got it going and at full extension the urn was swinging in a half-circle the length of the church and nearly touched the ceiling. It was easily moving 50 mph. The church filled with the incense smoke and its sweet burning smell. This shit was dangerous. If the receptacle had snapped off a crowd of several hundred worshippers and tourists would have been sprayed with pounds of burning coals plus the urn itself, a sight part of me would have liked to see had I not been in this hypothetical volley's direct path. Maybe if they swung a giant censer of burning incense through church at the end of every mass, I thought, people wouldn't leave after communion.

It had rained the whole time I was in Santiago but finally opened up my last day there and I got to photograph the cathedral and plaza in good sunlight. A few results below. The next day I was off to Salamanca.