My observation is simple: many pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago aspire to follow the footsteps of medieval pilgrims. But there is a noticeable gap between the experience of pilgrimage even a few decades ago compared with today. I believe a significant contribution to that gap may be found in the proliferation of maps. In the end, I would encourage anyone considering this pilgrimage to get to the Cathedral in Santiago any way they can. But this is what I’ve noticed.
Let’s start with the hallmarks of a map. And how using maps might impact a pilgrim on their way to Santiago.
When I was a child, we traveled with huge, colorful pieces of paper that ensured we could get in the car and get where we were going and we were, for the most part, independent. Meaning, we never needed to ask people which road to take. We were self-sufficient. We had maps.
Local maps might point out where your hometown is in Michigan or where to find parking at an event. Effectively, a map can help a traveler become familiar with unfamiliar surroundings.
“Oh, there’s the river. Got it.”
Sailors and pirates would need maps or mapping tools when they traveled because once they were out in open water and couldn’t ask for directions, a map, whether it was a map of the stars, a treasure map, or some device to determine latitude, was an essential companion.
It is ironic to note that even Christopher Columbus used a map. But then, to be fair, it would be another 281 years before longitude could be mapped with any accuracy.
Military commanders use maps.
In September 1775, General George Washington fancied taking Québec as the 14th American colony. So, Washington sent troops, led by a trusted and ambitious young officer named Benedict Arnold, who was given a 15-year-old English map to guide his men north along the Kennebec River.
It was an epic fail.
Both men believed that traveling to Québec City would take 20 days, so they outfitted their caravan of 1100 men for 20 days travel. But, instead of the 180 miles they expected to travel, the distance was 270 miles. It hadn’t taken 20 days, it took 45 days and Arnold arrived with only 600 of his original 1100 men. The troops arrived in Québec City depleted and starving.
If only they could have asked locals for assistance – but, in fact, not knowing who was a patriot and who was a loyalist inhibited them from reaching out for help. They were compelled to rely on this map. Dozens of young men died of smallpox on the way home.
These soldiers, along with Columbus’s sailors, were all away from home, acting in an unfamiliar landscape: strangers surrounded by strangers in an even stranger landscape. The maps they used, whether to find a quicker route to India, or to acquire Québec, made them independent. Any traveler with a map can move around with confidence, and without engaging local assistance or local guidance.
Now, let’s look at the hallmarks of travelers.
Travelers are the folks who go away from their home for a time and then return. They are motivated by a need to rest, to recover from a loss of some kind, to experience a different climate, or to visit with family. At the base, it’s packing what you need, closing up your house, and using some mode of transportation to move from a familiar place to a possibly unfamiliar place.
Early travelers would move from place to place by cart, horseback, or burro. Travel is less reliant on burro now, replaced with planes, trains, and automobiles. And yet, there is a type of traveler who typically, although not in every case, will prefer to go on foot. And that’s a pilgrim.
On the topic of just getting where you are going, a pilgrim isn’t really so different from other travelers. Travelers and pilgrims alike book flights, make reservations, pack things, visit historical properties, take photos, shop for souvenirs, and use maps.
I believe the real difference is about people.
Many pilgrimages will develop into a friendly journey with unfamiliar, yet like-minded people along the way: the very hallmark of a pilgrim.
Pilgrims tend to find themselves happily enmeshed in a web of strangers, while most travelers are out shopping for souvenir t-shirts. That is a key component – pilgrims tend to develop an easy, intimate, trusting relationship with the people they encounter along the way.
A key element of pilgrimage is always about the people. By late morning, pilgrims will not remember the name of the town where they slept last night, but they will tell you about the cook in the crowded café whose son works as a waiter, or the kind man in the car last night who stopped to point out where the albergue was.
Pilgrims, for the most part, are inherently NOT independent.
So, what happens now, when a pilgrimage today is facilitated by maps? And does using them compromise or diminish the pilgrimage experience?
In the years just before the First World War, pilgrims to Santiago still relied on the 12th century itinerary found in the Codex Calixtinus to make their way along the Camino Francés. Travel writers rarely mention pilgrims walking to Santiago, even though some probably did walk. And certainly there were some way markers along the way.
But then, something shifted.
In 1912, a French poetry professor named Joseph Bédier published a drawn map of the Camino Francés – his book was very popular.
Travelers could let go of the simple 12th century Codex itinerary and just slice the map out of Bédier’s book and hand it to a driver. As soon as the roads improved sufficiently to support cars in Spain, automobile travel along the Camino also became popular.
Wealthy Americans in particular aspired to be like their medieval pilgrim predecessors, and it became a kind of a Gilded Age board game to follow the Camino Francés: first by railroad and stagecoach, and later in their motorcars. What fun to picnic along the Camino Francés, to photograph churches on the way, and finally, to view the Portico de la Gloria in Santiago.
This was a game changer.
No need to ask for directions from the townspeople, the ones who were described in contemporary guidebooks as being unreliable and likely thieving. No need to seek out company for the journey. You were consummately independent, and because you had your own means of transportation, effectively you were also insulated. Although, it was also suggested at the time that you might want to carry a pistol.
The rising popularity of car travel prompted the proliferation of maps, initially by Michelin: the nice people who, at first, wanted not to tell you where the best food or accommodations were to be found, but how you could best use Michelin tires.
In 1925, American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edith Wharton wrote that she would set up a picnic alongside her car on the Camino Francés and then maybe visit a church that had been recommended to her.
But medieval pilgrims walking to Santiago did not need a map. Medieval pilgrims could step out of their home with the aid of neighbors who had already been to Santiago de Compostela or who knew someone who had. An itinerary helps, certainly, because they would know that after they reached one town, they could make their way to the next on the list, following the few markers, but it would likely be with the help of a sheep farmer, a woman hanging clothes to dry, maybe even a child playing alongside the road.
“How do I get to Burgos safely?”
“This way, pilgrim. Let me walk a bit of the way with you.”
Relying on a drawn map has changed the pilgrimage calculus. We aren’t asking for directions from sheep farmers or women doing laundry any longer. We are asking for directions now – from John Brierley.
This is my point.
Maps, as helpful as they appear, have brought the Camino into an era of hundreds of thousands of self-reliant, self-sufficient travelers – which is still not inherently a bad thing – but it gets farther and farther away from community reliance by needing less along the way. We have social media forums where lots of questions are posed and answered. And while many pilgrims will swear they do not use a map, it’s likely because they have committed Mr. Brierley’s program of daily starts and stops to an Excel spreadsheet before leaving home.
But isn’t a key hallmark of a pilgrimage finding your way along an unfamiliar path, seeking out the help of those strangers around you? Isn’t that what actually separates a pilgrim from any other traveler? A pilgrimage from any other travel?
Ultimately, I would argue that a pilgrimage is not about the journey or the destination – it’s all about the people.
When I worked as an hospitalera in Ribadiso in 2019, I’d stand by the road and tell passing pilgrims that we had beds – 68 of them. But the general reply was, “No thanks, we booked ahead.” And we would fill 16 beds.
What did most of these self-reliant pilgrims have in their hands?
They had maps, guidebooks, apps, and phones. Like Benedict Arnold had a map to Québec. Columbus had a map to India, Edith Wharton’s driver had M. Bédier’s map, and my dad kept a paper map to Chicago in the car. And I could have told these pilgrims when the next Mass would be said in Arzúa, when the pharmacy closed, where the grocery store was, and what time the café by the church opened for breakfast.
Bishop Sarah Mullally, walked from London to Canterbury before her installation as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. Her walking staff reads, “Archbishop’s Camino.”
She said in an interview,“My reflection today is that any pilgrimage, you do it with people. And as you walk with God, and into God, you also are accompanied by people… You don’t make journeys like this alone. You depend on the kindness and support of others, and it teaches you something about how we all need each other – and the joy and life there is in embracing that. The early Christians were known as “people of the way.” I think that’s still a good name for us today. We are pilgrim people, on a journey with God and with each other.”
You don’t make journeys like this alone.
No, not alone. Because we make our way in the company of strangers who become lifelong friends. We can make a spiritual journey, talk to everyone, and, as strangers on the earth, we acknowledge and respect our surroundings, we ask for and accept help, and we are always grateful for simple favors.
Two quick notes: 1) I do not use John Brierley. And 2) I will get to the Cathedral in Santiago any way I can.
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(This text comes from my recent talk at the Sacred Journeys 13 Conference in Quebec City).
Tumbleweed Pilgrim 