“This world nis but a thurghfare ful of wo,
And we ben pilgrimes, passinge to and fro.”
____ Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales[i]
Depart Tria-castela
(654 m.)
Over the río Sarria
To A Balsa
(750 m.)
through fertile valley
M
Capila de Nuestra Señora de las Nieves
On the Way: Triacastela to Pintín
We departed out of Triacastela very early. We did not know where we would end the day, for our goal was to travel as far as we could and decide the matter during the day. The way out of Triacastela was wonderfully pleasant, initially by way of a single-laned paved road which transformed itself to a series of corredoiras, these wide corridors through mountain and vale with verdant vaults formed of limbs of chestnut, birch, oak, and eucalyptus. Out of Triacastela we crossed over the río Sarria to the town of A Balsa, which was set in the bucolic valley of Valdeoscuro. On the right was the chapel of Nuestra Señora de las Nieves. From A Balsa, surrounded by the company of chestnuts, oaks, and birch, we ascended to the town of San Xil. In the dark mist one came upon the town suddenly, the walls of the town unexpectedly loomed overhead as if they were ghosts or monsters. It was silent and eerie on approach. The trail was generously strewn with manure, for the Galicians use these roads to take their incontinent livestock from barn to pasture, pasture to pasture, and from pasture to barn. At spots, small streams run across, or parallel, or even within the boundaries of the trail.
As we climbed past San Xil, it rained; the wind blew hard, and it turned cold. The sun was slow in rising. We crossed the arroyos Louseiras and Muiño and climbed the Alto de Riocabo. The climb was gentle but sure at first as we skirted the southern outcrops of the Serra da Meda. Then, past the Riocabo brook, it became steeper until we reached the Alto de Riocabo, which, at 896 meters above sea level, marked the zenith for our walk this day.
Ascend to San Xil
Skirt the southern outcrops of the Serra da Meda (1202 m.)
Arroyo Riocabo
Up to the Alto de Riocabo
(896 m.)
Fonte-arcuda
Furela
Into Brea to descend to the valley of Sarria
Into Pintín and down to Calvor
Through Aguiada, San Mamede do Camiño and San Pedro do Camiño
By Carballal into Vigo de Sarria and over the río Ouribio
From the height of Riocabo we descended to the town of Montán. As we entered into the town, we were surprised by a pilgrim who joined the main path. It was Mano. He was the first pilgrim from our initial group that we have seen since the town of El Acebo. He informed us that Richard was somewhere between O Cebreiro and Triacastela and had been walking. Pleased with the news, we walked with Mano through Montán. The church of Montán was Romanesque, and primitive, but happy. It was dedicated to St. Mary, and had a rectangular apse.
From Montán, Randi, Mano, and I traveled to the hamlet of Fontearcuda, which lay just beyond the arroyo San Román. On our right was the hamlet of Zoo, on our left the hamlets of Lousada and San Román, and before us the hamlet Furela, each group of houses with its own church and cemetery. We walked toward the town of Furela. It was cold and it was late in the morning, so our bodies hankered after coffee and breakfast. We asked a woman in Furela if there was a café in town. She answered no. We asked here where the closest café would be and she responded Sarría.
That was further away than we had hoped, but what was there to do about it but resign oneself to it and walk? So from Furela we headed toward the hamlet of Pintín, which is by the carretera. At Pintín I caused a great commotion, perhaps the greatest event in Pintín that year.
I I I
On the Way: The Great Stir in Pintín
At the town of Pintín I created a great stir, a great commotion. This is how it happened. As we came into town, we first came upon a donkey, then a dog. The road we were on curved through the center of town. As we walked around the bend in the road, we came upon an old lady. Then we came upon a group of a dozen-or-so cows. The cows were being driven from their barns to the fields on the other side of the town by a middle-aged woman. The woman wore a blue and white dress, and a white veil covered her hair. She goaded the cows with a stick. As I walked by the cows, I upset one of them. The cow’s name, I was to learn, was Perla. Perla was fussy. I unnerved her, had disturbed her routine, and was in her way. She became most agitated.
“Perla!” both women yelled simultaneously. “Get back in line!”
Perla ignored the commands, and kept coming at me.
“Perla!” they yelled, but it did not help. Perla almost flattened me into the wall of a house, but at the last moment I stepped inside a doorway to avoid her bulk and her anger.
She passed by, but remained ornery. For as she rounded the corner, I heard a pail clatter on the cobblestones of the town, the dog bark furiously, the donkey bray, and three women with voices of different timbre all yell in unison, “Perla!” “Perla!” followed by all sorts of commands, denunciations, and threats in Gallego, none of which I understood. Nor, I believe, did Perla.
It was so that I caused a great stir in Pintín. Very likely it was the greatest event in Pintín that day and very possibly that year, for the town is small and lazy, but the people simple, happy and well fed; and there is no immorality about the place, unless it comes in through the television and the radio.
I I I
On the Way: Pintín to Sarría
From Pintín we walked to the village of Calvor and the ruins of a primitive settlement. From these we headed toward Aguiada. We passed a series of hamlets and farmhouses on our way to Sarria, and I shall list them here seriatim because we passed them and there is nothing more to say about them: San Mamede do Camiño, San Pedro do Camiño, Carballal, and Vigo de Sarria.
And into Sarria
(450 m.)
k
Santa Marina
k
El Salvador
k
La Magdalena
When we crossed the río Sarria we entered the town of Sarria proper. There we stumbled into the first café. It was mid-morning, around 10:00 a.m., and we had already negotiated 21 km. We ate a made-to-order tortilla prepared by the generous patroness. With it we quaffed down great draughts of good and strong coffee.
After breakfast we walked on calle Mayor, which is identical to the Camino. It took us to the church of Santa Marina, a modern replacement of the old Romanesque church that was built in honor of the Galician martyr. Some of the stone homes here are of original medieval construction and have not significantly changed since the medieval pilgrim walked through this town in the thirteenth century. The town has other churches, including that church of the originally Augustinian monastery of La Magdalena, since 1895 run by Mercedarian Fathers. The church attached to the monastery is Isabelline Gothic. The church of El Salvador has a portal, of slightly pointed arch with blunted cusps—a Moorish feature—and a tympanum with a primitive Christ the Pantocrator. Picaud, it is not clear why, ignored Sarria in his Pilgrim’s Guide.
In origin, the town is old, but it is clean and modern. It was the first significant town we have seen since we departed Villafranca del Bierzo two days ago, on the other side of the sierra León. The town was once dominated by its castle, which was built in the 13th century, destroyed during the Irmandiños revolt in 1467, and rebuilt, only later to be allowed to fall to ruin. But it is dominated by it no more, for of its former glory but one tower remains, a solitary, proud tower, doubly crenelated, but peering quite shyly as if still spooked by the Irmandiños rebels, behind the green foliage of trees.
I I I
Caritas aedificat
About the Way: The Sarrian Friar
Who Was the Writer of the Spanish Empire
The family of Luis de Sarria, more commonly known as Fray Luis de Granada (1504-1588), the “writer of the Spanish empire,” was from this region. His father, Francis, and his mother left Sarria and travelled to Granada after Isabel and Ferdinand conquered the kingdom of Granada in 1492. There Luis, of pure Galician stock, was born in Andalusia. After his father died in 1509, he was taken in by the Count de Tedilla, mayor of the Alhambra. He joined the Dominicans and became a preacher and spiritual of great renown, beloved by the great St. Theresa of Avila.
At a bookstore in Sarria, I picked up Fray Luis de Granada’s Guia de Pecadores or Sinner’s Guide. I looked “peregrinaje” up in the index and learned what the Saint had to say on pilgrimage. The venerable friar distinguished between internal or theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Love of God, and external virtues. He classified pilgrimage as an external virtue. Faith, Hope, and Love of God are infinitely above any external virtues, Fray Luis wrote. The external virtues are subordinate to the theological. But—he admonished—their relationship is close and they cannot be divided. The theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love, are the end; pilgrimage, a means to that end. The virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love of God may be said to be the health of the body, pilgrimage the medicine to obtain it. The theological virtues are the soul of religion, pilgrimage its body.
I I I
Depart Sarria
hamlet to hamlet and house to house
On the Way: Sarria to Cortes
From Sarria we departed, walking on the calle Mayor, which took us right of the castle of Sarria and over the río Celeiro by means of the ponte Áspera. When we were close to being out of town, we headed straight past a cemetery. We then heard a voice yelling at us.
“Peregrinos!” cried the voice.
It was the voice of an old man. We followed it to the window of a religious house across the street from the cemetery. He wore a white cotton shirt, a gray jacket and had only wisps of gray hair on his balding head. He was in his 90s.
“You are off the Camino. You missed a turn. Look behind you. Go back, retrace your steps, and turn right past the cemetery. You should have turned left before you reached the cemetery.”
We thanked him for his warning. We turned, found our mistake, and took a right down the right path. We waved at him as we went downhill past the edge of cemetery, past the dead who were this man’s companions, and with whom he would soon intimate consort.
Thus put on the right track by the charity of an old man, we traveled for a time parallel to the Madrid-Coruña railway. Eventually, we crossed over the railway and the arroyo San Miguel and past the farmhouse called Paredes into the hamlet of Vilei. The path was cool and shaded with the generous branches of chestnut trees, some of whose trunks were so large it took ten steps to go around them. Shortly past a cemetery and a chapel dedicated to San Silvestre we came upon the town of Barbadelo.
Sancti Michaelis
Barba-dellus
Barba-delo to Vilei
k
Santiago de Barbadelo
The church at Barbadelo was Romanesque, and worthily so in times past and times present, for the town was mentioned by Aymeric Picaud when he penned his Pilgrim’s Guide long ago, and has been named recently a National Monument by the Spanish government. This was the mosteiro de Santiago de Barbadelo. The church was of single nave, without aisles. The tympanum of this church, of layered arches and shallow carving, was rustic, but despite its rusticity (or perhaps because of it), it was beautiful. The tower was built on two molded arches, resting on columns topped with capitals curiously carved with strange creatures. The tower was square, articulated into three levels.
Vilei to to Rente to Mercado de Serra to Leiman to Pena to Perus-callo to Cortiñas to Laban-deira to Casal to Brea to Morgade to Ferriros to Cruceiro to Mirallos to Pena to Couto to Rozas
From Barbadelo we regained the Camino and traveled to the town of San Silvestre and by the four-house town of Rente. Rente had a very beautiful rustic stone home, a Casa Rural with rooms to rent. We stopped in for a soft drink and met an American pilgrim who was resting her injured knee which she had strained while walking the pilgrim path. She was a lawyer from Chicago, was resting a couple of days, and was hoping to start walking again to Santiago de Compostela.
After a brief rest, we left Rente. From Rente we headed through the hamlets of Mercado da Serra, to Monte, and to Muiño de Marzán. In this area, stone fences—called chantos by the tongues in this region—divide the small farming homesteads—called minifundias by the Spanish sociologists. At Marzán there was a mill, to the right of which we crossed the arroyo Marzán at a place called O Real. Walking past a grove of oaks we reached a clearing, and ahead was Leiman, and then Pena, following which was the town of Peruscallo. Shortly after Peruscallo we crossed the arroyo Carna into Cortiñas, a village of five houses. The Camino then traveled between Labandeira, a small hamlet, and Casal, a single house, across the arroyo known as the Chelo, and into Brea. Brea was a hamlet of five houses.
The next town through which we walked was Mordade—a single house on the left, a fountain on the right, and a chapel on the right in ruins. We crossed the arroyo named Ferreiros and the town on the west end of it called the same. We were 600 meters above sea level, more or less, and the winter weather here must be more temperate than heretofore, for we came upon the first grapevines since we had climbed the mountains to the town of O Cebreiro. The land was dotted with old horreos, or small granaries. Made of straw, wood, brick, rock, tile, or a combination of these materials, each horreo gives silent homage to the farmer’s ancestors and to a way of life which will not last.
At Ferreiros I had a very poor man’s meal: a watery Gallego broth with no meat, but only some Gallego cabbage and a few chickpeas. There were traces of chorizo, a few potatoes, and maybe a half dozen beans. The empanada I ordered was prodigious in size, but empty of content. It had onions and cabbage in the main, and a few bits of cold, uncooked bacon and speckles of chorizo. I gobbled it greedily nevertheless because I was very hungry. The voracity with which I consumed these peasant foodstuffs brought to my mind the quip by, I believe, St. Thomas Becket, who observed that a peasant or ascetic monk might gobble up his beans with greater gluttony than the archbishop did his pheasant.
The walk from Ferreiros to Portomarín was tedious; indeed, it seemed interminable. For a reason we were not able to determine, our maps were wrong. The distances and landmarks they showed were not reliable, which added frustration to the exhaustion as there was no way to predict the amount of walking which lay ahead of us. From Ferreiros we traveled more or less blindly through a series of farm towns. The first of these was Mirallos, a hamlet of two homes. The church was simple Romanesque, three archivolts in the entrance, and a double tympanum. The corbels bore lion’s heads. We passed through the town. On the outside of town was a stone with a carving of a monstrance, perhaps a marker to O Cebreiro. The Mirallos stream ran through the town, so we crossed it as we headed to the town of Pena and from Pena to Rozas.
Rozas to to Moimentos to Coutrelo to Merca-doiro to Moutrás to Parrocha to Vilachá
After the town of Rozas we passed the hill known as the Pena de Corvo into the town of Moimentos. From there to Coutarelo, and at Coutarelo we went left to the parish church of Santiago. Back on the road we quickly passed Mercadoiro and Moutras and from there to Parrocha. From Porrocha we descended to Vilachá, a relatively sizeable town lying close to the Embalse de Belesar, a reservoir formed by the damming of the río Miño north of this place.
Closeby here, in Cortes, the monastery of Santa María de Loio, that is St. Mary of Eloi, founded by the abbot Qunitila, once stood. It no longer exists and there is no trace visible, but in 1170, the first rules of the Military Order of Santiago were penned there, and the monastery served as the military order’s first motherhouse. For that reason these monk-knights of Santiago were at one time known as the freyles de Loio.
There is no trace of the Knights’ one-time home—it was already in ruins in 1584. Among the brambles and the bushes and stones, sounding alike the whispering wind, I heard somewhere past the town of Moimentos the spirit of the former monastery murmuring sotto voce the words of the gloomy Don Alvaro Dabo in Henri de Montherlant’s play Le Maître de Santiago:
If ever I had a certain renown,
I would say of it what we say about our dead:
“The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away;
blessed be the name of the Lord.”[ii]
I I I
And finally cross the río Miño to Portomarín
k
San Nicolás
On the Way: Cortes to Portomarín
We continued and shortly came upon a large lake; it was man-made and known as the Belesar reservoir. Two young pilgrims—rashly I thought—took off their clothes and prepared to jump off the high bridge into the unknown waters of the reservoir. Before they jumped, however, they—wisely I thought—asked an old man from the town, an anciano, who was walking across the bridge out of Portromarín, whether the water was deep enough. He probably had walked on the bed of the man-made lake before the dam covered it. He nodded, and they jumped.
On the other side of the Belesar reservoir is Portomarín, the new, for Portomarín the old lies under the waters of the reservoir. Georgiana Goddard King, who wrote before the reservoir, tells us that there was not much history of the town for all of its archives of vellum and paper had perished. The only archives then remaining were of rock, and the townspeople were not about to let those be destroyed by the need for the reservoir. Before the damming of the waters, the jewels of the old town were brought up to this new site, stone by stone, and so the church of San Nicolás, San Pedro, the Casa del Conde, and the Palacio de Berbetoros have survived to tell us of Portomarín’s past.
I I I
Pons Mine
*
New moon
One of the buildings so preserved is the church of St. Nicolás, a 13th century fortress-church, belonging at one time to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. It symbolized in a tenuous architecture the tenuous union between the fighting monk and the praying knight. It is a fortress church, or it is an ecclesiastical fortress—take your pick, for they would both be accurate. The structure is composed of a single circular apse at the end of a tall and battlemented square church. On the western side, above the front portal is a rose window of more than five yards in diameter. The remaining walls are articulated with blind arcading pierced atop with long and narrow loopholes. There are three carved portals, any of which admit entry into the church. The 12th century portals are said to be the work of Master Mateo. Especially notable is the rose window and the entrance portico, with three pairs of columns and archivolts, depicting Christ in Majesty surrounded by the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse. The only distraction to the Spartan beauty of the church is the black numbers painted on the stones. In anticipation of the dam, they were painted on each stone during the church’s dismantling. Though meant to help the workmen in the process of reconstructing the church, they have never been effectively erased.k
[i] Cantebury Tales, p. 454
[ii] De Montherlant, Henry, The Master of Santiago and Four Other Plays, translated from the french by Jonathan Griffin, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951, p. 291-92. “This world nis but a thurghfare ful of wo,
And we ben pilgrimes, passinge to and fro.”
____ Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales[i]
Depart Tria-castela
(654 m.)
Over the río Sarria
To A Balsa
(750 m.)
through fertile valley
M
Capila de Nuestra Señora de las Nieves
On the Way: Triacastela to Pintín
We departed out of Triacastela very early. We did not know where we would end the day, for our goal was to travel as far as we could and decide the matter during the day. The way out of Triacastela was wonderfully pleasant, initially by way of a single-laned paved road which transformed itself to a series of corredoiras, these wide corridors through mountain and vale with verdant vaults formed of limbs of chestnut, birch, oak, and eucalyptus. Out of Triacastela we crossed over the río Sarria to the town of A Balsa, which was set in the bucolic valley of Valdeoscuro. On the right was the chapel of Nuestra Señora de las Nieves. From A Balsa, surrounded by the company of chestnuts, oaks, and birch, we ascended to the town of San Xil. In the dark mist one came upon the town suddenly, the walls of the town unexpectedly loomed overhead as if they were ghosts or monsters. It was silent and eerie on approach. The trail was generously strewn with manure, for the Galicians use these roads to take their incontinent livestock from barn to pasture, pasture to pasture, and from pasture to barn. At spots, small streams run across, or parallel, or even within the boundaries of the trail.
As we climbed past San Xil, it rained; the wind blew hard, and it turned cold. The sun was slow in rising. We crossed the arroyos Louseiras and Muiño and climbed the Alto de Riocabo. The climb was gentle but sure at first as we skirted the southern outcrops of the Serra da Meda. Then, past the Riocabo brook, it became steeper until we reached the Alto de Riocabo, which, at 896 meters above sea level, marked the zenith for our walk this day.
Ascend to San Xil
Skirt the southern outcrops of the Serra da Meda (1202 m.)
Arroyo Riocabo
Up to the Alto de Riocabo
(896 m.)
Fonte-arcuda
Furela
Into Brea to descend to the valley of Sarria
Into Pintín and down to Calvor
Through Aguiada, San Mamede do Camiño and San Pedro do Camiño
By Carballal into Vigo de Sarria and over the río Ouribio
From the height of Riocabo we descended to the town of Montán. As we entered into the town, we were surprised by a pilgrim who joined the main path. It was Mano. He was the first pilgrim from our initial group that we have seen since the town of El Acebo. He informed us that Richard was somewhere between O Cebreiro and Triacastela and had been walking. Pleased with the news, we walked with Mano through Montán. The church of Montán was Romanesque, and primitive, but happy. It was dedicated to St. Mary, and had a rectangular apse.
From Montán, Randi, Mano, and I traveled to the hamlet of Fontearcuda, which lay just beyond the arroyo San Román. On our right was the hamlet of Zoo, on our left the hamlets of Lousada and San Román, and before us the hamlet Furela, each group of houses with its own church and cemetery. We walked toward the town of Furela. It was cold and it was late in the morning, so our bodies hankered after coffee and breakfast. We asked a woman in Furela if there was a café in town. She answered no. We asked here where the closest café would be and she responded Sarría.
That was further away than we had hoped, but what was there to do about it but resign oneself to it and walk? So from Furela we headed toward the hamlet of Pintín, which is by the carretera. At Pintín I caused a great commotion, perhaps the greatest event in Pintín that year.
I I I
On the Way: The Great Stir in Pintín
At the town of Pintín I created a great stir, a great commotion. This is how it happened. As we came into town, we first came upon a donkey, then a dog. The road we were on curved through the center of town. As we walked around the bend in the road, we came upon an old lady. Then we came upon a group of a dozen-or-so cows. The cows were being driven from their barns to the fields on the other side of the town by a middle-aged woman. The woman wore a blue and white dress, and a white veil covered her hair. She goaded the cows with a stick. As I walked by the cows, I upset one of them. The cow’s name, I was to learn, was Perla. Perla was fussy. I unnerved her, had disturbed her routine, and was in her way. She became most agitated.
“Perla!” both women yelled simultaneously. “Get back in line!”
Perla ignored the commands, and kept coming at me.
“Perla!” they yelled, but it did not help. Perla almost flattened me into the wall of a house, but at the last moment I stepped inside a doorway to avoid her bulk and her anger.
She passed by, but remained ornery. For as she rounded the corner, I heard a pail clatter on the cobblestones of the town, the dog bark furiously, the donkey bray, and three women with voices of different timbre all yell in unison, “Perla!” “Perla!” followed by all sorts of commands, denunciations, and threats in Gallego, none of which I understood. Nor, I believe, did Perla.
It was so that I caused a great stir in Pintín. Very likely it was the greatest event in Pintín that day and very possibly that year, for the town is small and lazy, but the people simple, happy and well fed; and there is no immorality about the place, unless it comes in through the television and the radio.
I I I
On the Way: Pintín to Sarría
From Pintín we walked to the village of Calvor and the ruins of a primitive settlement. From these we headed toward Aguiada. We passed a series of hamlets and farmhouses on our way to Sarria, and I shall list them here seriatim because we passed them and there is nothing more to say about them: San Mamede do Camiño, San Pedro do Camiño, Carballal, and Vigo de Sarria.
And into Sarria
(450 m.)
k
Santa Marina
k
El Salvador
k
La Magdalena
When we crossed the río Sarria we entered the town of Sarria proper. There we stumbled into the first café. It was mid-morning, around 10:00 a.m., and we had already negotiated 21 km. We ate a made-to-order tortilla prepared by the generous patroness. With it we quaffed down great draughts of good and strong coffee.
After breakfast we walked on calle Mayor, which is identical to the Camino. It took us to the church of Santa Marina, a modern replacement of the old Romanesque church that was built in honor of the Galician martyr. Some of the stone homes here are of original medieval construction and have not significantly changed since the medieval pilgrim walked through this town in the thirteenth century. The town has other churches, including that church of the originally Augustinian monastery of La Magdalena, since 1895 run by Mercedarian Fathers. The church attached to the monastery is Isabelline Gothic. The church of El Salvador has a portal, of slightly pointed arch with blunted cusps—a Moorish feature—and a tympanum with a primitive Christ the Pantocrator. Picaud, it is not clear why, ignored Sarria in his Pilgrim’s Guide.
In origin, the town is old, but it is clean and modern. It was the first significant town we have seen since we departed Villafranca del Bierzo two days ago, on the other side of the sierra León. The town was once dominated by its castle, which was built in the 13th century, destroyed during the Irmandiños revolt in 1467, and rebuilt, only later to be allowed to fall to ruin. But it is dominated by it no more, for of its former glory but one tower remains, a solitary, proud tower, doubly crenelated, but peering quite shyly as if still spooked by the Irmandiños rebels, behind the green foliage of trees.
I I I
Caritas aedificat
About the Way: The Sarrian Friar
Who Was the Writer of the Spanish Empire
The family of Luis de Sarria, more commonly known as Fray Luis de Granada (1504-1588), the “writer of the Spanish empire,” was from this region. His father, Francis, and his mother left Sarria and travelled to Granada after Isabel and Ferdinand conquered the kingdom of Granada in 1492. There Luis, of pure Galician stock, was born in Andalusia. After his father died in 1509, he was taken in by the Count de Tedilla, mayor of the Alhambra. He joined the Dominicans and became a preacher and spiritual of great renown, beloved by the great St. Theresa of Avila.
At a bookstore in Sarria, I picked up Fray Luis de Granada’s Guia de Pecadores or Sinner’s Guide. I looked “peregrinaje” up in the index and learned what the Saint had to say on pilgrimage. The venerable friar distinguished between internal or theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Love of God, and external virtues. He classified pilgrimage as an external virtue. Faith, Hope, and Love of God are infinitely above any external virtues, Fray Luis wrote. The external virtues are subordinate to the theological. But—he admonished—their relationship is close and they cannot be divided. The theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love, are the end; pilgrimage, a means to that end. The virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love of God may be said to be the health of the body, pilgrimage the medicine to obtain it. The theological virtues are the soul of religion, pilgrimage its body.
I I I
Depart Sarria
hamlet to hamlet and house to house
On the Way: Sarria to Cortes
From Sarria we departed, walking on the calle Mayor, which took us right of the castle of Sarria and over the río Celeiro by means of the ponte Áspera. When we were close to being out of town, we headed straight past a cemetery. We then heard a voice yelling at us.
“Peregrinos!” cried the voice.
It was the voice of an old man. We followed it to the window of a religious house across the street from the cemetery. He wore a white cotton shirt, a gray jacket and had only wisps of gray hair on his balding head. He was in his 90s.
“You are off the Camino. You missed a turn. Look behind you. Go back, retrace your steps, and turn right past the cemetery. You should have turned left before you reached the cemetery.”
We thanked him for his warning. We turned, found our mistake, and took a right down the right path. We waved at him as we went downhill past the edge of cemetery, past the dead who were this man’s companions, and with whom he would soon intimate consort.
Thus put on the right track by the charity of an old man, we traveled for a time parallel to the Madrid-Coruña railway. Eventually, we crossed over the railway and the arroyo San Miguel and past the farmhouse called Paredes into the hamlet of Vilei. The path was cool and shaded with the generous branches of chestnut trees, some of whose trunks were so large it took ten steps to go around them. Shortly past a cemetery and a chapel dedicated to San Silvestre we came upon the town of Barbadelo.
Sancti Michaelis
Barba-dellus
Barba-delo to Vilei
k
Santiago de Barbadelo
The church at Barbadelo was Romanesque, and worthily so in times past and times present, for the town was mentioned by Aymeric Picaud when he penned his Pilgrim’s Guide long ago, and has been named recently a National Monument by the Spanish government. This was the mosteiro de Santiago de Barbadelo. The church was of single nave, without aisles. The tympanum of this church, of layered arches and shallow carving, was rustic, but despite its rusticity (or perhaps because of it), it was beautiful. The tower was built on two molded arches, resting on columns topped with capitals curiously carved with strange creatures. The tower was square, articulated into three levels.
Vilei to to Rente to Mercado de Serra to Leiman to Pena to Perus-callo to Cortiñas to Laban-deira to Casal to Brea to Morgade to Ferriros to Cruceiro to Mirallos to Pena to Couto to Rozas
From Barbadelo we regained the Camino and traveled to the town of San Silvestre and by the four-house town of Rente. Rente had a very beautiful rustic stone home, a Casa Rural with rooms to rent. We stopped in for a soft drink and met an American pilgrim who was resting her injured knee which she had strained while walking the pilgrim path. She was a lawyer from Chicago, was resting a couple of days, and was hoping to start walking again to Santiago de Compostela.
After a brief rest, we left Rente. From Rente we headed through the hamlets of Mercado da Serra, to Monte, and to Muiño de Marzán. In this area, stone fences—called chantos by the tongues in this region—divide the small farming homesteads—called minifundias by the Spanish sociologists. At Marzán there was a mill, to the right of which we crossed the arroyo Marzán at a place called O Real. Walking past a grove of oaks we reached a clearing, and ahead was Leiman, and then Pena, following which was the town of Peruscallo. Shortly after Peruscallo we crossed the arroyo Carna into Cortiñas, a village of five houses. The Camino then traveled between Labandeira, a small hamlet, and Casal, a single house, across the arroyo known as the Chelo, and into Brea. Brea was a hamlet of five houses.
The next town through which we walked was Mordade—a single house on the left, a fountain on the right, and a chapel on the right in ruins. We crossed the arroyo named Ferreiros and the town on the west end of it called the same. We were 600 meters above sea level, more or less, and the winter weather here must be more temperate than heretofore, for we came upon the first grapevines since we had climbed the mountains to the town of O Cebreiro. The land was dotted with old horreos, or small granaries. Made of straw, wood, brick, rock, tile, or a combination of these materials, each horreo gives silent homage to the farmer’s ancestors and to a way of life which will not last.
At Ferreiros I had a very poor man’s meal: a watery Gallego broth with no meat, but only some Gallego cabbage and a few chickpeas. There were traces of chorizo, a few potatoes, and maybe a half dozen beans. The empanada I ordered was prodigious in size, but empty of content. It had onions and cabbage in the main, and a few bits of cold, uncooked bacon and speckles of chorizo. I gobbled it greedily nevertheless because I was very hungry. The voracity with which I consumed these peasant foodstuffs brought to my mind the quip by, I believe, St. Thomas Becket, who observed that a peasant or ascetic monk might gobble up his beans with greater gluttony than the archbishop did his pheasant.
The walk from Ferreiros to Portomarín was tedious; indeed, it seemed interminable. For a reason we were not able to determine, our maps were wrong. The distances and landmarks they showed were not reliable, which added frustration to the exhaustion as there was no way to predict the amount of walking which lay ahead of us. From Ferreiros we traveled more or less blindly through a series of farm towns. The first of these was Mirallos, a hamlet of two homes. The church was simple Romanesque, three archivolts in the entrance, and a double tympanum. The corbels bore lion’s heads. We passed through the town. On the outside of town was a stone with a carving of a monstrance, perhaps a marker to O Cebreiro. The Mirallos stream ran through the town, so we crossed it as we headed to the town of Pena and from Pena to Rozas.
Rozas to to Moimentos to Coutrelo to Merca-doiro to Moutrás to Parrocha to Vilachá
After the town of Rozas we passed the hill known as the Pena de Corvo into the town of Moimentos. From there to Coutarelo, and at Coutarelo we went left to the parish church of Santiago. Back on the road we quickly passed Mercadoiro and Moutras and from there to Parrocha. From Porrocha we descended to Vilachá, a relatively sizeable town lying close to the Embalse de Belesar, a reservoir formed by the damming of the río Miño north of this place.
Closeby here, in Cortes, the monastery of Santa María de Loio, that is St. Mary of Eloi, founded by the abbot Qunitila, once stood. It no longer exists and there is no trace visible, but in 1170, the first rules of the Military Order of Santiago were penned there, and the monastery served as the military order’s first motherhouse. For that reason these monk-knights of Santiago were at one time known as the freyles de Loio.
There is no trace of the Knights’ one-time home—it was already in ruins in 1584. Among the brambles and the bushes and stones, sounding alike the whispering wind, I heard somewhere past the town of Moimentos the spirit of the former monastery murmuring sotto voce the words of the gloomy Don Alvaro Dabo in Henri de Montherlant’s play Le Maître de Santiago:
If ever I had a certain renown,
I would say of it what we say about our dead:
“The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away;
blessed be the name of the Lord.”[ii]
I I I
And finally cross the río Miño to Portomarín
k
San Nicolás
On the Way: Cortes to Portomarín
We continued and shortly came upon a large lake; it was man-made and known as the Belesar reservoir. Two young pilgrims—rashly I thought—took off their clothes and prepared to jump off the high bridge into the unknown waters of the reservoir. Before they jumped, however, they—wisely I thought—asked an old man from the town, an anciano, who was walking across the bridge out of Portromarín, whether the water was deep enough. He probably had walked on the bed of the man-made lake before the dam covered it. He nodded, and they jumped.
On the other side of the Belesar reservoir is Portomarín, the new, for Portomarín the old lies under the waters of the reservoir. Georgiana Goddard King, who wrote before the reservoir, tells us that there was not much history of the town for all of its archives of vellum and paper had perished. The only archives then remaining were of rock, and the townspeople were not about to let those be destroyed by the need for the reservoir. Before the damming of the waters, the jewels of the old town were brought up to this new site, stone by stone, and so the church of San Nicolás, San Pedro, the Casa del Conde, and the Palacio de Berbetoros have survived to tell us of Portomarín’s past.
I I I
Pons Mine
*
New moon
One of the buildings so preserved is the church of St. Nicolás, a 13th century fortress-church, belonging at one time to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. It symbolized in a tenuous architecture the tenuous union between the fighting monk and the praying knight. It is a fortress church, or it is an ecclesiastical fortress—take your pick, for they would both be accurate. The structure is composed of a single circular apse at the end of a tall and battlemented square church. On the western side, above the front portal is a rose window of more than five yards in diameter. The remaining walls are articulated with blind arcading pierced atop with long and narrow loopholes. There are three carved portals, any of which admit entry into the church. The 12th century portals are said to be the work of Master Mateo. Especially notable is the rose window and the entrance portico, with three pairs of columns and archivolts, depicting Christ in Majesty surrounded by the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse. The only distraction to the Spartan beauty of the church is the black numbers painted on the stones. In anticipation of the dam, they were painted on each stone during the church’s dismantling. Though meant to help the workmen in the process of reconstructing the church, they have never been effectively erased.k
[i] Cantebury Tales, p. 454
[ii] De Montherlant, Henry, The Master of Santiago and Four Other Plays, translated from the french by Jonathan Griffin, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951, p. 291-92.
And we ben pilgrimes, passinge to and fro.”
____ Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales[i]
Depart Tria-castela
(654 m.)
Over the río Sarria
To A Balsa
(750 m.)
through fertile valley
M
Capila de Nuestra Señora de las Nieves
On the Way: Triacastela to Pintín
We departed out of Triacastela very early. We did not know where we would end the day, for our goal was to travel as far as we could and decide the matter during the day. The way out of Triacastela was wonderfully pleasant, initially by way of a single-laned paved road which transformed itself to a series of corredoiras, these wide corridors through mountain and vale with verdant vaults formed of limbs of chestnut, birch, oak, and eucalyptus. Out of Triacastela we crossed over the río Sarria to the town of A Balsa, which was set in the bucolic valley of Valdeoscuro. On the right was the chapel of Nuestra Señora de las Nieves. From A Balsa, surrounded by the company of chestnuts, oaks, and birch, we ascended to the town of San Xil. In the dark mist one came upon the town suddenly, the walls of the town unexpectedly loomed overhead as if they were ghosts or monsters. It was silent and eerie on approach. The trail was generously strewn with manure, for the Galicians use these roads to take their incontinent livestock from barn to pasture, pasture to pasture, and from pasture to barn. At spots, small streams run across, or parallel, or even within the boundaries of the trail.
As we climbed past San Xil, it rained; the wind blew hard, and it turned cold. The sun was slow in rising. We crossed the arroyos Louseiras and Muiño and climbed the Alto de Riocabo. The climb was gentle but sure at first as we skirted the southern outcrops of the Serra da Meda. Then, past the Riocabo brook, it became steeper until we reached the Alto de Riocabo, which, at 896 meters above sea level, marked the zenith for our walk this day.
Ascend to San Xil
Skirt the southern outcrops of the Serra da Meda (1202 m.)
Arroyo Riocabo
Up to the Alto de Riocabo
(896 m.)
Fonte-arcuda
Furela
Into Brea to descend to the valley of Sarria
Into Pintín and down to Calvor
Through Aguiada, San Mamede do Camiño and San Pedro do Camiño
By Carballal into Vigo de Sarria and over the río Ouribio
From the height of Riocabo we descended to the town of Montán. As we entered into the town, we were surprised by a pilgrim who joined the main path. It was Mano. He was the first pilgrim from our initial group that we have seen since the town of El Acebo. He informed us that Richard was somewhere between O Cebreiro and Triacastela and had been walking. Pleased with the news, we walked with Mano through Montán. The church of Montán was Romanesque, and primitive, but happy. It was dedicated to St. Mary, and had a rectangular apse.
From Montán, Randi, Mano, and I traveled to the hamlet of Fontearcuda, which lay just beyond the arroyo San Román. On our right was the hamlet of Zoo, on our left the hamlets of Lousada and San Román, and before us the hamlet Furela, each group of houses with its own church and cemetery. We walked toward the town of Furela. It was cold and it was late in the morning, so our bodies hankered after coffee and breakfast. We asked a woman in Furela if there was a café in town. She answered no. We asked here where the closest café would be and she responded Sarría.
That was further away than we had hoped, but what was there to do about it but resign oneself to it and walk? So from Furela we headed toward the hamlet of Pintín, which is by the carretera. At Pintín I caused a great commotion, perhaps the greatest event in Pintín that year.
I I I
On the Way: The Great Stir in Pintín
At the town of Pintín I created a great stir, a great commotion. This is how it happened. As we came into town, we first came upon a donkey, then a dog. The road we were on curved through the center of town. As we walked around the bend in the road, we came upon an old lady. Then we came upon a group of a dozen-or-so cows. The cows were being driven from their barns to the fields on the other side of the town by a middle-aged woman. The woman wore a blue and white dress, and a white veil covered her hair. She goaded the cows with a stick. As I walked by the cows, I upset one of them. The cow’s name, I was to learn, was Perla. Perla was fussy. I unnerved her, had disturbed her routine, and was in her way. She became most agitated.
“Perla!” both women yelled simultaneously. “Get back in line!”
Perla ignored the commands, and kept coming at me.
“Perla!” they yelled, but it did not help. Perla almost flattened me into the wall of a house, but at the last moment I stepped inside a doorway to avoid her bulk and her anger.
She passed by, but remained ornery. For as she rounded the corner, I heard a pail clatter on the cobblestones of the town, the dog bark furiously, the donkey bray, and three women with voices of different timbre all yell in unison, “Perla!” “Perla!” followed by all sorts of commands, denunciations, and threats in Gallego, none of which I understood. Nor, I believe, did Perla.
It was so that I caused a great stir in Pintín. Very likely it was the greatest event in Pintín that day and very possibly that year, for the town is small and lazy, but the people simple, happy and well fed; and there is no immorality about the place, unless it comes in through the television and the radio.
I I I
On the Way: Pintín to Sarría
From Pintín we walked to the village of Calvor and the ruins of a primitive settlement. From these we headed toward Aguiada. We passed a series of hamlets and farmhouses on our way to Sarria, and I shall list them here seriatim because we passed them and there is nothing more to say about them: San Mamede do Camiño, San Pedro do Camiño, Carballal, and Vigo de Sarria.
And into Sarria
(450 m.)
k
Santa Marina
k
El Salvador
k
La Magdalena
When we crossed the río Sarria we entered the town of Sarria proper. There we stumbled into the first café. It was mid-morning, around 10:00 a.m., and we had already negotiated 21 km. We ate a made-to-order tortilla prepared by the generous patroness. With it we quaffed down great draughts of good and strong coffee.
After breakfast we walked on calle Mayor, which is identical to the Camino. It took us to the church of Santa Marina, a modern replacement of the old Romanesque church that was built in honor of the Galician martyr. Some of the stone homes here are of original medieval construction and have not significantly changed since the medieval pilgrim walked through this town in the thirteenth century. The town has other churches, including that church of the originally Augustinian monastery of La Magdalena, since 1895 run by Mercedarian Fathers. The church attached to the monastery is Isabelline Gothic. The church of El Salvador has a portal, of slightly pointed arch with blunted cusps—a Moorish feature—and a tympanum with a primitive Christ the Pantocrator. Picaud, it is not clear why, ignored Sarria in his Pilgrim’s Guide.
In origin, the town is old, but it is clean and modern. It was the first significant town we have seen since we departed Villafranca del Bierzo two days ago, on the other side of the sierra León. The town was once dominated by its castle, which was built in the 13th century, destroyed during the Irmandiños revolt in 1467, and rebuilt, only later to be allowed to fall to ruin. But it is dominated by it no more, for of its former glory but one tower remains, a solitary, proud tower, doubly crenelated, but peering quite shyly as if still spooked by the Irmandiños rebels, behind the green foliage of trees.
I I I
Caritas aedificat
About the Way: The Sarrian Friar
Who Was the Writer of the Spanish Empire
The family of Luis de Sarria, more commonly known as Fray Luis de Granada (1504-1588), the “writer of the Spanish empire,” was from this region. His father, Francis, and his mother left Sarria and travelled to Granada after Isabel and Ferdinand conquered the kingdom of Granada in 1492. There Luis, of pure Galician stock, was born in Andalusia. After his father died in 1509, he was taken in by the Count de Tedilla, mayor of the Alhambra. He joined the Dominicans and became a preacher and spiritual of great renown, beloved by the great St. Theresa of Avila.
At a bookstore in Sarria, I picked up Fray Luis de Granada’s Guia de Pecadores or Sinner’s Guide. I looked “peregrinaje” up in the index and learned what the Saint had to say on pilgrimage. The venerable friar distinguished between internal or theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Love of God, and external virtues. He classified pilgrimage as an external virtue. Faith, Hope, and Love of God are infinitely above any external virtues, Fray Luis wrote. The external virtues are subordinate to the theological. But—he admonished—their relationship is close and they cannot be divided. The theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love, are the end; pilgrimage, a means to that end. The virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love of God may be said to be the health of the body, pilgrimage the medicine to obtain it. The theological virtues are the soul of religion, pilgrimage its body.
I I I
Depart Sarria
hamlet to hamlet and house to house
On the Way: Sarria to Cortes
From Sarria we departed, walking on the calle Mayor, which took us right of the castle of Sarria and over the río Celeiro by means of the ponte Áspera. When we were close to being out of town, we headed straight past a cemetery. We then heard a voice yelling at us.
“Peregrinos!” cried the voice.
It was the voice of an old man. We followed it to the window of a religious house across the street from the cemetery. He wore a white cotton shirt, a gray jacket and had only wisps of gray hair on his balding head. He was in his 90s.
“You are off the Camino. You missed a turn. Look behind you. Go back, retrace your steps, and turn right past the cemetery. You should have turned left before you reached the cemetery.”
We thanked him for his warning. We turned, found our mistake, and took a right down the right path. We waved at him as we went downhill past the edge of cemetery, past the dead who were this man’s companions, and with whom he would soon intimate consort.
Thus put on the right track by the charity of an old man, we traveled for a time parallel to the Madrid-Coruña railway. Eventually, we crossed over the railway and the arroyo San Miguel and past the farmhouse called Paredes into the hamlet of Vilei. The path was cool and shaded with the generous branches of chestnut trees, some of whose trunks were so large it took ten steps to go around them. Shortly past a cemetery and a chapel dedicated to San Silvestre we came upon the town of Barbadelo.
Sancti Michaelis
Barba-dellus
Barba-delo to Vilei
k
Santiago de Barbadelo
The church at Barbadelo was Romanesque, and worthily so in times past and times present, for the town was mentioned by Aymeric Picaud when he penned his Pilgrim’s Guide long ago, and has been named recently a National Monument by the Spanish government. This was the mosteiro de Santiago de Barbadelo. The church was of single nave, without aisles. The tympanum of this church, of layered arches and shallow carving, was rustic, but despite its rusticity (or perhaps because of it), it was beautiful. The tower was built on two molded arches, resting on columns topped with capitals curiously carved with strange creatures. The tower was square, articulated into three levels.
Vilei to to Rente to Mercado de Serra to Leiman to Pena to Perus-callo to Cortiñas to Laban-deira to Casal to Brea to Morgade to Ferriros to Cruceiro to Mirallos to Pena to Couto to Rozas
From Barbadelo we regained the Camino and traveled to the town of San Silvestre and by the four-house town of Rente. Rente had a very beautiful rustic stone home, a Casa Rural with rooms to rent. We stopped in for a soft drink and met an American pilgrim who was resting her injured knee which she had strained while walking the pilgrim path. She was a lawyer from Chicago, was resting a couple of days, and was hoping to start walking again to Santiago de Compostela.
After a brief rest, we left Rente. From Rente we headed through the hamlets of Mercado da Serra, to Monte, and to Muiño de Marzán. In this area, stone fences—called chantos by the tongues in this region—divide the small farming homesteads—called minifundias by the Spanish sociologists. At Marzán there was a mill, to the right of which we crossed the arroyo Marzán at a place called O Real. Walking past a grove of oaks we reached a clearing, and ahead was Leiman, and then Pena, following which was the town of Peruscallo. Shortly after Peruscallo we crossed the arroyo Carna into Cortiñas, a village of five houses. The Camino then traveled between Labandeira, a small hamlet, and Casal, a single house, across the arroyo known as the Chelo, and into Brea. Brea was a hamlet of five houses.
The next town through which we walked was Mordade—a single house on the left, a fountain on the right, and a chapel on the right in ruins. We crossed the arroyo named Ferreiros and the town on the west end of it called the same. We were 600 meters above sea level, more or less, and the winter weather here must be more temperate than heretofore, for we came upon the first grapevines since we had climbed the mountains to the town of O Cebreiro. The land was dotted with old horreos, or small granaries. Made of straw, wood, brick, rock, tile, or a combination of these materials, each horreo gives silent homage to the farmer’s ancestors and to a way of life which will not last.
At Ferreiros I had a very poor man’s meal: a watery Gallego broth with no meat, but only some Gallego cabbage and a few chickpeas. There were traces of chorizo, a few potatoes, and maybe a half dozen beans. The empanada I ordered was prodigious in size, but empty of content. It had onions and cabbage in the main, and a few bits of cold, uncooked bacon and speckles of chorizo. I gobbled it greedily nevertheless because I was very hungry. The voracity with which I consumed these peasant foodstuffs brought to my mind the quip by, I believe, St. Thomas Becket, who observed that a peasant or ascetic monk might gobble up his beans with greater gluttony than the archbishop did his pheasant.
The walk from Ferreiros to Portomarín was tedious; indeed, it seemed interminable. For a reason we were not able to determine, our maps were wrong. The distances and landmarks they showed were not reliable, which added frustration to the exhaustion as there was no way to predict the amount of walking which lay ahead of us. From Ferreiros we traveled more or less blindly through a series of farm towns. The first of these was Mirallos, a hamlet of two homes. The church was simple Romanesque, three archivolts in the entrance, and a double tympanum. The corbels bore lion’s heads. We passed through the town. On the outside of town was a stone with a carving of a monstrance, perhaps a marker to O Cebreiro. The Mirallos stream ran through the town, so we crossed it as we headed to the town of Pena and from Pena to Rozas.
Rozas to to Moimentos to Coutrelo to Merca-doiro to Moutrás to Parrocha to Vilachá
After the town of Rozas we passed the hill known as the Pena de Corvo into the town of Moimentos. From there to Coutarelo, and at Coutarelo we went left to the parish church of Santiago. Back on the road we quickly passed Mercadoiro and Moutras and from there to Parrocha. From Porrocha we descended to Vilachá, a relatively sizeable town lying close to the Embalse de Belesar, a reservoir formed by the damming of the río Miño north of this place.
Closeby here, in Cortes, the monastery of Santa María de Loio, that is St. Mary of Eloi, founded by the abbot Qunitila, once stood. It no longer exists and there is no trace visible, but in 1170, the first rules of the Military Order of Santiago were penned there, and the monastery served as the military order’s first motherhouse. For that reason these monk-knights of Santiago were at one time known as the freyles de Loio.
There is no trace of the Knights’ one-time home—it was already in ruins in 1584. Among the brambles and the bushes and stones, sounding alike the whispering wind, I heard somewhere past the town of Moimentos the spirit of the former monastery murmuring sotto voce the words of the gloomy Don Alvaro Dabo in Henri de Montherlant’s play Le Maître de Santiago:
If ever I had a certain renown,
I would say of it what we say about our dead:
“The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away;
blessed be the name of the Lord.”[ii]
I I I
And finally cross the río Miño to Portomarín
k
San Nicolás
On the Way: Cortes to Portomarín
We continued and shortly came upon a large lake; it was man-made and known as the Belesar reservoir. Two young pilgrims—rashly I thought—took off their clothes and prepared to jump off the high bridge into the unknown waters of the reservoir. Before they jumped, however, they—wisely I thought—asked an old man from the town, an anciano, who was walking across the bridge out of Portromarín, whether the water was deep enough. He probably had walked on the bed of the man-made lake before the dam covered it. He nodded, and they jumped.
On the other side of the Belesar reservoir is Portomarín, the new, for Portomarín the old lies under the waters of the reservoir. Georgiana Goddard King, who wrote before the reservoir, tells us that there was not much history of the town for all of its archives of vellum and paper had perished. The only archives then remaining were of rock, and the townspeople were not about to let those be destroyed by the need for the reservoir. Before the damming of the waters, the jewels of the old town were brought up to this new site, stone by stone, and so the church of San Nicolás, San Pedro, the Casa del Conde, and the Palacio de Berbetoros have survived to tell us of Portomarín’s past.
I I I
Pons Mine
*
New moon
One of the buildings so preserved is the church of St. Nicolás, a 13th century fortress-church, belonging at one time to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. It symbolized in a tenuous architecture the tenuous union between the fighting monk and the praying knight. It is a fortress church, or it is an ecclesiastical fortress—take your pick, for they would both be accurate. The structure is composed of a single circular apse at the end of a tall and battlemented square church. On the western side, above the front portal is a rose window of more than five yards in diameter. The remaining walls are articulated with blind arcading pierced atop with long and narrow loopholes. There are three carved portals, any of which admit entry into the church. The 12th century portals are said to be the work of Master Mateo. Especially notable is the rose window and the entrance portico, with three pairs of columns and archivolts, depicting Christ in Majesty surrounded by the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse. The only distraction to the Spartan beauty of the church is the black numbers painted on the stones. In anticipation of the dam, they were painted on each stone during the church’s dismantling. Though meant to help the workmen in the process of reconstructing the church, they have never been effectively erased.k
[i] Cantebury Tales, p. 454
[ii] De Montherlant, Henry, The Master of Santiago and Four Other Plays, translated from the french by Jonathan Griffin, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951, p. 291-92. “This world nis but a thurghfare ful of wo,
And we ben pilgrimes, passinge to and fro.”
____ Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales[i]
Depart Tria-castela
(654 m.)
Over the río Sarria
To A Balsa
(750 m.)
through fertile valley
M
Capila de Nuestra Señora de las Nieves
On the Way: Triacastela to Pintín
We departed out of Triacastela very early. We did not know where we would end the day, for our goal was to travel as far as we could and decide the matter during the day. The way out of Triacastela was wonderfully pleasant, initially by way of a single-laned paved road which transformed itself to a series of corredoiras, these wide corridors through mountain and vale with verdant vaults formed of limbs of chestnut, birch, oak, and eucalyptus. Out of Triacastela we crossed over the río Sarria to the town of A Balsa, which was set in the bucolic valley of Valdeoscuro. On the right was the chapel of Nuestra Señora de las Nieves. From A Balsa, surrounded by the company of chestnuts, oaks, and birch, we ascended to the town of San Xil. In the dark mist one came upon the town suddenly, the walls of the town unexpectedly loomed overhead as if they were ghosts or monsters. It was silent and eerie on approach. The trail was generously strewn with manure, for the Galicians use these roads to take their incontinent livestock from barn to pasture, pasture to pasture, and from pasture to barn. At spots, small streams run across, or parallel, or even within the boundaries of the trail.
As we climbed past San Xil, it rained; the wind blew hard, and it turned cold. The sun was slow in rising. We crossed the arroyos Louseiras and Muiño and climbed the Alto de Riocabo. The climb was gentle but sure at first as we skirted the southern outcrops of the Serra da Meda. Then, past the Riocabo brook, it became steeper until we reached the Alto de Riocabo, which, at 896 meters above sea level, marked the zenith for our walk this day.
Ascend to San Xil
Skirt the southern outcrops of the Serra da Meda (1202 m.)
Arroyo Riocabo
Up to the Alto de Riocabo
(896 m.)
Fonte-arcuda
Furela
Into Brea to descend to the valley of Sarria
Into Pintín and down to Calvor
Through Aguiada, San Mamede do Camiño and San Pedro do Camiño
By Carballal into Vigo de Sarria and over the río Ouribio
From the height of Riocabo we descended to the town of Montán. As we entered into the town, we were surprised by a pilgrim who joined the main path. It was Mano. He was the first pilgrim from our initial group that we have seen since the town of El Acebo. He informed us that Richard was somewhere between O Cebreiro and Triacastela and had been walking. Pleased with the news, we walked with Mano through Montán. The church of Montán was Romanesque, and primitive, but happy. It was dedicated to St. Mary, and had a rectangular apse.
From Montán, Randi, Mano, and I traveled to the hamlet of Fontearcuda, which lay just beyond the arroyo San Román. On our right was the hamlet of Zoo, on our left the hamlets of Lousada and San Román, and before us the hamlet Furela, each group of houses with its own church and cemetery. We walked toward the town of Furela. It was cold and it was late in the morning, so our bodies hankered after coffee and breakfast. We asked a woman in Furela if there was a café in town. She answered no. We asked here where the closest café would be and she responded Sarría.
That was further away than we had hoped, but what was there to do about it but resign oneself to it and walk? So from Furela we headed toward the hamlet of Pintín, which is by the carretera. At Pintín I caused a great commotion, perhaps the greatest event in Pintín that year.
I I I
On the Way: The Great Stir in Pintín
At the town of Pintín I created a great stir, a great commotion. This is how it happened. As we came into town, we first came upon a donkey, then a dog. The road we were on curved through the center of town. As we walked around the bend in the road, we came upon an old lady. Then we came upon a group of a dozen-or-so cows. The cows were being driven from their barns to the fields on the other side of the town by a middle-aged woman. The woman wore a blue and white dress, and a white veil covered her hair. She goaded the cows with a stick. As I walked by the cows, I upset one of them. The cow’s name, I was to learn, was Perla. Perla was fussy. I unnerved her, had disturbed her routine, and was in her way. She became most agitated.
“Perla!” both women yelled simultaneously. “Get back in line!”
Perla ignored the commands, and kept coming at me.
“Perla!” they yelled, but it did not help. Perla almost flattened me into the wall of a house, but at the last moment I stepped inside a doorway to avoid her bulk and her anger.
She passed by, but remained ornery. For as she rounded the corner, I heard a pail clatter on the cobblestones of the town, the dog bark furiously, the donkey bray, and three women with voices of different timbre all yell in unison, “Perla!” “Perla!” followed by all sorts of commands, denunciations, and threats in Gallego, none of which I understood. Nor, I believe, did Perla.
It was so that I caused a great stir in Pintín. Very likely it was the greatest event in Pintín that day and very possibly that year, for the town is small and lazy, but the people simple, happy and well fed; and there is no immorality about the place, unless it comes in through the television and the radio.
I I I
On the Way: Pintín to Sarría
From Pintín we walked to the village of Calvor and the ruins of a primitive settlement. From these we headed toward Aguiada. We passed a series of hamlets and farmhouses on our way to Sarria, and I shall list them here seriatim because we passed them and there is nothing more to say about them: San Mamede do Camiño, San Pedro do Camiño, Carballal, and Vigo de Sarria.
And into Sarria
(450 m.)
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Santa Marina
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El Salvador
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La Magdalena
When we crossed the río Sarria we entered the town of Sarria proper. There we stumbled into the first café. It was mid-morning, around 10:00 a.m., and we had already negotiated 21 km. We ate a made-to-order tortilla prepared by the generous patroness. With it we quaffed down great draughts of good and strong coffee.
After breakfast we walked on calle Mayor, which is identical to the Camino. It took us to the church of Santa Marina, a modern replacement of the old Romanesque church that was built in honor of the Galician martyr. Some of the stone homes here are of original medieval construction and have not significantly changed since the medieval pilgrim walked through this town in the thirteenth century. The town has other churches, including that church of the originally Augustinian monastery of La Magdalena, since 1895 run by Mercedarian Fathers. The church attached to the monastery is Isabelline Gothic. The church of El Salvador has a portal, of slightly pointed arch with blunted cusps—a Moorish feature—and a tympanum with a primitive Christ the Pantocrator. Picaud, it is not clear why, ignored Sarria in his Pilgrim’s Guide.
In origin, the town is old, but it is clean and modern. It was the first significant town we have seen since we departed Villafranca del Bierzo two days ago, on the other side of the sierra León. The town was once dominated by its castle, which was built in the 13th century, destroyed during the Irmandiños revolt in 1467, and rebuilt, only later to be allowed to fall to ruin. But it is dominated by it no more, for of its former glory but one tower remains, a solitary, proud tower, doubly crenelated, but peering quite shyly as if still spooked by the Irmandiños rebels, behind the green foliage of trees.
I I I
Caritas aedificat
About the Way: The Sarrian Friar
Who Was the Writer of the Spanish Empire
The family of Luis de Sarria, more commonly known as Fray Luis de Granada (1504-1588), the “writer of the Spanish empire,” was from this region. His father, Francis, and his mother left Sarria and travelled to Granada after Isabel and Ferdinand conquered the kingdom of Granada in 1492. There Luis, of pure Galician stock, was born in Andalusia. After his father died in 1509, he was taken in by the Count de Tedilla, mayor of the Alhambra. He joined the Dominicans and became a preacher and spiritual of great renown, beloved by the great St. Theresa of Avila.
At a bookstore in Sarria, I picked up Fray Luis de Granada’s Guia de Pecadores or Sinner’s Guide. I looked “peregrinaje” up in the index and learned what the Saint had to say on pilgrimage. The venerable friar distinguished between internal or theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Love of God, and external virtues. He classified pilgrimage as an external virtue. Faith, Hope, and Love of God are infinitely above any external virtues, Fray Luis wrote. The external virtues are subordinate to the theological. But—he admonished—their relationship is close and they cannot be divided. The theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love, are the end; pilgrimage, a means to that end. The virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love of God may be said to be the health of the body, pilgrimage the medicine to obtain it. The theological virtues are the soul of religion, pilgrimage its body.
I I I
Depart Sarria
hamlet to hamlet and house to house
On the Way: Sarria to Cortes
From Sarria we departed, walking on the calle Mayor, which took us right of the castle of Sarria and over the río Celeiro by means of the ponte Áspera. When we were close to being out of town, we headed straight past a cemetery. We then heard a voice yelling at us.
“Peregrinos!” cried the voice.
It was the voice of an old man. We followed it to the window of a religious house across the street from the cemetery. He wore a white cotton shirt, a gray jacket and had only wisps of gray hair on his balding head. He was in his 90s.
“You are off the Camino. You missed a turn. Look behind you. Go back, retrace your steps, and turn right past the cemetery. You should have turned left before you reached the cemetery.”
We thanked him for his warning. We turned, found our mistake, and took a right down the right path. We waved at him as we went downhill past the edge of cemetery, past the dead who were this man’s companions, and with whom he would soon intimate consort.
Thus put on the right track by the charity of an old man, we traveled for a time parallel to the Madrid-Coruña railway. Eventually, we crossed over the railway and the arroyo San Miguel and past the farmhouse called Paredes into the hamlet of Vilei. The path was cool and shaded with the generous branches of chestnut trees, some of whose trunks were so large it took ten steps to go around them. Shortly past a cemetery and a chapel dedicated to San Silvestre we came upon the town of Barbadelo.
Sancti Michaelis
Barba-dellus
Barba-delo to Vilei
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Santiago de Barbadelo
The church at Barbadelo was Romanesque, and worthily so in times past and times present, for the town was mentioned by Aymeric Picaud when he penned his Pilgrim’s Guide long ago, and has been named recently a National Monument by the Spanish government. This was the mosteiro de Santiago de Barbadelo. The church was of single nave, without aisles. The tympanum of this church, of layered arches and shallow carving, was rustic, but despite its rusticity (or perhaps because of it), it was beautiful. The tower was built on two molded arches, resting on columns topped with capitals curiously carved with strange creatures. The tower was square, articulated into three levels.
Vilei to to Rente to Mercado de Serra to Leiman to Pena to Perus-callo to Cortiñas to Laban-deira to Casal to Brea to Morgade to Ferriros to Cruceiro to Mirallos to Pena to Couto to Rozas
From Barbadelo we regained the Camino and traveled to the town of San Silvestre and by the four-house town of Rente. Rente had a very beautiful rustic stone home, a Casa Rural with rooms to rent. We stopped in for a soft drink and met an American pilgrim who was resting her injured knee which she had strained while walking the pilgrim path. She was a lawyer from Chicago, was resting a couple of days, and was hoping to start walking again to Santiago de Compostela.
After a brief rest, we left Rente. From Rente we headed through the hamlets of Mercado da Serra, to Monte, and to Muiño de Marzán. In this area, stone fences—called chantos by the tongues in this region—divide the small farming homesteads—called minifundias by the Spanish sociologists. At Marzán there was a mill, to the right of which we crossed the arroyo Marzán at a place called O Real. Walking past a grove of oaks we reached a clearing, and ahead was Leiman, and then Pena, following which was the town of Peruscallo. Shortly after Peruscallo we crossed the arroyo Carna into Cortiñas, a village of five houses. The Camino then traveled between Labandeira, a small hamlet, and Casal, a single house, across the arroyo known as the Chelo, and into Brea. Brea was a hamlet of five houses.
The next town through which we walked was Mordade—a single house on the left, a fountain on the right, and a chapel on the right in ruins. We crossed the arroyo named Ferreiros and the town on the west end of it called the same. We were 600 meters above sea level, more or less, and the winter weather here must be more temperate than heretofore, for we came upon the first grapevines since we had climbed the mountains to the town of O Cebreiro. The land was dotted with old horreos, or small granaries. Made of straw, wood, brick, rock, tile, or a combination of these materials, each horreo gives silent homage to the farmer’s ancestors and to a way of life which will not last.
At Ferreiros I had a very poor man’s meal: a watery Gallego broth with no meat, but only some Gallego cabbage and a few chickpeas. There were traces of chorizo, a few potatoes, and maybe a half dozen beans. The empanada I ordered was prodigious in size, but empty of content. It had onions and cabbage in the main, and a few bits of cold, uncooked bacon and speckles of chorizo. I gobbled it greedily nevertheless because I was very hungry. The voracity with which I consumed these peasant foodstuffs brought to my mind the quip by, I believe, St. Thomas Becket, who observed that a peasant or ascetic monk might gobble up his beans with greater gluttony than the archbishop did his pheasant.
The walk from Ferreiros to Portomarín was tedious; indeed, it seemed interminable. For a reason we were not able to determine, our maps were wrong. The distances and landmarks they showed were not reliable, which added frustration to the exhaustion as there was no way to predict the amount of walking which lay ahead of us. From Ferreiros we traveled more or less blindly through a series of farm towns. The first of these was Mirallos, a hamlet of two homes. The church was simple Romanesque, three archivolts in the entrance, and a double tympanum. The corbels bore lion’s heads. We passed through the town. On the outside of town was a stone with a carving of a monstrance, perhaps a marker to O Cebreiro. The Mirallos stream ran through the town, so we crossed it as we headed to the town of Pena and from Pena to Rozas.
Rozas to to Moimentos to Coutrelo to Merca-doiro to Moutrás to Parrocha to Vilachá
After the town of Rozas we passed the hill known as the Pena de Corvo into the town of Moimentos. From there to Coutarelo, and at Coutarelo we went left to the parish church of Santiago. Back on the road we quickly passed Mercadoiro and Moutras and from there to Parrocha. From Porrocha we descended to Vilachá, a relatively sizeable town lying close to the Embalse de Belesar, a reservoir formed by the damming of the río Miño north of this place.
Closeby here, in Cortes, the monastery of Santa María de Loio, that is St. Mary of Eloi, founded by the abbot Qunitila, once stood. It no longer exists and there is no trace visible, but in 1170, the first rules of the Military Order of Santiago were penned there, and the monastery served as the military order’s first motherhouse. For that reason these monk-knights of Santiago were at one time known as the freyles de Loio.
There is no trace of the Knights’ one-time home—it was already in ruins in 1584. Among the brambles and the bushes and stones, sounding alike the whispering wind, I heard somewhere past the town of Moimentos the spirit of the former monastery murmuring sotto voce the words of the gloomy Don Alvaro Dabo in Henri de Montherlant’s play Le Maître de Santiago:
If ever I had a certain renown,
I would say of it what we say about our dead:
“The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away;
blessed be the name of the Lord.”[ii]
I I I
And finally cross the río Miño to Portomarín
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San Nicolás
On the Way: Cortes to Portomarín
We continued and shortly came upon a large lake; it was man-made and known as the Belesar reservoir. Two young pilgrims—rashly I thought—took off their clothes and prepared to jump off the high bridge into the unknown waters of the reservoir. Before they jumped, however, they—wisely I thought—asked an old man from the town, an anciano, who was walking across the bridge out of Portromarín, whether the water was deep enough. He probably had walked on the bed of the man-made lake before the dam covered it. He nodded, and they jumped.
On the other side of the Belesar reservoir is Portomarín, the new, for Portomarín the old lies under the waters of the reservoir. Georgiana Goddard King, who wrote before the reservoir, tells us that there was not much history of the town for all of its archives of vellum and paper had perished. The only archives then remaining were of rock, and the townspeople were not about to let those be destroyed by the need for the reservoir. Before the damming of the waters, the jewels of the old town were brought up to this new site, stone by stone, and so the church of San Nicolás, San Pedro, the Casa del Conde, and the Palacio de Berbetoros have survived to tell us of Portomarín’s past.
I I I
Pons Mine
*
New moon
One of the buildings so preserved is the church of St. Nicolás, a 13th century fortress-church, belonging at one time to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. It symbolized in a tenuous architecture the tenuous union between the fighting monk and the praying knight. It is a fortress church, or it is an ecclesiastical fortress—take your pick, for they would both be accurate. The structure is composed of a single circular apse at the end of a tall and battlemented square church. On the western side, above the front portal is a rose window of more than five yards in diameter. The remaining walls are articulated with blind arcading pierced atop with long and narrow loopholes. There are three carved portals, any of which admit entry into the church. The 12th century portals are said to be the work of Master Mateo. Especially notable is the rose window and the entrance portico, with three pairs of columns and archivolts, depicting Christ in Majesty surrounded by the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse. The only distraction to the Spartan beauty of the church is the black numbers painted on the stones. In anticipation of the dam, they were painted on each stone during the church’s dismantling. Though meant to help the workmen in the process of reconstructing the church, they have never been effectively erased.k
[i] Cantebury Tales, p. 454
[ii] De Montherlant, Henry, The Master of Santiago and Four Other Plays, translated from the french by Jonathan Griffin, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951, p. 291-92.
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