Sarria

How long to stay?

An afternoon is enough. The old town is manageable: church and fortress tower on the Rúa Maior, the A Madalena monastery, the medieval bridge. You can do all that in an afternoon without your backpack. If you start here, you need a night anyway to arrive, get your credencial and your first stamp. If you have been walking for weeks, the evening is better spent resting. Tomorrow the Way will be busier than anything you have known so far.

Sarria in Ninja numbers

• 161,901 pilgrims began in Sarria in 2025. No other place on any Camino comes anywhere close; Porto, in second place, had less than a third of that.
• Two out of three pilgrims who arrived in Santiago on the Camino Francés in 2025 only set off in Sarria.
• Around 115 kilometres separate Sarria from Santiago, according to Camino Ninja, just over the 100 you have to walk for the Compostela.
• 2 stamps a day are what you need in your credencial from here on.
• 8 maravedís was what every pilgrim passing through Sarria on the way home with a Compostela received at the Hospital de San Antón in the eighteenth century. The sick received 24.

Arriving: two routes, one town

From Triacastela you reach Sarria on the Camino Francés by one of two variants: via San Xil or via the monastery of Samos, from where it is a good 15 kilometres to Sarria according to Camino Ninja. Just before Aguiada, just under 5 kilometres from town, the two meet again. Through San Mamede do Camiño you reach Sarria, and in town the Way leads you along the Rúa Maior, the old-town street with the Igrexa do Salvador and the tower of the old fortress.

If you start in Sarria, you usually arrive by train or bus. Trains run from Madrid, Barcelona and the Basque Country, buses mostly with a change in Lugo.

In brief: a royal town on the Way

At the end of the twelfth century King Alfonso IX of León founded the new town of Vilanova de Sarria. He died here in 1230 while on pilgrimage to Santiago. By around 1280 the town had two churches, a monastery and two chapels. Later it became part of the County of Lemos. The town's fortress was destroyed by rebelling peasants, the Irmandiños; only one tower was left standing. In 1589 the Hospital de San Antón for pilgrims was founded, and it lasted until 1845. In the eighteenth century, when hardly any pilgrims came, Sarria shrank to about seventy houses. In 1880 the railway arrived. Today many of those who begin their Camino here come by train.

Newcomers and veterans: the place where the Camino doubles

Sarria is the place where two kinds of pilgrim meet. Some have been walking since Saint-Jean, León or Astorga, with blisters behind them, pain, friendships and a rhythm of their own. The others are just stepping off the train, with clean shoes and full backpacks. Around 115 kilometres lie ahead of them, just over the 100 needed for the Compostela.

For the long-distance walkers this often comes as a shock. Where you may have walked alone yesterday, hundreds a day will be walking with you from tomorrow. For the newcomers it is a beginning with everything that goes with it: excitement, a backpack that is too heavy, the first blisters. Both are the Camino. If you have been walking a long time, you may remember what your own first day was like. If you are new, you may learn from those who have been walking for a long time. For five days you share the same Way.

Between the Rúa Maior and the bridge: what to see

Four stops for an afternoon walk. You can leave your backpack at the albergue for it.

• Igrexa do Salvador: The thirteenth-century church is early Gothic, single-naved, with a wooden roof and a round apse. On the north façade sits Christ as ruler of the world, the Pantocrator. A simple place to pause before the last days to Santiago begin. We haven't found opening hours.
• Fortress tower: Of the medieval fortress only a round tower remains, about 14 metres high. The rest was torn down by the Irmandiños, peasants who rose up against their lords in the fifteenth century.
• Mosteiro da Madalena: At the beginning of the thirteenth century Italian monks founded a hospital for pilgrims here. Mercedarians have lived here since 1896; the monastery has Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque parts and a Gothic cloister. A large albergue bears the monastery's name today. We haven't found visiting hours.
• Ponte da Áspera: The medieval bridge with three arches of slate and granite lies on the way out of town. Pilgrims have crossed it towards Portomarín for centuries, and tomorrow morning you will be one of them.

Food and drink

On market days, the 6th, 20th and 27th of every month, Sarria serves pulpo á feira, market-style octopus. The bakeries still make their empanadas by hand. In February Sarria celebrates the pig: the Festa do Porco Celta is dedicated to the native Galician breed.

Honestly

• From here it is crowded. 161,901 starters in a year means more than 400 every day on average, and most start in August and September. If you are looking for silence, you will hardly find it on the next five stages.
• The public albergue is tiny. 40 places for so many pilgrims doesn't add up. If you start here or arrive in high season, you are better off booking a private place.
• Not every albergue is quiet. Several pilgrims report noise from bars and terraces outside the window until late at night. When booking, ask for a room at the back.
• We know less than we would like. For this text we found no current reports of closures or roadworks. Ask at your albergue what is going on right now.

Where pilgrims sleep

• Albergue de peregrinos de Sarria: the public Xunta albergue with 40 places at €10 a night. As at all Xunta albergues, you can't book.
• Albergue Monasterio de la Magdalena: a large private albergue, with 100 places according to Camino Ninja, from €12.

There are plenty of private albergues in Sarria; a dorm bed mostly costs €10 to €14, according to Camino Ninja. One of them, by the way, is called Dos Oito Marabedís, "Of the eight maravedís", the sum the old hospital gave pilgrims on their way home.

Ninja tips

• Book early: If you arrive or start in Sarria, reserve your bed in advance. Pilgrims recommend it because the last 100 kilometres are much busier.
• A curtain instead of a dorm: Several newer albergues in Sarria have beds with a curtain, their own light and a socket. Pilgrims praise this again and again. If privacy matters to you, ask for it.
• Two stamps from today: On the last 100 kilometres you need at least two stamps a day. You can get stamps at albergues, bars and churches along the Way.
• Make the most of market day: If you are in Sarria on the 6th, 20th or 27th of the month, there is octopus from the market.
• Greet the newcomers: If you have been on the road for a long time, from tomorrow you will meet many people on their first day. A "Buen Camino" from someone with dusty shoes costs you nothing.

Practical tips for pilgrims

• Credencial and stamps: If you start here, you need a credencial to sleep in pilgrim albergues and to receive the Compostela at the end. According to a pilgrim portal (as of October 2026), in Sarria you can get one at the Convento de la Merced, that is the Mercedarians' monastery of A Madalena, at Avenida de la Merced 60, at the parish of Santa Mariña at Travesía de la Iglesia 1, at the parish of Nuestra Señora del Rosario at Gran Vía 25 and from the pilgrims' association Amigos do Camiño de Santiago na Comarca de Sarria at Rúa Vigo de Sarria 15. In 2023 pilgrims also reported the tourist information office and the public albergue. The nicest place for your first stamp is A Madalena: a Galician directory calls stamping credenciales the Mercedarians' main task there. We haven't found opening hours; if in doubt, ask at your albergue.
• Getting here: By train from Madrid, Barcelona or the Basque Country, by bus mostly via Lugo.
• Festivals: On the last Saturday in August Sarria celebrates the Noite Meiga, the witches' night. On the first weekend of April there is an antiques fair.

Onwards: the last 115 kilometres

You leave Sarria over the Ponte da Áspera. Beyond the town the Way leads to Barbadelo, after a good 4 kilometres according to Camino Ninja, where the Templars were once based at the church of San Esteban. Via Ferreiros, after around 13 kilometres, you reach Portomarín after 22.3 kilometres. From there it is around 92 kilometres to Santiago de Compostela.

What awaits you tomorrow

A day through many small hamlets, in more company than ever before, to Portomarín. The town stands above a reservoir. When the Belesar reservoir flooded old Portomarín in the 1960s, the town moved up the hillside, and its church was taken along stone by stone.

Deep dive: A king, a monastery and a hundred kilometres

A long read, in case you want to learn more about Sarria. About twenty minutes' reading.

Where two streams meet

When you walk along the Rúa Maior, past the Igrexa do Salvador and the round tower of the fortress, you are walking where pilgrims have passed through Sarria since the Middle Ages. Trains have run here since 1880, and today many people arrive by rail to begin their Camino in Sarria. The old pilgrims' street and the railway tracks: in Sarria two streams meet, and both belong to the story of this place.

Sarria is not a big town. About 9,000 people live in the town itself, a little over 13,000 in the whole municipality. And yet in 2025, 161,901 pilgrims began their walk here, more than anywhere else in the world. How that came about is a story that begins with a dying king and ends with a rule of the Pilgrim's Office. In between lie a monastery that started out as a pilgrims' hospital, a castle torn down by peasants, a hospital that gave homeward-bound pilgrims money for the road, and long centuries when hardly anyone came.

A river, hill villages and a monastery in the valley

The town takes its name from its river. The Río Sarria rises in the mountains near Triacastela, which you may just have walked through, and flows through the town.

People lived here long before the pilgrims. Rock carvings survive in Maside and Barbadelo, there are dolmens in Santa Marta, Arxemil and Vilamaior, and on many hills lie castros, the fortified villages of pre-Roman times. Some of them were inhabited into the Middle Ages. In Roman times the area belonged to the hinterland of Lucus Augusti, today's Lugo. Near Vilar de Sarria and San Antolín two Roman country estates have been excavated, and a gravestone from Vilar de Sarria now stands in the museum in Pontevedra.

Under the Suebi, who ruled Galicia after the Romans, there was already a county of Sarria. After the Muslim conquest, which left hardly any traces here, the monastery of Samos also took part in resettling the land. Smaller monasteries of the area were placed under its supervision, and their monks cleared land, laid out fields and brought farmers in. From the tenth century on, the counts of the area bear the title Count in Sarria in the charters. So the place already existed when the pilgrims' road grew great. But it was the road that made it a town.

A new town on the Way of the French

At the end of the twelfth century King Alfonso the Ninth of León founded a new town, Vilanova de Sarria, and gave it the rights of a royal town. He did not do this only here: he also had Melide and Monforte de Lemos resettled, and in 1208 he refounded A Coruña.

By around 1280 the town was complete: a street called Camiño francés, along with the Rúa de Queiroga and the Rúa do Pombal, two parish churches, San Salvador and Santa Mariña, the monastery of A Madalena and two chapels. The Way of the French, as the pilgrims' road was called, had given the town a street.

There is a small twist to this. In the pilgrims' guide of the Codex Calixtinus, written down around 1140, the author lists the places along the way one by one. After Triacastela he names San Miguel, then Barbadelo, then Portomarín. Sarria does not appear. The place where almost one pilgrim in three begins today was not worth a mention of its own in the most famous pilgrims' guide of the Middle Ages. Barbadelo was, though, the village you will walk through a few kilometres into tomorrow, where the Templars were based at the church of San Esteban.

The king who never arrived

Alfonso the Ninth was born in Zamora on 15 August 1171 and became King of León and Galicia in 1188. He was not an easy ruler. His first marriage, to his cousin Teresa of Portugal, was dissolved because they were too closely related. His second, to Berenguela of Castile, was declared invalid by Pope Innocent the Third in 1198; the couple nevertheless stayed together for some years, and the kingdom was placed under interdict. The king was excommunicated once, too. He seemed little impressed by it.

Two of his deeds, however, have lasted. In the year he came to the throne, 1188, he called an assembly in the cloister of San Isidoro in León, to which he invited not only nobles and clergy but also representatives of the towns. The historian John Keane sees this as an important step on the road to the parliaments of Europe. And in 1218 he founded the University of Salamanca.

In 1230 he conquered Mérida and Badajoz in the south. After that he set off north, to Santiago. According to Spanish accounts he wanted to thank the apostle for his help in the war. Manuel Núñez Rodríguez sums it up in one sentence in a scholarly article from 2010: having taken all the land north of the Guadiana, Alfonso returned as a pilgrim to Santiago and died on the way. In Vilanova de Sarria, the town he had founded himself, he fell seriously ill. On 24 September 1230 he received the last rites here and died, fifty-nine years old.

He reached Santiago all the same. His will asked that he be buried in the cathedral next to his father, Ferdinand the Second, and so it was done. The two tombs now stand in the Royal Pantheon in the Chapel of Relics of the cathedral. The recumbent figures of the two kings are so alike that historians still cannot say for certain which tomb belongs to which king.

His death had consequences far beyond Sarria. Alfonso had intended his daughters Sancha and Dulce, from his first marriage, to be his heirs. But their stepmother Berenguela saw to it that both renounced, and in December 1230 her son Ferdinand the Third also became King of León. From then on Castile and León were united for good. A king travelling as a pilgrim dies a little over a hundred kilometres from his goal, and in the end two kingdoms become one.

The Church of the Saviour

The Igrexa do Salvador stands on the Rúa Maior. It was built in the thirteenth century, at the time when Romanesque was turning into Gothic, and you can see exactly that. It has a single nave with a wooden roof and a semicircular apse, like the many Romanesque village churches of Galicia. Its portals, however, already show the new age.

Look out for two things. On the north portal sits Christ as ruler of the world, a Pantocrator, in an archaic style that looks older than the building. And above one of the portals there is a tympanum whose images experts still interpret in different ways. What exactly it shows is disputed. So feel free to look for yourself and come up with your own reading.

The bell gable is much younger. Francisco Castiñeira built it in 1860, and the fountain on the square in front of the church dates from the same year. The Salvador is not a large building. But pilgrims have been walking past it since the thirteenth century, pilgrims who were at exactly the point where you are now: still a good hundred kilometres from the goal.

The second old parish church, Santa Mariña, did not have that patience. It was Romanesque and dated from the twelfth century, but in 1885 a new building was put up in its place. Of the old church only a drawing of the portal and one capital remain. The figures of Saint Mariña and Saint John on the new building were made by the sculptor Isidoro Brocos.

Italian brothers and a hospital for pilgrims

Some 200 metres from the pilgrims' way lies the monastery of A Madalena. Its story begins at the start of the thirteenth century, and it begins with pilgrims. Italian brothers founded a hospital here for people on their way to Santiago. The English-language tradition calls them brothers of the Order of the Blessed Martyrs of Jesus and adds that they were pilgrims themselves. We cannot check whether that is true, but it is a lovely thought: people who had been on the road themselves stopped and looked after those who came after them.

On the question of which order the house belonged to in its first centuries, the sources do not agree. One says the brothers lived by the Rule of Saint Augustine from the beginning, and that the house was the order's first foundation in Galicia. Another speaks of an order of its own, the Magdalenes, which ran the monastery until 1568, before it was incorporated into the Augustinian order. All agree on two points: the Augustinians shaped the house for centuries, and it began as a shelter for pilgrims.

The monastery was supported by the powerful families of the area, by the Counts of Lemos, by a canon from Ourense named Nuño Álvarez de Guitián and later by the Augustinian bishop Francisco Armañá y Font. You can see this in the building. Of the first monastery of the thirteenth century only fragments remain, above all the Romanesque portal to the cloister. The church has a single nave with a wooden ceiling in the Italian style of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The main chapel from the sixteenth century is richly decorated, with forms of Gothic, Renaissance and Portuguese Manueline. There is also a chapel of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, as well as tombs and coats of arms of noble families.

The cloister north of the church has two storeys. The lower one dates from the sixteenth century and combines Romanesque with Gothic forms. The upper one was built later and has been heavily altered by modern work. Facade, bell tower and portal are Baroque and date from the eighteenth century.

Then came the break. With the confiscation of the monasteries in the nineteenth century, religious life here ended, the property was auctioned off, and for a time the building housed a prison and a barracks. In 1896 the Mercedarians moved in, an order founded in the Middle Ages to ransom captives. They still run the house today, together with a school. A Galician directory describes their main task today in surprisingly sober terms: stamping the pilgrims' credenciales. So the circle closes. Eight hundred years after the Italian brothers, pilgrims still come to this door.

The lords of Lemos

After the king's death Sarria did not stay in royal hands for long. In 1360 King Peter the First, known as the Cruel, granted Sarria and other places to Fernando de Castro, and in 1366 the town was joined to the County of Lemos. The Counts of Lemos, with their seat in Monforte, were among the most powerful noble families in Galicia. Their county included five small towns, among them Sarria and Triacastela, which you walked through not long ago. In Sarria they appointed an official of their own.

In the sixteenth century the Counts of Lemos also received the title of Marqués de Sarria. The sources disagree on the exact year: one gives 1505, the other 1543. The title still exists today and, through many inheritances, has passed to the family of the Dukes of Alba.

The Castro family was rich and loved the arts. The most famous of them, Pedro Fernández de Castro, seventh Count of Lemos and fourth Marqués de Sarria, was Viceroy of Naples. Miguel de Cervantes dedicated the second part of his Don Quixote to him. So if you have it in your head that the most famous knight in world literature is dedicated to a lord of Sarria, you are right.

Peasants against castles

Whoever rules a town needs a castle. The fortress of Sarria stood on the highest point of the old town, on the site of an old castro that had already been chosen in prehistoric times for its position. Its history goes back to the twelfth century. It is said to have had at least four towers.

In the fifteenth century the people of Galicia rose up. Peasants, craftsmen and townspeople joined together in brotherhoods, the Irmandades, and marched against the castles of the nobility. The great revolt of the Irmandiños broke out in 1467, and fortresses fell all over Galicia. The castle of Sarria was destroyed as well. But the lords came back, crushed the revolt and rebuilt their castles. In Sarria, too, the fortress rose again, but never as strong as before.

What followed was slow decay. By the middle of the eighteenth century nobody lived in the castle any more. Until 1860 it was still largely standing; then private owners and the town bought the site and took the stones for other buildings. The moats were filled in. What remains is a single round tower of granite, 14 or just under 15 metres high depending on the source, with a few battlements and the coats of arms of the Castro and Lemos families. Locally it is called the Torre do Batallón; the site belongs to the Pérez-Batallón family. It is a protected monument. According to a Galician source the site is up for sale, and an investor is being sought to bring the place back to life.

A tower the peasants left standing and the town later used as a quarry: when you walk past it, you are walking past a monument to the question of who owns the land.

Eight maravedís for the journey home

There are places where people think of pilgrims on their way there. In Sarria they also thought of those on their way back. In 1589 Dionís de Castro y Portugal, a cleric and illegitimate son of the Marqués de Sarria, founded the Hospital de San Antón. It was built by the master builder Juan de Seara. It was meant for pilgrims coming back from Santiago.

The rule has come down to us from the eighteenth century. Anyone who passed through Sarria on the way home and could show their Compostela received a bed and eight maravedís for the road. Anyone who was ill received twenty-four. So the certificate from Santiago was not just a keepsake; it was a pass that earned you something along the way. An albergue in Sarria is called Dos Oito Marabedís today, after those eight coins.

The hospital did other good as well. In 1794 a school was founded with its money, where children learned to read and write. In 1845 it closed. After that the building served as town hall, as school and as prison; today it houses the court.

There was another house for the sick, of which only a chapel remains today. The Capilla de San Lázaro is the last remnant of a hospital for lepers that existed until 1700.

Silence, war and the railway

When the pilgrims went, Sarria suffered too. When fewer and fewer people walked to Santiago in the eighteenth century, the town shrank to about seventy houses and a few shops. All the parishes together had no more than 350 inhabitants. This was the place where a king had once died.

The nineteenth century brought unrest. When Napoleon's troops came into the country, churches were plundered and grain and money were requisitioned. The confiscation of the monasteries emptied A Madalena. During the Carlist Wars, irregular fighters roamed the area. At the same time Sarria became a modern municipality: in 1820 it got its own local government and became the seat of a judicial district.

The real turning point came on rails. Around 1850 the road from Lugo to Valdeorras opened, and in 1880 the railway. It brought trade, and new neighbourhoods grew up; one of them is still simply called A Estación, the station. Today many of those who begin their Camino here arrive on this line.

The priest from Sarria

In 1929 Elías Valiña was born in Sarria. He became a priest, wrote his doctoral thesis on the history of the Way of Saint James and became parish priest of O Cebreiro, the mountain village on the border of Galicia. From 1984 he began marking the old routes to Santiago with yellow arrows.

The pilgrimage historian Anton Pombo wrote a remarkable sentence about him. Valiña, he says, did not begin in Sarria, his own birthplace, nor at the Galician border, even though he was parish priest there. He thought of the Way as a whole, from France to Compostela, and joined it together piece by piece. There is a quiet irony in the fact that today more people set out from his home town than from anywhere else, and that most of them walk only the last stretch of his Way.

A hundred kilometres

If you want to receive the Compostela in Santiago, you must have walked or ridden at least the last hundred kilometres, or cycled two hundred. This rule is younger than many people think. According to Anton Pombo, for a long time there was no fixed minimum distance at all. Only around the Holy Year of 1993, when Galicia began promoting the Way with the Xacobeo programme, was the limit set at a hundred kilometres.

That settled things for Sarria. Around 115 kilometres lie between the town and the cathedral, just a little more than you need. Sarria has a railway station with trains from Madrid, Barcelona and the Basque Country, buses via Lugo and plenty of accommodation. And from here the Way can be walked in five daily stages, ideal for anyone short of time.

The numbers tell the rest. In 2015 more than a quarter of all pilgrims who received a Compostela had already started in Sarria, more than twice as many as in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. In 2024, according to the Pilgrim's Office, it was more than 150,000, about sixty-four per cent of all pilgrims on the Camino Francés. In 2025 it was 161,901, almost one in three of all pilgrims who arrived in Santiago, whatever route they took.

Is that still a Camino?

No question is argued over among pilgrims as eagerly as this one. Some who have been walking since Saint-Jean look down on the people with fresh backpacks. And there is serious criticism, not just snobbery.

In March 2016 Anton Pombo signed a paper for the International Fraternity of the Camino de Santiago, which he dated, of all places, in Sarria. In it he proposed raising the minimum distance for the Compostela to three hundred kilometres, derived from the oldest recorded pilgrims' route, the Camino Primitivo. His reasoning: the hundred-kilometre limit had created a distorted image. For many, the pilgrimage had become just a four- or five-day stroll through Galicia, tour operators were offering the credencial and the Compostela as marketing tools, and the places on the final stages, especially from Tui and Sarria onwards, were overwhelmed in high season. The paper was presented to the cathedral chapter in Santiago. It was not adopted, as Rebekah Scott, who translated it into English, expressly pointed out.

The opposing view deserves to be taken just as seriously. Not everyone has six weeks, not everyone has the health or the money. For many the Way from Sarria is the only one they can walk, and it can be the beginning of a much longer one. And Alfonso the Ninth, this town's most famous pilgrim, did not even manage the last hundred kilometres.

We at Camino Ninja don't want to settle this question. We just note: whoever begins in Sarria walks the same Way as everyone else, over the same bridges, into the same cathedral. Perhaps the length of your Camino is not measured only in kilometres.

A detour via Samos

If you came from Triacastela, you had a choice between two routes. The shorter leads via San Xil, the longer to the monastery of Samos, according to Camino Ninja a good 15 kilometres before Sarria. Whoever took it passed a monastery whose beginnings lie in the sixth century and which once helped to resettle the area around Sarria.

Samos was founded in the sixth century; the foundation is attributed to Saint Martin of Dumio. The oldest written trace is an inscription from 665 naming Bishop Ermefredo of Lugo as the man who restored the monastery. After the Muslim conquest it lay abandoned until King Fruela the First of Asturias resettled it around 760. His widow and his son found refuge here, and that son later became King Alfonso the Second, the Chaste, who is regarded as the first pilgrim to the apostle's tomb in Santiago. From 960 the monks lived by the Rule of Saint Benedict, and Benedictines still live here today.

Samos has burned often. In 1558 so badly that the monastery had to be completely rebuilt, most recently in 1951. In 1836 the monks were driven out; in 1880 they returned. What you see today is mainly the work of the modern era. The Baroque abbey church was built between 1734 and 1748; its curving double staircase is modelled on that of the Obradoiro in Santiago. The great cloister from the years 1685 to 1689 measures 54 metres on each side and is considered the largest in Spain. At its centre, since 1947, stands a statue of Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, the great thinker of the Spanish Enlightenment, who took his vows as a Benedictine in Samos in 1690. In the smaller, Gothic cloister there is a fountain with Nereids, and on one keystone is the inscription: Qué miras, bobo, what are you staring at, fool.

In the monastery garden stands a small chapel from the ninth century, with a centuries-old cypress beside it. Tradition says the tree grows where Saint Martin of Tours planted his staff. Samos still takes in pilgrims today. Since 2015 it has been among the buildings listed as UNESCO World Heritage together with the Camino Francés.

What Sarria gives you

Sarria is a place of beginnings, but its history is full of endings. A king died here on pilgrimage, a hundred kilometres from his goal. A castle was torn down, rebuilt and turned into a quarry. A monastery lost its monks and became a prison before religious moved in again. A hospital gave homeward-bound pilgrims money for the road home, and then it closed. And yet the Way never quite disappeared.

Perhaps that is what this town gives you, whether you are starting here or have been walking for weeks. The Camino belongs to no one, not to the first, not to those who walk farthest, not to the most devout. The Italian brothers who built a hospital here were pilgrims themselves. The priest who painted the yellow arrows was a child of this town. And the people who will cross the Ponte da Áspera with you tomorrow morning may know nothing of all this. They are walking the same Way all the same. You can wish them a Buen Camino. It costs nothing.