October 2024
This year has seen the 27th exhibition in the series organised annually by the Spanish foundation ‘Las Edades del Hombre’ - ‘The Ages of Mankind’ (or ‘of Humanity’, to translate its name for a modern sensibility). These exhibitions bring together paintings, sculpture and artefacts drawn from all over the autonomous region of Castille and Leon, and display them, usually in one of the region’s cathedrals, to illustrate a given theme. On occasion they have been held in two or three churches in the same locality, or have travelled abroad - notably to New York City in 1998, and to Brussels in 2004. This year, reinforcing the link between its theme of ‘Hospitality’ and the pilgrim roads to Santiago de Compostela, the exhibition has been held in two centres: Villafranca del Bierzo, and Santiago itself, where it occupies both the crypt of the cathedral’s Portico de la Gloria and the monastery of San Martin Pinario.
It is surely cause for congratulation that the Foundation has chosen to focus on Hospitality, as understood and extended to pilgrims for millennia in much of Europe, precisely at a time when the practice of such hospitality on the Caminos is increasingly under pressure from political and commercial interests. In self-defence, two dozen of the so-called ‘Albergues de Acogida Tradicional’, or ‘donation-based pilgrim hostels’ formed an assocation a few years ago, and last February appealed to UNESCO to have the traditional hospitality of the pilgrim roads recognised as part of Humanity’s non-material heritage, or ‘Patrimonio Cultural’. Protection of this kind would challenge the discrimination in favour of private facilites to which the AATs are often subject.
A group of American pilgrims, 1988
The best defence, of course, is a well-informed public. An exhibition such as the current one on Hospitality seeks not only to appeal to the aesthetic response of its thousands of visitors, but also to offer them, in multiple depictions, the ways in which the stranger, the pilgrim, the person in need, has been and should be received and cared-for as a brother or a sister - indeed, as Christ Himself. This goes gloriously counter to today’s commercially-driven and transactional ethos, but it is, and always has been, the motive behind what is freely offered to pilgrims on the roads to Santiago. The transformative power of this experience in creating a better world should not be under-estimated. I for one am deeply grateful for having seen this splendid exhibition, and to the Fundacion Las Edades del Hombre for having created it.
The former monastery and Hospederia of O Cebreiro cared for pilgrims from 1076 until 2012.
