April 2024
It’s late April, and four days after it was almost too hot to sit outside, I’m watching the snow fall on the hydrangeas outside my kitchen window. From Rabanal del Camino comes news of a wildfire nearby, prompting plans to evacuate the village which thankfully did not have to be enacted. What next, in the way of disconcerting weather phenomena, I wonder? I have a small counterweight to such anxious thoughts right here on the table in front of me: the 13 issues of the tiny Boletin del Camino de Santiago, a total of 217 typed and photocopied pages that tell how the pilgrimage to Compostela was brought back to life in the two years between the summer of 1985 and that of 1987.. It’s an extraordinarily detailed little publication: what was the Boletin, and who created it?
In May 1985, a meeting known as the I Encuentro Jacobeo took place in Santiago de Compostela, convened by the then Archbishop (later Cardinal Archbishop of Madrid) Antonio Maria Rouco Varela. It was intended as a forum for discussion about how to revive and promote the pilgrimage to Santiago along its ancient ‘Camino’. Thirty-eight people attended, most of them already involved in some way with the pilgrimage as parish priests, medievalists, art historians, town hall officials or local enthusiasts.
Chief among them was the scholar-priest Elias Valina Sampedro from O Cebreiro, author of one Camino guide-book and co-ordinator of another. He was unanimously elected ‘Commissioner-Co-ordinator’ of the project, and the Boletin was the means he devised to set it in motion. From July 1985, it appeared bi-monthly, and was a compendium of editorial comment, notices and newspaper cuttings on Camino-related topics. There were no grants back then, so Elias funded the Boletin himself, and typed it up at night when his parish work was done. Later, he introduced a modest annual subscription to cover postage. Members of his family helped by photocopying the material sent to him by a host of avid news-gatherers, then folding and stapling the pages into booklets, never imagining that they were creating Camino history.
Elias wrote passionately of the responsibility to defend the Camino as well as promote it, of the need for refugios (what we now call albergues), route-clearing, way-marking and fountains. He took politicians, highway authorities, church dignitaries and town hall officials to task when facilities were slow to materialise, or when the route was treated with disrespect. By listing new subscribers, the Boletin helped to form the associations of ‘Amigos’ that made the route viable. This, and the fact that it soon gained subscribers in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and the United Kingdom as well as in Spain, gave it a vital role in re-establishing the international character of the pilgrimage. All this emerged at the now legendary Jaca conference in September 1987, when the Boletin was subsumed into the far more ambitious Peregrino magazine, still a major source of Camino information today.
The 21st century’s Camino phenomenon is an oak with many roots and many branches, but the ‘acorn’ from which it grew was a small but mighty artisanal newsletter called Boletin del Camino de Santiago….