October 2023
Years ago I attended a funeral in La Faba – a village I knew, of course, as one of the stops on the gruelling ascent to O Cebreiro. It was a late autumn day, but most of those paying their respects stood outside the church of San Andrés, quaking with cold. Before long, someone told me why, pointing out a crack six inches wide running from top of the church’s bell-tower to its base above the porch: damage caused by a recent earthquake. The building was on the point of collapse, and while the officiating priest was clearly trusting Providence, the mourners, on the whole, were not.
Not long after, the Stuttgart-based cultural association ‘Ultreia’, inspired and largely financed by the retired businessman Manfred Hartmann, offered the diocesis of Astorga half the cost of restoring San Andrés, and the conversion of the house once occupied by its last parish priest into a pilgrim albergue. (The German and Spanish sides of this project were brought together by Fr. Angel Fernández de Aránguiz, whose astonishing contribution to the Camino was the subject of this blog back in June.) The restored buildings opened in 2004, and have brought new life to La Faba. Like the Confraternity of Saint James’s Refugio Gaucelmo in Rabanal del Camino, Ultreia’s albergue is staffed by volunteer hospitaleros and operates on pilgrims’ donations. Set in beautifully tended gardens and equipped with a well-stocked kitchen, it’s an exceptionally pleasant stop for pilgrims.
This can be a remarkably resonant stretch of the Camino for those who do some reading beforehand. Well-read pilgrims who stop in La Faba will be aware of its ancient bridge, mentioned, like the village itself, in many of the accounts written by medieval pilgrims, especially German ones such as Hermann Künig von Vach. Similarly mentioned, just below La Faba in Herrerias, lie the vestiges of ‘Hospital Ingles’ and its cemetery for English pilgrims. Just past the monument marking the boundary between the autonomous regions of Castilla-Leon and Galicia (and the provinces of Leon and Lugo), there is a sloping field on the right known as ‘Campo dos Santos’. Residents of La Laguna de Castilla tell me this field was once the site of a hermitage that supplied pilgrims with water on their way up the steep incline, though today it is visited only by mushroom-hunters. The annual plethora of the prized funghi in that particular spot, and no other for miles, is as much a mystery as the long-vanished hermitage, but the folk memory of the latter is just as real.