Photo by Fresco Tours at flickr.com

More than 100,000 people walk the routes of the ‘Camino’, the pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela where St James is believed to be buried, each year. Writing in Thinking Faith for the feast of St James today, John Bateson-Hill describes his recent journey along this well-travelled path.

I stood for a moment looking out across the Atlantic Ocean wondering how it had all happened. In my mind’s eye I could see the little boat carrying the body of the Apostle being blown towards the shore. Once it had landed, his faithful disciples would then have had to transport the body to its final resting place, a place we now know as Santiago de Compostela. I was standing at the lighthouse on the very tip of Cap Finisterre having walked over a month through wind, rain and sun from the Pyrenees across northern Spain to reach the tomb of Saint James, or Santiago as he is called here, and then followed the extra miles to reach this point where James’s own Spanish journey had begun.

Fact and fiction are hard to disentangle but early accounts suggest that after his martyrdom in Jerusalem, Saint James was brought by boat to the very north west of Spain to a region we now call Galicia. When the Apostles were sent out to preach after Christ’s Ascension, it was to this far-flung part of the Roman Empire that St James is supposed to have come. To read more of John Bateson-Hill's account on Thinking Faith see: http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/20080723_1.htm