The Camino Portugues

The Portuguese Way is now the busiest approach to Compostela after the French road, and its recent popularity has obscured how old and how royal its use actually is.

From Lisbon, or in practice from Porto

The full route runs north from Lisbon through Coimbra and Porto and crosses the Minho into Galicia at Tui, but the great majority of walkers begin at Porto, which leaves roughly a fortnight to Santiago. Two branches carry much of the modern traffic: the coastal variant along the Atlantic, quieter and more scenic, and the Spiritual Variant near the end, which detours to Padron, where the body of James is said to have come ashore, and can be completed partly by boat up the estuary.

An old devotion revived

Portuguese royal and popular use of the road is well attested long before the modern revival. Isabel of Aragon, queen of Portugal and later canonised, walked to Santiago in the 1320s and 1330s and is said to have left her crown at the tomb. The road then faded with the general decline of pilgrimage and revived steeply only after 2010, so that a route with a genuinely medieval pedigree now carries a largely contemporary and international body of walkers.

Near Pontevedra a branch leaves the main Portuguese road, runs through the monastery of Armenteira and down the valley of the mills to the estuary at Vilanova de Arousa, and then goes to Santiago partly by boat. It is called the Variante Espiritual, and it is the only stretch of any route to Santiago normally travelled on water.

The reason is the translatio. In the legend, the body of the apostle was brought from Judaea by sea, entered the Ria de Arousa and was carried up the river Ulla to Padron, where the stone mooring post, the pedron, is kept under the altar of the parish church and gives the town its name. The boat leg follows that supposed course, and it passes a line of stone crosses set in the water along the estuary, the Via Crucis maritima, said to be the only maritime stations of the cross anywhere.

The variant is a modern reconstruction in its present form, promoted from around 2010 by local associations and municipalities, and it is honest to say so: the route existed as separate elements, the monastery, the mill path, the boat, and was assembled into a named alternative recently. That is the same thing the Camino as a whole underwent in the late twentieth century, on a smaller scale.

The rest of the Portuguese road divides at Porto between the central route inland through Barcelos and Ponte de Lima and the Caminho da Costa along the Atlantic. Both cross the Minho into Spain at Tui or, on the coastal line, by the ferry at Caminha, which is a second small water crossing and the reason some walkers claim the coastal route also breaks the rule that a Camino is walked.