🇪🇸 Spain · The North and the Atlantic Coast
Santiago de Compostela is where every road ends. For more than a thousand years, pilgrims from half of Europe have crossed mountains and plains to get here, to the tomb tradition attributes to the apostle James the Great. That pilgrimage, the Camino de Santiago, made this Galician city one of the three great holy cities of Christendom and left behind an old town of golden stone, arcades and squares that is today a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The heart of it all is the cathedral, a Romanesque mass clad in a dazzling Baroque façade presiding over the Plaza del Obradoiro. Inside waits the Pórtico de la Gloria, Master Mateo's masterpiece, and on the great feast days the botafumeiro, the enormous censer that flies from one side of the transept to the other through clouds of incense. Around it, the old town is a living maze of lanes, bars, convents and the energy of a university city that never stops moving.
This guide covers Santiago with a practical and warm eye: how to visit the cathedral and book the Pórtico de la Gloria, when the botafumeiro actually flies, how the Camino works and what you need to earn the Compostela, where to eat good pulpo á feira or a seafood platter, and how to get around a city built for walking in the rain. Santiago is stone, incense, seafood and emotion: an end of a journey that feels like an arrival.
Santiago's history begins at the start of the ninth century when, according to tradition, the hermit Pelayo saw lights in the wood of Libredón and Bishop Theodomir of Iria Flavia identified there a tomb attributed to the apostle James the Great. King Alfonso II of Asturias ordered a first church built over the tomb around the year 820 and became the first pilgrim. The discovery set the Camino de Santiago in motion, which in the Middle Ages drew pilgrims from all over Europe and filled the north of the peninsula with hospitals, bridges and churches. In 997 Almanzor razed the city but spared the tomb; in 1075 work began on the great Romanesque cathedral, crowned a century later by Master Mateo's Pórtico de la Gloria (around 1188). Archbishop Diego Gelmírez drove the city forward and raised it to a metropolitan see in 1120, and from that period comes the famous Codex Calixtinus, the first pilgrim's 'guidebook'. In the Baroque era, Fernando de Casas Novoa raised the spectacular Obradoiro façade (1738-1750). After centuries of decline, the Camino revived strongly in the twentieth century, above all from the Holy Year of 1993, until it became the global phenomenon it is today. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Green Spain: the Basques and Euskera, the oldest language in Europe; the Camino de Santiago and the Galicia of the Compostela cathedral; the iron and steel industry; and the sober memory of the ETA conflict.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
It all began, according to tradition, with mysterious lights in a wood. At the start of the ninth century, a hermit called Pelayo (Pelagius) saw strange lights over a wooded spot known as Libredón, in the northwest of Gallaecia. Bishop Theodomir of Iria Flavia was informed, went to the place and found a stone tomb which, by the reading of the time, was attributed to the apostle James the Great, one of Jesus's twelve disciples, beheaded in Jerusalem around the year 44 on the orders of Herod Agrippa. A very old legend held that his remains had been carried by his disciples by sea to Galicia. The identification took place, according to the traditional chronology, around the years 820-830.
The discovery was not only a religious event: it was also a matter of state. King Alfonso II of Asturias, whose Christian kingdom was holding out in the north against Muslim rule over much of the peninsula, immediately grasped its value. He came from Oviedo — becoming the first pilgrim in history — and ordered a first church of stone and clay to be raised over the tomb. Having an apostle's tomb gave the small Asturian kingdom a spiritual symbol of the first order, capable of rivalling the great sees of Christendom and of binding the Christian kingdoms together against al-Ándalus.
Around that first chapel a settlement began to grow. The place name 'Compostela' has traditionally been explained as deriving from the Latin 'campus stellae' (field of the star), alluding to the lights of the discovery, although modern scholars more probably link it to 'compostum' (cemetery, burial place), since there was a late Roman necropolis in the area. Either way, the 'Locus Sancti Iacobi' — the place of Saint James — had been born, and with it one of the greatest currents of pilgrimage in the history of the West.
Over the following centuries, the fame of the tomb spread across the whole of Christian Europe and the flow of pilgrims never stopped growing. A local cult became an international pilgrimage: from France, Germany, Italy and the British Isles, thousands of people took to the roads to reach the Apostle's tomb, on an equal footing with Rome and Jerusalem. Along the routes flourished hospitals, bridges, monasteries, churches and entire towns. The Camino de Santiago became a great artery carrying not only the faithful but also ideas, art, trade and artistic fashions that shaped European Romanesque.
The city also knew violence, however. In the year 997, the Muslim warlord Almanzor (al-Mansur) sacked and destroyed Santiago in one of his campaigns, and carried the bells and the doors of the church off to Córdoba, borne — according to the chronicle — on the shoulders of Christian captives. He did spare the Apostle's tomb. The city rebuilt itself and through the eleventh century it was walled and reinforced.
The great driving force behind medieval Compostela was Archbishop Diego Gelmírez, a political and ecclesiastical figure of enormous ambition who governed the see in the first decades of the twelfth century. Under him, in 1120, Pope Calixtus II raised Santiago to a metropolitan see (an archbishopric), consolidating its prestige. From his time comes the famous Codex Calixtinus (Liber Sancti Iacobi), a mid-twelfth-century Latin manuscript gathering sermons, miracles, liturgical music and, above all, a description of the pilgrimage routes considered the first 'guidebook' to the Camino, with advice, stages and warnings for the traveller. The codex owes its name to its authors' wish to attribute it to Pope Calixtus II. It is a fundamental source for understanding the pilgrimage phenomenon.
Santiago's eternal symbol is its cathedral, and building it was an enterprise spanning centuries. The great Romanesque cathedral we know today began to rise in 1075, under Bishop Diego Peláez and in the reign of Alfonso VI, over the earlier churches. It was conceived as one of the largest pilgrimage churches in Europe, of the same type as Saint-Sernin in Toulouse or Sainte-Foy at Conques: a Latin cross plan with wide naves and an ambulatory that let crowds of pilgrims circle the high altar and venerate the tomb without interrupting worship. The works went on for decades and the cathedral was consecrated in the twelfth century.
Its crowning work is the Pórtico de la Gloria, carved by the man known as Master Mateo. An inscription preserved in the cathedral itself dates the setting of the lintels to 1188, though the ensemble was completed in the years that followed. The Pórtico is one of the peaks of European Romanesque art: more than two hundred stone figures — prophets, apostles, musician angels, the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse tuning their instruments — surround a Christ in majesty of a revolutionary expressiveness and naturalism for its time. On the mullion, an image of Saint James himself received the pilgrims, who for centuries rested a hand on the column until a hand-shaped hollow was worn into the marble.
Over time the cathedral took on Gothic, Renaissance and, above all, Baroque additions that transformed its exterior without altering its Romanesque core. The result is a building in which almost a thousand years of art history can be read, layer on layer, and which is still the spiritual heart of the city and the final destination of every road.
The most universal image of Santiago — the one on the postcards, on the coins and in every pilgrim's memory — is not Romanesque but Baroque. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the city underwent a spectacular architectural renewal that turned it into one of the great Baroque ensembles in Europe. Architects such as Domingo de Andrade (who built the Clock Tower, the Berenguela) and Simón Rodríguez filled the old town with façades, towers, altarpieces and staircases of dazzling exuberance, all in the local granite that gives the city its characteristic grey and golden tone.
The culmination of that splendour is the Obradoiro façade, a masterpiece by Fernando de Casas Novoa, built between 1738 and 1750. Conceived as a gigantic stone curtain protecting and setting off the old Romanesque Pórtico de la Gloria, the façade raises two very tall twin towers and a central doorway of dynamic, vertical lines, crowned by the figure of Saint James the pilgrim. It is a theatrical, luminous work full of movement, presiding over the Plaza del Obradoiro with a majesty that is hard to match.
Around the cathedral, in those same centuries, was completed the great urban stage the visitor admires today: the Pazo de Raxoi, the Hostal dos Reis Católicos (the former Royal Hospital founded by the Catholic Monarchs at the start of the sixteenth century to shelter pilgrims, today a Parador) and the four linked squares surrounding the church. The city of stone that is today a UNESCO World Heritage site largely crystallised in those centuries of Baroque fervour.
The Camino de Santiago was not always the mass phenomenon it is today. After its medieval peak, the pilgrimage entered a long decline. The Protestant Reformation, the wars of religion in Europe, epidemics, unsafe roads and, later, the secularisation of society steadily reduced the number of pilgrims. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the relics were even lost: the remains attributed to the Apostle had been hidden in the sixteenth century for fear of attacks (such as that by the English privateer Francis Drake), and their location was forgotten, until they were 'rediscovered' in excavations in 1879 and their authenticity recognised by Pope Leo XIII in 1884. Even so, for much of the twentieth century the Camino was an almost forgotten rumour, walked by only a few.
The great revival came in the last decades of the twentieth century. Renewed cultural and historical interest in the Camino, institutional backing from Galicia and from Europe — the Council of Europe declared it the first European Cultural Route in 1987 and UNESCO inscribed it as World Heritage — and, very especially, the enormous campaign of the Holy Xacobeo Year of 1993, transformed the situation completely. From a few thousand pilgrims it went, in a few years, to hundreds of thousands a year who now reach the city on foot or by bicycle from every corner of the world, for religious, sporting, cultural or simply personal reasons.
The city returned to the headlines, not always for good reasons. In July 2011 the Codex Calixtinus disappeared from the cathedral in a theft that shocked Spain; the manuscript, of incalculable value, turned up a year later in the garage of a former cathedral electrician who had confessed to the theft. The almost novelistic episode reminded the world of the documentary treasure Santiago holds.
The Santiago de Compostela of the twenty-first century is a city in balance between its thousand-year past and its dynamic present. Capital of Galicia and seat of the Xunta and the Galician Parliament, it is also a lively university city: the University of Santiago, founded in 1495, fills the lanes with students and gives the city a young pulse that contrasts with the solemnity of its stone. Its historic centre, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1985, is one of the best preserved in Europe, a pedestrian maze of arcades, squares and churches walked in the Atlantic rain.
The city's engine is still the Camino. Every year, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims complete one of the routes and arrive, moved, at the Plaza del Obradoiro, where they embrace, weep and celebrate the end of the journey. That constant flow keeps alive an economy and a culture of welcome whose roots reach back to the Middle Ages. The Holy Xacobeo Years — when 25 July, the feast of the Apostle, falls on a Sunday — multiply the crowds and become major events.
Food is another of its great attractions: pulpo á feira, seafood platters, empanada, Padrón peppers and tarta de Santiago draw travellers who also make a pilgrimage for the pleasure of the Galician table. And alongside the old town sit contemporary propositions, such as Peter Eisenman's monumental (and controversial) Cidade da Cultura. Destination of every road, a holy, university and culinary city, Santiago goes on doing what it has done best for more than a thousand years: welcoming whoever arrives.