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Santiago de Compostela
The Galician cathedral city at the end of the Camino, where pilgrims honor Saint James
Every day, in a granite square in northwestern Spain, people with backpacks, sunburns, and blistered feet arrive at the end of a walk that may have begun weeks earlier in France, Portugal, or their own front door. They have come to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, which Catholic tradition holds contains the tomb of Saint James the Greater, one of Jesus' twelve apostles. Since the Middle Ages the Camino de Santiago, the Way of Saint James, has been one of Christianity's three great pilgrimages, with Rome and Jerusalem. Its modern revival has been extraordinary: more than half a million people now complete it each year, some for faith, some for reflection, some simply for the walk.
Santiago is the capital of Galicia, a green, rainy region of hills and granite near Spain's Atlantic coast. Its compact old town of arcaded stone streets, monasteries, and squares, much of it built from the same grey granite, surrounds the cathedral. The cathedral is Romanesque at heart, its pilgrimage plan of long aisles and an ambulatory designed for crowds, but its west front is the soaring eighteenth-century baroque Obradoiro facade. Behind it stands the Portico of Glory, a twelfth-century carved doorway by Master Mateo, and beneath the high altar a crypt holds the silver casket venerated as the apostle's relics. At major services the Botafumeiro, a giant censer, swings in a wide arc across the transept.
Tradition holds that a hermit found the apostle's tomb in the early ninth century, and King Alfonso II of Asturias built a first church over it. The present cathedral was begun in 1075 and consecrated in 1211, as the Camino drew pilgrims from across Europe. Interest faded after the Reformation and revived from the 1980s, helped by Holy Years, which fall when July 25, Saint James's feast, is a Sunday. The next is 2027. The Pilgrim's Office recorded 530,987 pilgrims in 2025, a new record, and awards the Compostela certificate to those who walk at least the last 100 kilometers. UNESCO inscribed the old town in 1985 and the routes in 1993. Crowding on the final stages and housing pressure in the city are growing concerns.