Half a Million Walked to Santiago Last Year. In 1984, a Village Priest Restarted the Route With a Can of Yellow Paint. — Woody Magazine, Jul. 25, 2026
Woody Magazine
We write about the things that aren't news.
Jul. 25, 2026 (Sat.)
Half a Million Walked to Santiago Last Year. In 1984, a Village Priest Restarted the Route With a Can of Yellow Paint.
The pilgrims walking into the cathedral square in Santiago today followed yellow arrows painted on walls and boulders. The man who painted the first of them was a parish priest in the Spanish mountains, and the year he bought the paint was 1984.
Backpackers walk into the Praza do Obradoiro all day today. It is 25 July, the Feast of St James: the cathedral's busiest day, and Galicia's national holiday.
How they arrived is unremarkable. They followed yellow arrows painted on walls, boulders and the trunks of trees. An arrow appears at every fork in the path. Nobody needs a map.
Almost nobody asks when the arrows appeared. The answer is 1984. If the pilgrimage is roughly eleven centuries old, its waymarking is forty-two.
A record day in August 1986
Writing about the Camino de Santiago tends to open the same way: a road walked without interruption for a thousand years. The first half of that holds up. A tomb attributed to the apostle James was identified in Galicia in the ninth century, and between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries the route stood alongside Jerusalem and Rome as a destination.
The second half does not. Pilgrim traffic thinned through the Reformation and Europe's wars, and by the middle of the twentieth century it had all but stopped. One scene shows how completely.
José Antonio Ortiz, who founded the pilgrim magazine Peregrino, walked the route in 1986, and told the story in an interview marking thirty years of the first European Cultural Itinerary. He reached Santiago on 14 August and went to collect his certificate, and the clerk told him the office had just set a record for the day. Twenty people had finished.
August is now the busiest month of the year. Here is what last year produced.
A paint can and a Citroën
The gap between those two numbers begins with one man. Elías Valiña Sampedro was born in 1929 in Mundín, a hamlet in the province of Lugo. He was ordained in 1957 and posted to the parish of Santa María la Real in O Cebreiro, a fog-bound village at 1,300 metres where the road climbs into Galicia. He stayed thirty-two years, until he died.
Valiña was a village priest and also the road's leading scholar. He read canon law at the Pontifical University of Comillas and took his doctorate at Salamanca. His dissertation, written in the 1960s and titled The Road to Santiago: A Historical and Legal Study, was published as a book in 1971 by Spain's national research council.
The research turned up something odd. The route survived intact in the documents. Twelfth-century sources named the villages, the bridges and the passes in order. Out in the landscape, though, you could not tell where it ran. Some stretches had become impassable.
It was a library that had kept every book and lost its catalogue. Nothing was missing. Nothing could be found.
So the fix Valiña chose was neither a map nor a guidebook. It was to mark the ground. In 1984 he bought a cheap batch of leftover yellow road paint and loaded it into a Citroën 2CV. He drove to Roncesvalles at the foot of the Pyrenees and worked west toward Santiago, painting an arrow at every junction. Altar servers went with him. So did members of the Camino associations then forming province by province.
Three reasons are given for the colour. Yellow carries at a distance. In France, where most pilgrims came from, hiking trails were not waymarked in yellow, so nothing would be confused with anything else. The first batch he bought also happened to be road-marking paint.
One story about him circulates widely, and Spanish sources that repeat it note that it has never been verified. Valiña was painting arrows on a pass near the French border when officers of the Guardia Civil, Spain's paramilitary police, stopped to ask what he was doing. This was border country during the armed campaign of the Basque separatist group ETA. The priest is said to have answered that he was preparing a large-scale invasion from France.
Then the institutions arrived
Paint does not last. Arrows on their own would have faded within a few seasons. Three years after the marking, something heavier settled on top of it.
On 23 October 1987, in Santiago, the Council of Europe declared the pilgrim routes to Santiago the first European Cultural Itinerary. European integration wanted a cultural emblem, and a road that crossed several countries answered the description. Once the designation existed, regional governments began attaching money to it.
Two things then coincided in 1993. UNESCO inscribed the French route as a World Heritage site, and the year fell as a Holy Year. The Galician government ran a tourism campaign called Xacobeo '93, mascot and all. Pilgrim numbers that year approached 100,000.
The rest is a staircase. Around 272,000 in the Holy Year of 2010. Then 347,578 in 2019, a collapse to 54,144 in 2020, a recovery to 438,208 in 2022, and 530,919 last year.
Read that far and the conclusion looks settled. What revived the road was marking and money, not a return of belief. Which raises the obvious objection: is the thing half a million people walked last year an invented tradition?
The twelfth century did exactly the same thing
It is not, and the evidence is the most interesting part of the story.
A manuscript called the Codex Calixtinus, compiled in the middle of the twelfth century, is held at Santiago cathedral. It is inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register, and the fifth of its five books is a guide for pilgrims. It is often described as the first travel guide.
What Book V chose to record settles its character. Where to sleep. Which relics are genuine. Which local rackets to watch for. It grades the drinking water river by river. Of one river in Navarre it warns that men and horses die from drinking there, and reports that two men from the district were sitting on the bank sharpening knives. Asked whether the water was safe, they said it was; two horses dropped dead within moments; the men skinned them.
Then comes the passage that matters. Book V lists, by name, the men who repaired the road between Rabanal and Portomarín from 1120 onward. Andréas, Rotgerius, Alvitus, Fortus, Arnaldus, Stephanus. And Petrus, who rebuilt the bridge over the Miño after Queen Urraca destroyed it.
A twelfth-century guidebook preserved the names of a road crew. The medieval pilgrimage did not run itself either. Crowns and monasteries laid the bridges, the hospitals and the hostels; somebody relaid the broken sections; a guidebook carried the information down the line. And the route walked today is the itinerary Book V describes.
That changes what Valiña did. He did not manufacture a tradition. He added his name to eight centuries of repair and marking, working with a paint can where his predecessors had worked with masonry.
There is a frame here worth keeping. Traditions that look unbroken have usually broken at least once, and somebody marked them out again. The festival with four centuries behind it, the shopfront claiming to be the original, the national holiday — continuity is not discovered but signposted. Ask who repainted the marks, and when, and an answer generally turns up.
What the marks have produced
The flow the arrows created is now generating problems of its own.
Foreign pilgrims have outnumbered Spaniards since 2023. Last year they accounted for 302,460 of the total, or 57 per cent, against 228,527 Spaniards. Americans were the largest single foreign nationality at 43,964, up more than 15 per cent in twelve months.
The traffic also bunches. A Compostela requires at least 100 kilometres on foot. Until February 2025 those kilometres had to be the final stretch into Santiago, and on the French route the first town past that line is Sarria. Last year 162,076 pilgrims — 30.5 per cent of the total — set off from that one town. One clause of regulation decided where hundreds of thousands of people took their first step. The rule has since been loosened. The bunching has not.
The destination is straining too. The Associated Press reported that residents of Santiago's old town produced a good-manners leaflet for visitors, translated into several languages, which included a request to fit rubber tips to walking poles. Roberto Almuíña, who chairs the old-town residents' association, said the trouble is not tourism itself but pressure that has gone past what anyone would call reasonable. The old town now has no hardware shop and no newsstand, and one bakery.
Even these figures undercount. The Pilgrim's Reception Office can only register people who ask for a Compostela in Santiago. From 2024 the Galician government placed twenty-five sensors along the routes, anonymously counting mobile phone signals. The results suggest the certificate-based tally misses as much as 40 per cent of the traffic. The pilgrim office in Saint-Jean recorded 54,115 people at its own desk last year. Santiago counted 30,345 who had started there.
The pressure is about to increase. The cathedral's Holy Door opens on 31 December, and 2027 begins as a Holy Year.
- The Pyrenees (Saint-Jean to Roncesvalles)The first stage and the steepest. The Napoleon route over the pass closes when snow lies deep, and winter walkers drop to the lower Valcarlos road instead.
- The Meseta (Burgos to León)A dry plateau above 800 metres. Summer afternoons run past 30°C with almost no shade anywhere. This is the stretch pilgrims cross before dawn.
- Galicia (O Cebreiro to Santiago)Atlantic weather all year. On thirty-year mean figures Santiago records rain on nineteen days in November, its wettest month, and on nine days in July, its driest.
- The Compostela and the 100-kilometre ruleThe certificate requires 100 kilometres on foot or 200 by bicycle. A revision in February 2025 dropped the requirement that those kilometres be the final stretch. Any continuous 100 kilometres on a recognised route now qualifies, provided the last stage leads to the cathedral. Two stamps a day are now required instead of one.
- The credencialA pilgrim passport, stamped at hostels and churches along the way to prove the distance was walked. Before Valiña painted his arrows, the document barely registered.
- Holy Years are set by the calendarA Holy Year falls whenever 25 July lands on a Sunday. Leap years turn that into an irregular cycle of six, five, six and eleven years, roughly fourteen times a century. Today is a Saturday, so this is not one. The next is 2027.
- American pilgrimsThe second-largest national group after Spain, at 43,964 in 2025. American numbers have grown by more than 90 per cent in a decade, passing both Germany and Italy. The 2010 film The Way, starring Martin Sheen, is widely credited with putting the route in front of an American audience.
The road was already there in 1984, when Valiña bought his paint. The arrows were not. A tradition that disappears has usually only lost its signposts. Signposts do not repaint themselves.
- Xunta de Galicia, official Camino de Santiago site — the yellow arrow and Elías Valiña
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Routes of Santiago de Compostela, inscribed 1993
- Council of Europe — Santiago de Compostela Pilgrim Routes
- Thirty years of the first European Cultural Itinerary — interview with José Antonio Ortiz
- Pilgrim's Reception Office (Oficina de Acogida al Peregrino), annual statistics (link unverified)
- Associated Press — reporting on overtourism in Santiago de Compostela, 2025 (link unverified)
- Codex Calixtinus, Book V, in English translation; UNESCO Memory of the World listing (link unverified)
- Stage distances and elevations from Cicerone and Caminoways route data (link unverified)
- Nationality breakdowns for 2023 and 2024 from Fundación Jacobea annual reports (link unverified)
- 2025 revision of the Compostela requirements, and the sensor-based undercount estimate, via the Pilgrim's Reception Office and American Pilgrims on the Camino (link unverified)
- Galician rainfall-day figures from thirty-year climate summaries; AEMET primary data not obtained (link unverified)
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