The rise and fall and rise of the Camino

By the 12th Century the Camino was a highly organised and popular route with rich and poor alike travelling the route to visit the tomb of St James. Many pilgrims did not do the journey by their own volition; there are records of people needing to complete the trip in order to earn an inheritance and others who had to complete it as a sentence imposed by a court. (There is apparently still a tradition in Flanders of pardoning and releasing one prisoner every year under the condition that, accompanied by a guard, the prisoner walks to Santiago wearing a heavy backpack). Pilgrims travelled for weeks or months to arrive at Santiago de Compostela and many arrived with very little due to illness or robbery; being attacked on the Camino was one of the great risks of the early travellers. 

It was the ravages of the Black Death in the mid 14th Century that saw the beginning of the decline of the Camino, followed by the impact of the Protestant Reforms of the 16th Century.  The idea of pilgrimage became unpopular and was banned in many countries (Henry VIII banned it in Britain).  In the late 16th century the relics of St James were hidden to prevent possible theft by Sir Frances Drake and were subsequently 'lost'.  With no body to venerate the number of pilgrims fell even further and in the Holy Year of 1867 only 40 pilgrims turned up for the St James' day Mass.  Fewer than twenty years later, after a determined effort, the relics were found and once declared genuine by Rome the numbers of pilgrims once again began to rise. 

Today's popularity is as a result of activity in the 1980s with the formation of Camino interest groups, a priest with a vision of how it could be and a lot of volunteers clearing and marking the routes.  This work has seen the numbers rise from just over 2000 in the mid 1980s to over 270,000 in 2010 making the Camino what it is today.