Is that the difference between tourist and pilgrim? Not skimming over the surface but immersed so deeply in a landscape that

some of it lodges and never falls away? Is that how a name on a map becomes a place in the heart?

​

I tell Alfonso, ‘This place, the whole of O Salnés, with each visit, I discover more treasures hidden within.’

​

A straggled line of people on the road ahead, backpacks and scallop shells flapping, course set for a field of stars – to catch one falling perhaps. 

​

As we pass, I hear John O’Donohue saying, ‘Listen to the new silence brought with them.’ 

​

These fragile hearts made restless by the fault in our gene pool, our stars or echoes of eternity layered in. 

​

Alfonso points ahead. ‘Look at that.’

​

Suddenly, shapes everywhere, as swallows and martins burst out, shot from God knows where, weaving, flashing past on final

feeding runs before their long migration.

​

Just after Pontearnelas the road winds uphill, to Mouzos and the Chapel of San Pedro. A man slowly rises from the porch, leaning heavily on his stick. He blinks as I shake his hand. Don Jose. Another man, younger, joins him. His son, Jaime.

​

‘Before we had a stamp,’ Alfonso explains, ‘Don Jose would plant his stick in ink and stamp the pilgrims’ passports.’

​

Jose nods; his stick is now decommissioned by a scallop shell stamp. 

​

Shading the porch is a camellia tree, with its symbolism of the Divine, the promise of spring. A plaque on the wall records that

the chapel was built in 1978, the year of the new constitution, of new democratic beginnings – the coming of spring again to Spain. The start of the pacto del olvido – of forgetting wrongs. I tell him that camellia also celebrates faithfulness, longevity. 

​

He nods.

​

Over time, Jaime expanded the chapel even as the village population declined, the tradition of family farming ebbing: the lot

of rural communities everywhere..

​

 ‘Then three years ago,’ Alfonso tells me, ‘Don Jose, Jaime and others lobbied for the Camino to go through the village. The

mayor later told me it was the only issue they ever sought a meeting on.’

​