The Road That Refilled the Villages
In 1985, 690 people finished the Camino de Santiago. Last year around half a million did. What that did to a 800-kilometre strip of emptied rural Spain is unlike anything else that has happened to the European countryside in forty years.
In 1985, 690 people collected a Compostela in Santiago. Not 690,000 — 690. The route was a line on medieval maps that a handful of enthusiasts and a few Spanish clerics were trying to reconstruct, and the villages along it were emptying at the same rate as everywhere else in rural Castile and León, which is to say fast.
In 2024 the Pilgrim Office issued around 500,000. The Camino Francés carries most of them, and the effect on a strip of northern Spain roughly 800 kilometres long and a few hundred metres wide has been unlike anything else that has happened to rural Europe in that period.
The emptied interior
To see why it matters you have to understand what it happened to. La España vaciada — the emptied Spain — is the term for the interior provinces that lost between a third and two thirds of their population to industrial cities and to Europe between 1950 and 1990. Soria, Teruel, Zamora, much of Palencia and Burgos: densities below ten people per square kilometre, villages with a median age over sixty, schools closed, bars closed, bus routes cancelled.
The meseta section of the Camino runs straight through the middle of this. Two hundred kilometres of wheat and sky between Burgos and León, villages every ten or fifteen kilometres, and by the 1980s several of them functionally dead.
What arrived was not tourism in the usual sense. Tourism concentrates: it builds where there is a coast, a cathedral or a ski lift, and leaves everything in between alone. The Camino is a line, and a walker covers 25 kilometres a day, which means the demand is distributed at exactly the interval at which villages happen to sit. A settlement of eighty people that could never support a hotel can support an albergue with sixteen bunks, because sixteen beds is what one day's walking generates.
What the money looks like
A pilgrim spends modestly — perhaps €35 to €40 a day on the standard budget, split between a bed, a menú del peregrino and a coffee. That is not much per person. Multiplied by five hundred thousand people over a season and distributed along a fixed line, it is a rural economy.
Studies commissioned by the Xunta de Galicia have put the annual economic impact in the high hundreds of millions of euros, most of it landing in municipalities that have no other significant private-sector income. In Galicia the effect is visible in the census: several Camino municipalities have stabilised or grown while their non-Camino neighbours have continued to fall.
It has also produced a specific and quite narrow business model. The albergue, the bar that opens at six for pilgrim breakfasts and closes at nine, the baggage transfer van, the pharmacy that stocks Compeed in commercial quantities. These are small businesses run by families, and a striking number of them are run by people who walked the route first and came back.
A hotel needs a destination. An albergue needs only a day's walk between it and the last one — which is why a line on a map refilled villages that a coastline never would have.
The costs, which are real
Half a million people walking through a village of eighty is not a neutral event. Water use in the Galician summer, waste, the volume of foot traffic on unsurfaced tracks, and the erosion of the last hundred kilometres where the numbers concentrate — these are managed rather than solved.
The composition of the traffic has changed too. The requirement for a Compostela is a hundred kilometres on foot, which is why Sarria is the single busiest starting point on the route and why the character of the last five days differs sharply from the first twenty-five. Long-distance walkers complain about it, sometimes insufferably. The villages between Sarria and Santiago have a different view, since that is where their income comes from.
And there is a question the Church raises and the tourist boards do not, which is what the route is for. The Pilgrim Office still asks the reason for walking and still distinguishes between religious, spiritual and other motivations. Roughly 40% now tick something other than religious. The Compostela is a religious document being issued in large numbers to people who are not making a religious journey, and the institution issuing it is aware of the tension.
The other Caminos
The response to congestion on the Francés has been to promote the alternatives, of which there are many and most are genuinely quiet. The Camino Portugués from Porto is now the second busiest and rising. The Camino del Norte follows the Cantabrian coast and is harder, wetter and considerably more beautiful. The Vía de la Plata runs 1,000 kilometres north from Seville through Extremadura and sees a few thousand walkers a year against the Francés's hundreds of thousands.
The Vía de la Plata is the interesting case, because it passes through the emptiest provinces in Spain — the ones the Francés does not reach. Whether the same mechanism works there is an open question. The route is longer, the stages between villages are further apart than a day's walk in places, and the summer heat in Extremadura closes the season for three months. The line has to fit the walking, and not every line does.
Walking it now
None of this should put anyone off. The Francés in May or September is one of the great walks in Europe and the infrastructure that makes it accessible — €10 municipal albergues, a bed every few kilometres, a route waymarked so thoroughly you can walk it without a map — exists because half a million people a year keep it in business.
What is worth doing is noticing where the money goes. Municipal and parish albergues, run by the village or by a confraternity, put it directly into the place you are walking through; the private ones vary. Eat at the bar rather than carrying supermarket food through a village that has one business left. And if the meseta looks like eight days of nothing worth walking, consider that the villages on it are the ones the whole mechanism was accidentally designed to save.
Sara shoots on assignment across four continents and develops half of it on film. Her long-term project on harvest seasons — coffee, saffron, olives, rice — has been exhibited at Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan.