Gestures in Stone: Pilgrims and the Vernacular Landscape of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela

Abstract

The Camino de Santiago de Compostela, a medieval pilgrimage trail that today starts in the French Pyrenees and travels west to the Spanish Atlantic Coast, holds a vernacular landscape layered by stone objects conveying stories and narratives. While modern Camino research often focuses on the trail as a site of medieval pilgrimage and architecture as well as churches, ruins, and tremendous views, verbal and pictorial evidence from the oral histories of fourteen pilgrims, historical resources, and contemporary media reveal that pilgrims played their own role in shaping the landscape. Inherently changeable gestures that generally go unnoticed by most modern users of the Camino take the form of waymarkers, cairns, and the Cruz de Ferro. As this research suggests, such gestures can serve as markers of pilgrims’ psyches that leave a lasting trace on the landscape. Placing stones on top of stone structures is itself an act that speaks outside of time and place to both the self and the community of pilgrims. By applying landscape theory, geocriticism, and folkloric studies, this article interprets these seemingly mundane gestures made with stones as evidence of profound transformations in a pilgrim’s mind and spirit and, more significantly, the architecture of place. The study underscores that these small gestures in the vernacular landscape potentially impact the pilgrim as profoundly, if not more so, than the medieval villages, churches, and ruins directly shaping the character of the contemporary Camino and its pilgrims.