Grand Tour Part II: Ham Sandwiches

Heather in the Worker's Plaza

Friday Heather and I took a little day trip to my new home town, Santiago de Compostela, which surprisingly I don't think I've talked about in this blog. Seriously, I just looked through the whole thing and I don't think I've talked about it once.

Santiago de Compostela is the capital of Galicia, and home to about 95,000 people, with about 83,000 more in the surrounding areas. Like most of the major cities around here, it was originally a Roman settlement though most of the Roman stuff has since been destroyed or buried by centuries of construction projects. 

The city is far and away most famous for being the final destination of the Camino de Santiago, or the Way of Saint James. (popularized by this film which I still have not seen) The Camino is a Catholic pilgrimage with various routes across Spain and Europe that all come together at the site where St James is buried. For centuries, the Camino was largely unknown or forgotten about and only frequented by devout and penitent Catholics. But over the past twenty years or so interest has been increasing almost exponentially. 

The symbol of the Camino is the yellow scallop shell, which is what is used to mark the pilgrim's path. This stylized version is what you'll see on most signage, and I at first thought it was a representation of the different Ways all meeting in Santiago, but really the wide end of the shell is supposed to point towards the destination.

Really I could write an entire post about the Camino, but I'm still telling the story of my trip with Heather, so that will have to be all for now on the Camino.

Here, (right) in the Praza do Obradoiro (the Worker's Square) Heather and I saw a bunch of pilgrims sitting on the ground reflecting on their journey and the sacredness of the place, or maybe just resting a bit after having walked at least 100 kilometers.

And below is their destination, and the thing they are all looking at. The end of the Camino at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Heather and I, before going in, went around the corner to the Pilgrims Museum, which I figured would be about the pilgrims who made/make the trip, but in reality it was more about the Cathedral itself and some of the history behind it.

The Cathedral sits on the spot where, according to legend, the tomb of St James was rediscovered in the 9th century AD. The first church was destroyed by the Moors, and the current structure is what you get after hundreds of years of remodeling after the original was rebuilt in the 11th century. The current façade was built in the 18th century in the baroque style, and is featured on the 1-cent, 2-cent and 5-cent Spanish coins! 

This is the Botafumeiro, or at least a replica of it, and is the censer or incense expeller used during mass. The photo (which is highly edited because it was dark inside and none of the pictures turned out well) doesn't show very well the size of the thing, but it is quite large and it takes eight men pulling on the rope to swing it. I've heard that the reason behind the size is that they needed a lot of incense to mask the smell of the sick and dirty pilgrims. Once in a while (every hundred years or so) it'll detach itself from the rope and spew burning incense everywhere, but no one has been killed, apparently.


After seeing the Cathedral, we went and poked around the old town for a bit in search of lunch. Heather was at that point still somewhat jet lagged and nauseous, but you know what sounded really good? A ham sandwich. After a bit of searching we did indeed find ham sandwiches but, little did we know, that by the end of the trip neither of us would want to look at another ham sandwich ever again.

View of the Cathedral from the park