Camino de Santiago, Final Day 5: A Rua to Santiago

After dropping my oldest off at college in August, I went on a 5 day, 115km walk on a small part of the Camino de Santiago in Spain, a 1,000+ year old network of paths across Spain that ends at the Cathedral of Santiago. Here, I write up my last day, roughly 21km (13.1mi), ending at the famous cathedral that attracted pilgrims and visitors for a milenium.

Even though my 5 day trek wasn’t super long in the scheme of things – the entire Camino Frances route takes 35 days to walk – the day felt like a victory lap, and was a lot of fun, especially approaching the city at the end.

As in the previous day, I started with the usual routine of a nice breakfast at the hotel buffet and dropping off my luggage. Once outdoors, there was some early morning fog the enveloped the farms, but it didn’t last super long.

The landscape of farms and forests was similar to some of what I’d seen in previous days. That said, being closer to the end, there were more chapels open, as well as folks along the trail stamping completion booklets this last day – sometimes elaborately with melted wax, albeit with long queues.

One site that was not there in the middle ages, about 5km in, was the Santiago airport. The path skirted around the boundaries of the airport.

After the airport, around the 11km mark, was the town of Lavacolla, with a cafe and some amenities, and a chapel.

Around the 16km mark was Monte de Gozo, which was a hilltop park area from which you could see the city of Santiago 5km away. It was a good spot to stop for a few minutes to rest before doing the remaining downhill stretch.

Approaching/Arrival

Finally, the downhill path approached the outskirts of Santiago!

Since Santiago is an actual city, there were the typical highway overpasses and such to cross, as well as the usual auto body shops and similar in the outer edges. But as it got closer to the center, there were signs marking the entrance to the city. Additionally, from the street as the old city started, one could see the cathedral’s tower at a distance.

Finally, I made it! Yay! The main square was right in front of the cathedral, and had a large crowd of folks posing for photos. I took my obligatory selfie.

I decided to get my Compostela completion certificate before going to my hotel and showering. The office for this (Rua Carretas, 33) was fairly close to the main cathedral square, and reasonably efficient. I took a number from the kiosk in the lobby, poked around the small chapel while waiting, and after a few minutes had my number called for my turn.

The clerk looked through my stamp credential booklet, and then they printed off my completion certificate. The certificate was in Latin, stating that I’d walked at least “Centum Milia Metorum” (100,000 meters) to see the St James Church. My name was even put in its Latin form “Jeremiam”, see the certificate below (some personal info blanked out in both):

After that, I went to my hotel down the road, checked in, and had a nice hot shower.

Touring the Cathedral

After checked in and washing up, I went to see the cathedral. The different doors were slightly confusing, but:

I first did the main entrance to just see the main pair of the cathedral. It was a fairly beautiful cathedral.
After that, I waited in the longer Crypt line, where you can walk by the [per Camino de Santiago tradition] bones of St James. Afterwards, you are apparently supposed to embrace the image of St James (skipped that part). There are some guards to keep the line moving. It’s effectively behind the altar.

And then (but the next day because I didn’t book in advance) – I got to walk on the Cathedral’s roof! You need to be on part of an organized tour for this, and my time on the stone roof happened to be perhaps the first time during the whole trip that it rained during the day. It was actually a thunder storm, the video of this was kind of crazy with the stone tiles and the water heavily gushing down the sides. Definitely surreal.

Caveat re: the Tower/Roof tour – it was actually in Spanish, and I didn’t 100% realize that in advance. It ended up working out alright, even though my spoken Spanish is very poor. (In retrospect, I should have known since the official website where I booked the tour was in Spanish. But I can largely read basic written Spanish and I didn’t think that clue through in my hiking exhaustion).

Otherwise, I had booked 2 nights in Santiago before leaving the city. It was already 4-5pm by the time I’d seen the Cathedral, so I basically had one full day left.

One common choice if you have a full day is to go to Finisterre by the coast; there are group bus tours that can book for this. Normally, I probably would have done this.
That said, I felt like I’d probably slightly overdone myself and didn’t want to commit to a full day on a bus with a set itinerary. Instead, I ended up taking the train to A Coruña, which was nice. In the latter part of the afternoon, I did the the Tower/Roof tour mentioned above, as well as seeing some museums around town (e.g. the Pilgrim Museum)