The Kingdom of Heaven with Boots On

The author of this memoir thinks he walks the Camino alone until a clairvoyant hospitelera tells him there’s someone walking with him. She tells him it’s the son who killed himself 26 years earlier. The pilgrimage to Santiago then becomes a walk into a mirror: the farther they go into it together, the deeper they return. Their family’s bohemian past is laid unsparingly bare until, at journey’s end, at Finisterre, the transcendent purpose of the son’s return is revealed.

In 2025 nearly half a million pilgrims from all over the world walked or cycled to Santiago. Their numbers grow year by year. A recent YouGov survey commissioned by the British Pilgrimage Trust found that nearly one in five adults in this country are considering making a pilgrimage of some kind. Why? Maybe the answer’s quite simple. Our hearts, in their wisdom, yearn for something the empire of spectacle can never give.