2018 Camino Portuguese from Porto: Day 14: Still touring Santiago

"Europe was made on the pilgrim road to Compostela"

Pope John Paul II

quote of the day on a sidewalk in Santiago de Compostella

Another day touring Santiago. Two days in a row without a backpack makes it seem a little more like a vacation and a little less like Camino.

We went to the noon Pilgrim mass at the Cathedral and got to see the large insensor swing. Truly an amazing sight. It was packed with people sitting all along the walls on the base of every pillar. When you come to mass you don't know if they're going to use the incense until the very end.

When they were getting ready to swing the incense up to the roof of the cathedral, we looked to the side and saw Sue and Ann from Australia. We've been seeing them on and off since Caldas de Rea. So we got together for another Tapas lunch. We did a little souvenir shopping and then back to pack for the trip home.

We got to see the Botafumeiro fly! The video quality could have been better, but we were very close and I was shooting without looking through my camera to enjoy the experience. I cut the video length -- it flew for over 5 minutes.

The ‘Botafumeiro’ is the famous incenser in Santiago de Compostela cathedral. It has been used since the Middle Ages, by legend to clear the air when crowds of pilgrims having completed the Camino de Santiago arrived in Santiago de Compostela after their long journey.

This ritual is in writing at least since the 12th century. The current ‘Botafumeiro’ dates back to 1851 weighting 120 pounds when empty and up to 25 kgs more when full.

Eight men, called ‘tiraboleiros’, are required to operate it, After being filled with incense and burning coal it is set in motion forming a 200 foot long trajectory to the ceiling of the cathedral. It reaches speeds of 40 MPH.

Laurel, Sue, Ann, Mark, and Deb

Tonight we walked around the old town and back to the main Cathedral Square to see if any of our Camino friends showed up today. We did see one woman who we stayed with on our second night. She finished two days behind us.

She was very concerned about us missing the Corpus Christi procession tomorrow. The holiday in Spain is May 31st and we thought we would be in Santiago for the observance of Corpus Christi. But the holiday will be celebrated in Santiago on Sunday when we fly out. She was very excited to know that there would be a special celebration tomorrow even though she's not Catholic. It wad nice of her to remember our goal of arriving on 5/31.

For the day I'll just include a few pictures of some of the wonderful statuary and altars we've seen in the city. Over the next week I'll probably clean up some of the blog posts to add captions to photos and correct some of the mistakes I've made along the way. I really enjoy doing this every night.