A hermit from the place called Solovio (where the Church of San Fiz de Solovio stands today) whose name was Paio, located the remains of a primitive burial in a wood called Libredón. This contained the tombs of the apostle Santiago and his disciples Teodoro and Atanasio.

This apparition confirms an established popular tradition which had previously been documented by the monks Bede the Venerable and the Beato de Liébana. However, proof was still lacking. Immediately, King Alfonso II visited the place and ordered a modest church to be built which was later rebuilt by Alfonso III (in 899). This was the germ of the present Cathedral and the city of Santiago.

In the X century, European pilgrims began to arrive, such as Bretenaldo, in 930, a Frank who decided to settle as a resident of the primitive Compostela. Two years later, about 932, King Ramiro II went on a pilgrimage. However, the most famous pilgrim of the X century was Bishop Gotescalco of Le Puy, who travelled to Compostela in the company of other clerics and a group of faithful from Aquitaine at the end of 950.

A short time later, in 959, Abbot Cesáreo from the Catalonian Monastery of Santa Cecilia de Montserrat went on pilgrimage to the holy place. He asked the Church of Compostela to request the Pope to restore the episcopal see of Tarragona. This intercession procedure increased the weight of the apostolic see in the Kingdom of Leon, strengthening the position of Compostela as a prestigious see in the west of the Peninsula.

The golden age of the pilgrimages occurred in these centuries: France, Italy, central and eastern Europe, England, Germany, including Iceland, and, of course, all of Hispania. They arrived on foot, on horseback, on ships, etc. They were assisted by a network of hospitals founded by kings, nobles and bourgeoisie of the cities, especially in the districts of the Franks and by the monks of Cluny, who welcomed the pilgrims to their monasteries.

History also tells us of the pilgrimage to the tomb of the apostle of Saint Francis of Assisi in 1214, an event which inaugurated one of the most fertile chapters of the Way of Saint James: the renewal of western spirituality through the educational, evangelising and fraternal work of the Franciscans. They founded the first convent of the Order in Santiago.

The majority of the hospital institutions for pilgrims and the poor were created through the donations contributed by religious communities, episcopal sees, noble families, high level clerics and, especially, kings. The monarchs founded a large number of hospitals on the Way, demonstrating the willingness of the Crown to exercise the Christian virtue of charity and serve God and Santiago as the patron saint of the kingdom. In the small medieval hospitals it was customary to offer wards with twelve beds, or six double beds, in remembrance of the twelve apostles of Jesus.

For the medieval mentality, the pilgrim was sent from heaven, therefore, he had to be considered and treated as if he were Jesus Christ. That is why it was not infrequent in the scenes of the apparition of the risen Jesus to the disciples of Emaus to represent the Saviour as a pilgrim, with emblems of the Jacobean pilgrimage such as the leather pouch and the scallop shell. The most well-known example of this identification is the famous Romanic relief in the cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos (Burgos).

In the celebration of the Roman Holy Year of 1300, the Pope offered the pilgrims the Plenary Indulgence or the forgiveness of their sins. At the end of the XIV century, a period of economic expansion began and was developed in the following century. In this framework of crisis, chaos and recuperation, peasants, bourgeois, soldiers, nobles and those I religious orders went on pilgrimage especially in the periods of truce, under the mantle of a cosmic vision which interpreted the Milky Way as a way of souls heading to Paradise.

The encounter with the marvellous attracted the most modest and the nobility. King Alfonso XI of Castile (1325-1350) was knighted in Compostela; Isabel de Aragón (c. 1270-1336), the widow of King Dinís de Portugal, went on pilgrimage in 1325, donating her crown, among other personal possessions and riches; at the beginning of 1343, Saint Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373) arrived in Compostela. She was on a pilgrimage with her husband, Ulf Gudmarsson, and other persons, and had a mystical vision in the Cathedral, which was normal in her life.

During the final third of the XIV century, coast of Galicia and the European Atlantic powered a trading dynamic with rewarding results. The situation of crisis suffered in France, Flanders, England and other countries was a boost to Galicia as regards International trade linked to the pilgrimage by sea which had its maximum place of reference in Corunna, a port for pilgrims.

In the final decades of the XIV century and during the XV century, a large number of ships loaded with pilgrims from Flanders, Brittany, England and the Baltic countries together with goods from Flanders, Andalusia, Catalonia, Genoa and Venice docked in the port of Corunna. The same dock exported smoked fish to the Mediterranean and Ribeiro wine to the Atlantic coast of Europe.

The Inquisition also meant a problem in the XVI century as its suspicious attitude affected all foreigners, including the Jacobean pilgrims, some of whom were accused of espionage. After the Council of Trent (1545-1563), the Catholic Church rearmed ideologically with the exaltation of the cut of Our Lady and the saints.

In May 1589, faced with the fear of an attack on Compostela by the English troops of Francis Drake, whose ships were attacking Corunna, Archbishop Juan de Sanclemente ordered the concealment of the body of the apostle in the presbytery of the Cathedral. Its exact location was unknown for several centuries until 1879, the year of the second discovery of the apostolic remains.

Baroque religiosity, fortified with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, favoured the reactivation of the Way of Saint James in the XVII century, especially during the Holy Years although the Jacobeans would have to share the route with false pilgrims, interested in living from charity and alms in the towns and cities. The French Revolution of 1789 and the wars involving several powers against France led to another fall in the number of pilgrims at the end of the century.

The Way of Saint James would have another discovery of the remains of the Apostle, affirmed in the Bull Deus Omnipotens (1884), and with the celebration of an Extraordinary Holy Year in 1885, it improved at the end of the century and at the beginning of the XX century especially due to the pastoral action of Archbishops Payá and Martín de Herrera. The fracture caused by the Sanish Civil War (1936-1939) split society in two and the pilgrimages would take time to recover its impetus in a Europe immersed in two world wars and the tension of the subsequent “cold war”.

In the 50s and 60s, the recuperation began little by little with the creation of the first Jacobean associations in Paris (1950) and Estella (1963), and the celebration of the Holy Years of 1965 and 1971. The definitive boost arrived in 1982 with the pilgrimage of Pope John Paul II and his Europeanist speech on the High Altar of the Cathedral of Santiago.

With this anxiety and the search for new, enriching experiences, the traditional pilgrimage to Santiago proposes a radical change in conduct, alternative human and universal values faced with a world which is more and more globalised, as well as being alienating and competitive.

At the beginning of the century and the millennium, the Jacobean pilgrimage is, more than ever, a transversal phenomenon: on the one hand, spiritual and ecumenical, as well as open to knowledge, friendship and mutual understanding. A Way whose pilgrims also have the experience of the countryside, the history, the shared culture and the solidarity.

Today the pilgrim finds a space considered to be sacred for centuries: the Way of Saint James itself; a sacralised geography which is also a historical and cultural itinerary. It is, in short, a different form of pilgrimage, which does not deny the traditional but adds to this the yearning and the motivations of contemporary societies.