Few pilgrims who attempt the Camino have heard of the Via de la Plata, fewer still have walked it. At 620 miles (1,000 km), it is the longest and loneliest of the Camino routes, crossing the Iberian Peninsula to Santiago de Compostela. As much of it is under the baking sun of southern Spain, it can also be the thirstiest, as I discovered last summer.
Each day I had to carry more and more water, until I had about four or five litres of water weighing down my rucksack and afflicting my sorry back and knees. After previously doing nearly 2,000 miles of extended Camino during pandemic lockdowns, I had learned the hard way that you pay for every unnecessary ounce you carry (an old army friend won’t let me forget that I carried a 1.5-kg tent more than 1,000 miles before actually using it). I thought I had finally got my rucksack’s weight down to the optimum minimum level (which included ditching that tent). The Plata had other ideas, because you can’t take short cuts with water on the Plata. You can do a day’s 20-mile stage – some were longer – and not encounter a single village or watering hole. Just lots of Spanish bulls on deserted ranch land appearing unfazed by the blistering heat while looking at you sweating your heart out.
In St John’s Gospel, Jesus tells the Samaritan woman at the well about the everlasting nourishment of “living water” as opposed to the water we thirst after daily. On the Plata I discovered how hard it is to ignore that daily need once you reach a certain degree of physical thirst. It’s immensely uncomfortable, if not a little scary when you are on your own. I hadn’t drunk that amount of water since my tour in Afghanistan (it was
an Afghan kufiya scarf given to me by my army friend and wrapped around my head that saved me from the sun at its harshest). I got a brutal lesson in the truth of Jesus’s point about the water the woman came to
draw from the well: “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again.”
I continually thirsted, again and again, drinking litre after litre. This necessitated a tough lesson in sacrificing comfort – slaking my thirst – for the sake of reducing weight. If I carried more water – more weight – it made the hiking harder and I sweated more and got thirstier! It was a vicious cycle, as well as a metaphor for the continual challenge in life of finding the right balance between competing claims. One day I didn’t get the balance right, and I ran out of water. I began to become delirious and giddy, experiencing rather too much of what those ascetic mystics in the desert discovered through mortification of the flesh. After retreating to a road, a kind Spanish couple drove me the rest of the way to my hostel – the only time during all those miles when I physically had to surrender.
The shock of the Plata’s austerity is compounded by the fact that most pilgrims begin it in the wonderful environs of Seville. The capital city of southern Spain’s quixotic Andalusia region radiates colour, people and vigour. Suddenly that all vanishes as you head northward on a route lasting about six weeks with most days, certainly during the first two-thirds of the journey as you cross from Andalusia into Extremadura, spent alone on eroded flatlands and marginal fields of scrub with those nonchalant bulls and the lack of watering options.
A big part of any Camino are the lessons about simplifying, letting go and unburdening yourself mentally and emotionally. Sorting through and reducing the weight of your rucksack is a physical manifestation of this idea. Twinned with this is the lesson to focus on what truly matters beyond the noise and distractions of modern life. Admittedly, on the Plata this process of simplification reached a degree that conflicted with the spiritual element you are meant to be encountering. For there were times when all I could think about was water. I didn’t care about anything else when the sun was at its zenith, and I still had ten miles to go. All that mattered was water – and not passing out.
But over time the obsession came to reveal its own truths: how vulnerable and weak the human body is; how the body functions as a machine that will break down if you don’t put enough of the right fluids and ingredients in it. But that, in turn, steered the mind to dwell on how, of course, it is not as simple as that. We are not just our bodies and their temporal needs. There is “a human nature that has a transcendent origin and telos”, writes Casey Chalk, who often discusses Catholicism in the public square. “Because we are embodied souls with intellect and will, our personhood is directed at certain immaterial ends that are
most essential: beauty, truth, justice, love, the divine.” It takes us back to the well at Samaria: “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again; but he that shall drink of the water that I will give him, shall
not thirst for ever,” Jesus says.
The early Christians who embraced that message and were willing to die for it are encountered on the Plata. For the route is littered with monuments and signs of Roman Hispania. In the middle of nowhere I suddenly found myself passing under an enormous Roman archway next to the ruins of a settlement. I arrived at the Extremadura regional capital Mérida by crossing one of the world’s oldest surviving Roman bridges. I pottered around the Temple of Diana in the city centre as people had their tasty tapas and cañas of cold beer at lunchtime. In the middle of the giant Mérida amphitheatre – a Unesco world heritage site – I thought of the ferocious gladiatorial battles that must have happened where I now stood ringed in by the ruins, and those early Christians given to the lions and bears on the same spot for the entertainment of the baying crowds.
In our present environment of non-stop news and social-media-driven vitriol – which usually doesn’t have much time for freedom of religious expression and metaphysical questions – there is much to put you off associating with crowds today. But when I did my first Camino in 2017, one of the most uplifting aspects proved the other pilgrims, their acts of kindness and fellowship while sharing a unique experience. It
was a stark reminder that through embracing Thomas Hardy’s madding crowd, life gains its lustre.
As the lockdowns painfully reminded us, it is our engagement with others that so often gives our existence its verve and wonder.
But all that got turned on its head on the lonely Plata. That lack of pilgrims forced the mind to consider the impact of such absences, along with all those other deficiencies experienced during the pandemic and lockdowns, when so many of those essentials as laid out by Chalk, and which give our lives shape, purpose and meaning beyond physical requirements, were not accessible. The result of confronting all this was a deep, deep thirst, though of a very different kind to that found in an overheated water bottle.
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