Compostela has the cordial courtesy of welcoming us through multiple paths and access doors. The tradition of pilgrimages, consecrated for twelve centuries, has been carving an intricate network of paths and trails in the landscape that surrounds the city. They are sculpted with the faith of the walkers and their constant footsteps that converge in the tomb of the apostle Santiago el Mayor, son of Zebedeo and Salome, brother of Juan, the Evangelist. There, under the main altar of the cathedral, is the central point of the hinge of the symbolic scallop, the pecten jacobaeus in Linnaean taxonomy. In that place, the bundle of furrows that faith, spirituality, adventure or current experience and emotion have traced with mysterious and teimuda constancy through time and throughout Christian Europe.
The trip, in a wide and free spiral through some of the humanized landscapes of Galicia, must end in Compostela, together with the remains that are the object of devotion and the symbolism that enhances that creation of the will, of the architectural and artistic genius that is the city of apostle. The heartbeat that animates life in the old towns of Tui, Baiona, Betanzos, Mondoñedo or Allariz seems to be the vicar of the grandiose resonance of Compostela, of its refined expression. Choosing the path to face the last stages of approaching Santiago causes the same greedy doubt that we experience before an assortment of chocolates. They all invite us to be tested, they all reward us by happily approaching our destination.
Perhaps because it is the original, that of the very arrival of the tomb of the apostle in Galicia, the traslatio, my favorite is the one that leaves behind the sea of Arousa, the estuary of the poets, and goes up the Ulla and the Sar, upstream from the Torres de Oeste in Catoira, towards the stone where the boat of tradition moored. There, towards the end of July, the dornas unfurl their sails in a renewed tradition and memory of Rosalía de Castro –“Que inchadiña branca veils, antre os millos corre soa, mysterious pure star!”– in one of the most beautiful and delicate images that the summer in Galicia can offer. Filgueira Valverde, in the tradition of the polygraphs of the country, gave away a subtle essay on the master Mateo who wrote about the carving of jet that “the Middle Ages closely linked the figure of the Apostle with the people of these extreme lands of the West”. And this, the spiritual and symbolic union between Galicians and the accepted convention of the miraculous neighborhood with the remains of Santiago, has remained alive over time. There is no village, town or city in Galicia that, like Compostela, makes the children of the nation of Breogán transcend in a more comprehensive and enveloping way.
Each road that arrives at Compostela has its corresponding access door. The French way does it through the always busy Francíxena or San Pedro gate; that of the English through the most intimate of the Rúa da Pena, the walkers of the Portuguese route and the Ulla do it through the always bustling Porta Faxeira and the Camino de la Plata opened the arch of Mazarelos, the same one through which they accessed the city the Ribeiro wines, those that, according to Mr. Cunqueiro, reached their best refinement in the bocoyes of the Compostela taverns with the trepidation of the Berenguela badaladas. Entering the old city through any of its doors and ending up doing it through all of them, going through the different urban routes to the symbolic heart of the cathedral, allows you to observe the varied network of streets and squares, their environments, the most frequented areas and others of unusual loneliness that seduce us, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on our moods and life circumstances. An exercise that, while the time of life passes, has something of intimate and gradual recognition, of slow acceptance.
This Compostela of contrasts between the crowded streets that converge in the cathedral and the hidden and silent places, has been accentuated by the extraordinary attraction that the pilgrimage to the tomb of the apostle has exerted in recent years. It is the same effect that is observed between the exalted baroque monumentality of its great religious buildings and the discreet restraint of the civil constructions, of its porticoed houses and glazed paneled windows. Professor José Manuel García Iglesias has left a definitive work on the baroque of Compostela –Galicia: times of baroque- inserted in the global sphere of the country of the 17th and 18th centuries. A monumental work that puts images and accuracy to the overflowing pantheism of Otero Pedrayo, the greatest chronicler of the cultural history of Compostela and Galicia.
No one, however, better than Xerardo Estévez, mayor of Compostela (1987-1998) and architect by profession, to explain the city that he imagined, planned and made a reality in an extraordinarily short time. In addition to being an excellent councilman, Estévez is a thinking, reasoning, pedagogical and global head, in the sense of appreciating any local phenomenon. From time to time he offers us the gift of his insightful articles, full of information and encouragement to better organize cities or understand a landscape. A few years ago he collected those published in a magnificent book, Landscapes and Words. “Today’s city needs to look into its entrails, discover itself and update its memory through an intelligent reading of its history in order to efficiently manage its daily life, arouse restlessness, creativity, ideas and projects. (…) But to dream of her future, in addition to that epidermal vision, she needs to look outwards, which places her in the urban grid of the world”.
Compostela today is not only the city where paths converge and doors open to culture, spirituality and diversity; it is also the living example of a historic city that projects itself determinedly into the future.