By Alfred Kavanagh | The first International Congress on the Camino de Santiago between Volcanoes, which was held in Gran Canaria between the 16th and 17th, invites a global reflection on the spiritual itineraries of humanity in the 21st century.
The conference is structured around five main themes: the road as a spiritual and physical itinerary, the Canary Islands as a link between continents, the multiculturalism of the Fortunate Islands, tourism and the natural heritage offered by the route between volcanoes and the legacy of the arts and letters derived from the Way itself.
It is no coincidence that it is a route between volcanoes, because anyone who ventures through Roque Nublo, Artenara, Tejeda, Risco Caído until reaching Gáldar, where the Church of Santiago de los Caballeros is located, perceives or, rather is shaken, by the beauty of the landscape and cloudscape. The path can be done in many ways, because it is not the heritage of a culture or a religion, but it is offered to us, sublime, for that double exercise of action and contemplation. In all the millennia and in all its centuries, men have walked and in doing so they have brushed against the spirituality that surrounds the places through which they have traveled.
The vocation of this conference is to recover that feeling of being with the other, all the more important after a global pandemic, and to experience that legacy that speaks to us with different voices. I remember when I visited the almogarén in Roque Bentayga, a term whose etymology, although disputed, possibly derives from the Arabic, qarana (qrn), conjunction, because in those places, the Guanches performed their rites in perfect harmony with the equinoxes.
Volcanoes also belong to the symbolic repertoire of all cultures as spaces of conflict and transformation because they connect the four elements of nature (air, fire, water, earth). Hence, the route between the volcanoes allows us to experience that coincidence between opposites, the blinding light that cuts through the promontories and the deep shadows as we enter the volcanic formations.
We walk in the primordial eras of man and feel that experience that later each one may or may not translate into words, sounds or forms, but the Path is there, it is not a mere drawing on a map, it is a dynamic path to discover to allow that moment of confrontation with oneself.
Every conference is an agape, a banquet, a moment of concord, and fraternization, an act of friendship that brings together people from many places, of very diverse cultures and religions to be there at the crossroads of the civilizations of the West and the East, universal in its insularity, insular in its universality, since few places in the world offer the opportunity at every moment to revisit that common past that has been developing between arrivals and departures from the multiple ports of the Canary Islands, each one of them, observatory of humanity.
*Professor of International Relations at the University of Comillas and president of the Scientific Committee of the First International Congress of the Camino de Santiago entre Volcanoes.
First International Congress of the Camino de Santiago between Volcanoes