The Camino de Santiago is famous for its cathedrals and stamps in your pilgrim passport, but the real reason people keep coming back is smaller and stranger: the characters you meet along the way. A recent journal entry from hiker Marley Kreiser, on day ten of her walk toward Santiago, captures exactly why.
Her morning started with a French pilgrim who'd spent 39 years in San Francisco and somehow managed to open both a creperie and a furniture design business — his advice for travellers wanting dual citizenship was to find a French husband. Then came a supermarket owner who sings Adele at customers at 6am, offers them gin with their orange juice, and has walked more than 15 Caminos himself. His theory on why the trail works: energy from the sun and the walking, energy from ancient Celtic stone sites that churches were later built on, and energy from open-hearted people. He calls the Camino his mission, and sings pilgrims out the door.
Day ten's route took her through Villava, where locals were setting up a National Barbecue Party — around 50 grills, tents and wooden toys filling the streets — and then across old stone walls into Pamplona, whose 1553 fortifications were built thick and angled specifically to shrug off cannonballs. She ate mozzarella and cucumber outside the Catedral Metropolitana de Santa María la Real before checking into Albergue diocesano Betania, a donation-based hostal with stricter house rules than most: packs stay in the common area, doors close at 9pm, and nobody gets up before 6am. The payoff was a family-style dinner, a hidden chapel service where the priest sat among pilgrims rather than preaching from the pulpit, and a shift in how she thought about her walk — from "what's next for me?" to "how can I be of service?"
Between towns, she also met friends at Taberna Vienés in Pamplona's Jardines de la Taconera, a green, flower-filled garden bar that doesn't feel like a city centre at all. One fellow pilgrim even recognised the lauburu (the Basque curved cross) drawn on her shoes — a small moment, but the kind the Camino specialises in.
For anyone considering the pilgrimage, this is the honest texture of it: long road walks through towns like Villava, cheap supermarket picnics, albergues that trade a bit of privacy for genuine community, and strangers who become a temporary family. Kreiser's own rule of thumb is a good one to steal — leave every place better than you found it, and be a good guest. That mindset, more than any packing list, is what makes the trail work.
If Pamplona is on your radar beyond the Camino, day ten shows it's more than the running of the bulls: centuries-old walls you can walk along, a quiet cathedral square, and garden taverns minutes apart.
Story via The Trek.
