Camino Mozárabe

22 May Camino Mozárabe

Five women, each with one friend in common, convened last year to walk part of the Camino de Santiago. The ‘Camino’ is, in fact, a misleading singular since it is made up of lots of different trails from all over Spain, signposted with a yellow scallop shell on a blue ground, that link together to arrive at Santiago de Compostela, the supposed burial place of St James. In 2024, we took the route north from the border with Portugal up the Galician coast. Two women from the south of England, a Liverpudlian, a Catholic (practising) from Newry and a Protestant Scot (long lapsed) did not necessarily suggest a compatible blend of backgrounds and values, nor the necessary level of self-deprecatory humour that is essential when you’re spending a week together almost constantly in each other’s company – though the single-room supplement did give us some space each day, if we needed it, to decompress! Boosted by our collective desire to make it a success, the chemistry worked well, so well that we agreed to do something similar again.

This year, the Newry representative bowed out and a German friend of mine stepped in, maintaining the one friend on common theme. We chose another strand of this web of trails, the Camino Mozárabe linking Granada to Cordoba. This Camino wriggles across the province of Jaen through old pueblos of narrow cobbled streets and white-washed buildings, where the Moors had built castles from which the Christians eventually evicted them, mostly in the fifteenth century. Granada nestles in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where the May mornings are chilly and the afternoons hot. Carving a route through gentle hills covered in olive trees, all neat and regular growing out of pale soil like perfectly curated corn rows, the Camino is dust in the nostrils and hard on the feet. This is the heart of Spanish olive production and olives have been growing here for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. By May, their blossom phase has just finished and the fruit is beginning to set in clusters of fifteen or twenty tiny beads of green.

We noticed how many of the trunks seemed to be split in two, sometimes three branches, as if three little saplings had been planted once upon a time – or the tree had had an argument with itself in its youth. The guide in the olive oil museum in Baena told us that olives are planted singly but that a second or third spur often develops as the tree grows. The ones with a single trunk produce the best quality olives, she said; clearly the result of an easy adolescence and good parenting, we speculated! The generations are etched into their anatomy: the slender trunks of youth, the middle-aged spread as they mature, the knots, twists and fragility of age.

This landscape is both beautiful and monotonous. Day after day pounding the trail, a canvas of white ground, topped by a swathe each of soft green and sky blue can pall. And, while we had looked forward to the sunshine and the heat, by the third day we were praying for a forest or two to pause for a moment in the shade or a stream to dip a tired foot or wash away the dust.  At least in May the chromatic sameness is broken by colour. The Camino is edged with an astonishing, densely-packed array of wild flowers. There are low-growing delicate pink ones with darker pink centres like baby lavatera; flashes of brilliant blue like gentian suddenly grown tall; broom blooming elegant sprays of yellow; lingerie-pastels of wild rose; prickly purple thistles evoking distant Scottish cousins; creamy-yellow marguerites and the perfect seed-heads of some recently-flowered beauties. Most dramatic of all are the thousands, and I mean thousands of bright red poppies with their tissue-paper-thin petals. Is there a collective noun for them, we wondered – a provocation, a pandemonium, a paradise, a palaver, a perfection?