Beginning the Journey

I will start with some apparently paradoxical images. Anybody who visits Santiago de Compostela these days can witness how the not-so-long-ago remote provincial city has become a veritable theme park of Galician heritage, medievalism, and the cult of St. James for global consumption. Traditions are invented and reinvented. The old is now the new cool. What was once the periphery is now a new center. It seems like a new cultural geography has been written by the effects of globalization, which alters traditional time/space coordinates and reshapes center/periphery dichotomies. After centuries of neglect and peripheralization since its heyday in the Middle Ages, the cultural and political capital of contemporary Galicia has become one of the alternative hot spots of international travel in the global age. Travelers from more than 100 nations now regularly come to Santiago each year. Some are pilgrims, which could seem like an apparent anachronism in a secularized western world, but for many that concept does not really reflect the variety of their goals or experiences as travelers in the twenty-first century.

The complex network of pilgrimage routes leading to Santiago de Compostela formed, historically and metaphorically, the backbone of a sort of European cultural nervous system during the Middle Ages. The pilgrimage to Santiago also constitutes one of the original founding myths and most influential chapters in the chronology of Galician history and cultural mythology, with an enormous transnational projection that has only increased in our age.