2021 It is the ‘Xacobeo’ year and it will last until 2022. It is the first time that it is going to be held for two years, decision made from the Vatican by the situation of the coronavirus.
During the ‘Xacobeo’ there are thousands of people who decide to make the way to reach the the Cathedral of Santiago of Compostela and give the apostle a hug. There are two original routes on the Camino de Santiago, but many others have emerged over the centuries. Some of them are found in our land, in Castilla-La Mancha, an example is the ‘Wool Route‘that crosses the provinces of Cuenca and Guadalajara until it reaches the so-called’ French way ‘.
History of the Cuenca Way
In ‘A Vivir Castilla-La Mancha, Pueblo a Pueblo’ we have spoken with Pepe Cava, president of the Association of Friends of the Camino de Santiago de Cuenca, which has two headwaters located in Alicante and Valencia. The first news of this Cuenca road dates back to the end of the 80s thanks to the research of Vicente Malabia.
Pepe Cava has a hostel in Villaconejos de Trabaque. Precisely, at the tourist level, it says that before a pandemic, pilgrims came from different parts of the world. He says that the Camino de Santiago through Cuenca is increasingly visited and the prospects are good, as long as the pandemic evolves well.
25 routes of the Camino de Santiago
We have also spoken with Sergio Fernandez Tolosa, journalist and photographer, as well as an experienced cyclist and hiker who has written the book ‘Caminos de Santiago, 25 Jacobean Routes’ from the publishing house ‘Geo Planeta’. He says that all the routes have surprised him and in the case of the ‘Ruta de la Lana’ it is a “very interesting” experience.
In this book we find multitude of marked routes and branches from Spain and Portugal thanks to the work that the different associations of friends of the Camino de Santiago have been developing for years. Sergio Fernández says that for all of them pilgrims passed.
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Other routes
With the professor of History of the UCLM, Angel Monterrubio we have known other interesting routes that pass through the region. One of them is the Guadalupe Way, which is in Extremadura, but the roads used to make that pilgrimage center cross what is now the territory of Castilla-La Mancha and the monastery depends on the Archbishopric of Toledo. Guadalupe was the great pilgrimage center in the Iberian Peninsula in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, displacing even Santiago.
It has also discovered us other very interesting routes such as the ‘Vía Verde la Jara’, the ‘Senda de Viriato’, the ‘Journey to the Alcarria’ route, and even the ‘Pedro Almodóvar’ route.
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