Santiago de Compostela
Compostela, the Capital of the West
More than 1000 years ago, people from all over the old world began to travel towards far away Finisterre... Their goal lay there in a verdant country of rain, fog and granite where round St James the apostle’s tomb the capital of the West was founded, the third of Christendom’s holy cities: Compostela.
At the beginning of the ninth century, the hermit Pelayo saw in a wood near the present - day Church of San Fiz de Solovio mysterious lights and music. He called on the bishop Teodomiro, who found in the place St James the apostle’s tomb, whose body had been brought to Galicia by his disciples.

Alfonso the second, the Chaste, ordered a church to be built round the apostle’s tomb. Since then people, irrelevant of origin or nature, arrived in Santiago to kneel before the apostle bringing with them as gift language and culture from far away places, the source of ideas, inventions and history.
Santiago, today capital of Galicia, dwelling place of the Patron Saint of Spain, is capital of Europe too and here - like in Rome - all roads converge.

By one of these roads, the Old French Road, the famous road to Santiago, we arrived in Santiago. And if the pilgrim had as his immediate objective the great Cathedral of St James we will go there after having visited the most important monuments that grew up around the cathedral through its influence and fruit of a faith than made mountains of stone rise up in a land situated at the edge of the known world.
Let’s begin to discover the Jacobean capital, the capital of the land of St James, round the old centre of the walls, whose fortress is nowadays only a memory.


We will pay a special attention to:
The Collegiate of the Sar, one of the most wonderful monuments of the Galicia Romanesque with side buttresses added in the eighteenth century to avoid the collapse of the temple because of the height of the naves and the poor foundations.
Bonaval, was founded by St Domingo in 1220. The baroque façade and the original spiral staircase were designed by the architect Domingo de Andrade. Inside, the museum of the Galician people is to be found and in the church the burial place of famous Galicians.
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