Page 51 - DreamScapes Magazine | Spring/Summer 2023

The road to Finisterre—the place pilgrims have called the end of the Earth—winds through rounded hills and alongside silver beaches. The last section rises to a rocky headland crowned by a lighthouse. A bronze sculpture of a hiking boot is bolted to a weathered boulder in front of the lighthouse. The monument marks the pilgrim’s age-old custom of leaving behind worn shoes in celebration of their completed pilgrimage. Perched beside it, high over the roiling ocean, I spot a fishing boat bobbing on the waves like a toy in a bathtub. Looking beyond it to the horizon, I understand how pilgrims in medieval times with no knowledge of the Americas would experience a walk to the end of the Earth as a satisfying epilogue to their spiritual journey. Through their eyes, I can imagine how they believed there was nothing beyond the sea as if the sudden drop of these Galician cliffs into the ocean is all the Earth there was.
The French Way
At the lighthouse, I meet honeymooners Catie Greene and Chas Klisis from Colorado. Greene, an Episcopalian priest, and Klisis, an engineer and amateur photographer, started a one-month pil- grimage in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the French side of the Pyrenees Mountains. They followed the 790-kilometre French Way, the most popular of all the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage routes, across the northern plains through the foothills of Galicia—a dis- tinct region with its own language, culture and rich culinary traditions—to its capital, Santiago. With a few free days left before flying home, the newlyweds headed here to see Finisterre.
When I ask whether their pilgrimage has left them with any important life lessons, they tell me that it has. But, adds Greene, “We don’t know what the lessons are yet. They’re still emerging.”
Costa Da Morte
The walk around Cape Finisterre leads north along the Costa da Morte for a long one-day hike to another rocky finger pointing into the Atlantic near the seaside town of Muxía. Here, Santuario da Virxe da Barca (Sanctuary of the Virgin of the Boat) rises above
GALICIA’S HEAVENLY SEAFOOD
Galicia is known for seafood. Wild harvested and cultivated shellfish, finfish and octopus are popular along the Costa da Morte. For its menu and its location on a stretch of white beach framed by a wide bay and distant mountains, the Restaurante Tira do Cordel near Finisterre is excellent and at the same time, typical. Inex- pensive, set breakfast menus are designed for pilgrims. The Menú del Día (Menu of the Day) starts with fish and includes an entrée, bread, drink and dessert. Razor clams, barnacles, whole grilled fish, crab and scallops—the symbol of the Camino de Santiago—star on the menu.
SPRING/SUMMER 2023 DREAMSCAPES 51