The Casa de los Cubos pilgrim hostel is slowly starting to forget about the pandemic. Although the president of the Association of Friends of the Camino de Santiago de Burgos, Jesús Aguirre, admits that “we have not yet recovered” from Covid, he is optimistic after a summer in which the facility on Fernán González Street is regaining its pulse.
Luna and Alessandra, of Italian origin, are two of the 11,500 pilgrims who have passed through the hostel in Burgos between January and July. Both began the Camino alone, meeting in Larrasoaña, a small Navarrese town north of Pamplona, and have forged a friendship that, as they excitedly recount, will last beyond this experience.
The Association believes it is feasible to reach 20,000 users in 2024 and exceed the numbers from last year. In fact, they expect to have a large influx of pilgrims in September. In that month last year they already received more than a hundred visitors a day and they hope to improve it. However, the more than 30,000 pilgrims that there were in the whole of 2017 are still seen as an unattainable goal.
The one who has experience in this Camino de Santiago is David, who has done it thirteen times, while Pedro, a Guipuzcoan who loves this tradition, says that he was unable to finish it two years ago and this summer he decided to return to where he left off. Caroline and Renné began the pilgrimage in Belgium and their legs will have covered more than 2,500 kilometres when they reach Santiago.
Aguirre regrets that the accesses to the Camino to the city, in Gamonal and Capiscol, are two steps that could be made much more humane and made more natural. For example, widening the pavement, installing benches, green areas… There are many possibilities to make it more welcoming. Other pilgrims, due to poor signage, choose to walk along the area next to the Arlanzón river and miss some essential monuments in the urban area such as the Monastery of San Juan. “They get to the Plaza de Santa Teresa or the Santa María bridge and until they see the Cathedral they don’t know where to stop,” argues Jesús.
Aguirre is a lover of the French Way of St. James and the landscapes that start in Saint-Jean Pied de Port and lead the pilgrim towards Roncesvalles, the Pyrenees, Navarre, the vineyards of La Rioja and reach the Castilian steppe, another of the most precious places for the president, who also praises the image of the sunflower fields found along the route and downplays the drought suffered in summer on these sections of the Way.
The association itself is convinced that the Camino de Santiago will continue to break records and will be able to recover the numbers from before the pandemic.
