Buen Camino! by Peter Murtagh

Author:Peter Murtagh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Buen Camino!
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan
Published: 2011-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

BERCIANOS DEL CAMINO

PETER: Pity poor Bercianos. It’s a one-horse town and even he has checked out. Bercianos’ one obvious asset, the church of San Salvador, a substantial structure on a ridge at the edge of the village on the Camino, collapsed in a heap some 20 years ago. All that is visible today is a huge pile of rubble—mud, bricks, mortar dust and splintered beams—and the arched entrance. The good beams have been dragged from the rubble but are still, 20 years on, in a pile beside the collapsed house of God. And with it, the life has gone out of the village, or so it seems to the passing pilgrim.

Some 250 people live in Bercianos. So says a sign at the entrance to the village. It is 858 metres up on the Meseta Alta, surrounded by wheat fields and not a lot else. Most of the buildings in the village are made of mud: mud mixed with straw, rounded pebbles, broken tiles—anything essentially that will bulk out the mix and give it a bit of strength. In most instances the deep-brown mud walls are not plastered and so the matrix is clearly visible—as are the wooden lintels above windows and doors. Bockedy tiled roofs overhang the walls, affording a degree of protection from eroding rainwater. The streets are largely empty, devoid of people save for the occasional, almost always elderly person shuffling along to the tiny grocery shop or the bar where a TV blares out football news to an almost empty room. The clientele when I peer in include two late-middle-aged Japanese pilgrims standing at the bar. God knows what they make of this place but to me, much of the village, and the atmosphere within it, are like parts of a film set from one of those classic Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood and featuring, somewhere along the way, the treacherous looking Lee Van Cleef. All that’s missing is tumbleweed blowing aimlessly down the empty streets.

But the albergue turns out to be a delight. It too is a mud brick structure, the façade of which has been lined with brick. Inside the wide, square, ancient, wooden front door there is a large entrance hall, paved in patterns of small cobble stones. Upstairs the rooms have timber floors and the walls are all plastered with a mix of mud and straw, exposed wooden beams within the mud giving added strength. The building was given to the Augustinians in Madrid some years back by the parish of Bercianos and it is now a nightly refuge for pilgrims on the way to Santiago. The reception is manned when we arrive by two young men and Father Antolin Javier, an Augustinian. They are all volunteers and accept only a donation of an unspecified amount for a bunk bed and a warm reception. Father Javier normally works in the Augustinian provincial bureaucracy in Madrid where he is also an assistant parish priest and a teacher of philosophy. He is very much in charge of events in the albergue.

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