All throughout the year there are people that walk all over Spain to get to Santiago de Compostela. There are different routes to take to accomplish the pilgrimage, starting in Southern France, starting in Portugal, starting in the south of Spain… All different but all with the same ending, arriving at the Spectacular Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.
We did not walk it, we made it one of our stops in touring Galicia this summer, it’s definitely amazing! We were only staying one night and we chose to stay near the Cathedral since we weren’t going to be there for long. We stayed at the Franciscan convent which has been completely reformed and turned into a hotel. It’s a mesh between stone and old feel meeting simplistic modern.
Crossing the street from the convent-hotel you walk aside old buildings that are actually part of the university. And then you arrive to the large plaza where the Cathedral is and the Parador de Compostela. You have to look to all sides, above, and all around essentially to take in the mixture of Baroque, Romanesque and Gothic buildings all around you. I leave you below our favorite pics we took.
Of course you get hungry with all the walking around! There are plenty of places to eat tapas of all kinds, give yourself a treat as your tummy will be very happy!
After dinner walk around the streets and head back to the plaza. It’s breezy and the temperatures have cooled down. You will encounter groups of people just sitting in the plaza talking about their pilgrimage, it’s inspiring, amazing, en-lighting, fun. If you are lucky you might even catch a group of students singing popular songs. These groups are men that belong to one of the universities, usually in the last years of their degree and they sing with hopes of getting tips and/or selling their CDs. They are called Tunos or La Tuna . In this case we saw the Law students Tuna.
ccarretero 
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