“Bom Caminho!”, offers the barista as I weave my way through the tables and chairs that flow out of the café and across the pavement.  “Bom Caminho!”, from the peloton of road racing cyclists (male; always male) as I round the next bend.  “Bom Caminho!”, from the council’s man emptying the street bins. 

There would appear to be an assumption being made.  It could be the direction that we’re heading – north; the paraphernalia – five bags; or the date, Easter week.  Ergo, we must be ‘pilgrims’. 

‘Bom Caminho’, ‘Good Path’, might be the literal translation, but of course it relates to at least one of the many routes that lead to Santiago de Compostela. 

We’re riding out of Porto in a thickening mist, a murk of drizzle that concentrates into persistent penetrating damp.  Out of that flat soft light the next apparitions materialise, two hunchbacks with walking poles tap-tapping out their strides.  Two peregrinos carrying rucksacks shrouded by all-enveloping pochos that still show their creases, recently bought and now newly extracted from their packaging.  Looking further along the path I can make out several more ghostly outlines; yet more pilgrims.  For most this will be their first, if less than auspicious, day on this ‘caminó’.  

We’d already been asked “are you going to Santiago?”, to which we’d offered the possibly sacrilegious reply: “only if it’s on the way”.  Possibly an excommunicable reply, but we did explain that we were actually heading home to Scotland.  So with our accoutrements of baggage, our direction of north, the presumption would appear that we must be on ‘pilgrimage’.  But are we?

One dictionary’s definition suggests that pilgrimage is a journey to a religious place, or a person regarded as travelling through life, and that the term’s derivation runs through Provençal and back to the Latin for ‘foreigners’.  So by those definitions we are ‘pilgrims’, even if we’re not on an overtly religious journey.  

For many, when mention is made of the ‘Camino de Compostela’, the image will be of the route that runs east to west through the north of Spain.  The mistake lies in the singular usage, when it should be “Caminos”, plural. There are many routes just as there are many starting points.  Canterbury, Kent, being at a northerly end of one, whilst Cabo São Vicente is a southern one.  

We had ridden to the Cabo; it’s the km 0 of the Algarve cycle route.  A lighthouse perched at the extremis of mainland Europe, at the sou’western corner of Portugal and one start point of another Camino.  At this southern end the walkers tend to be Northern Europeans on packaged walking holidays with little supportive infrastructure beyond accommodation and vans ferrying luggage ahead.  However when the Camino reaches Porto everything changes.  Blue and yellow signs at every turn, granite distance posts, three metre wide cycle lanes, a vast array of accommodations.  The impression is of a visitor industry shifting from ‘sand + sunning’ to ‘pilgriming’.  It makes for relaxing touring, a journey where you don’t always feel that you’re ‘in the way’.

Although I do wonder, for the walking pilgrim, shrouded in an all-enveloping restriction of nylon, if that first granite post, the one that indicates ‘265 km’ is an encouragement.  Still, we exchange “Bom Caminho” as we stride or pedal on our way.