Today’s Camino is well tended for modern pilgrimage as may show the well-known label of a yellow scallop shell. The natural shape has become cultural, transformed into an iconic symbol that reassures people who may be afraid of being lost. The yellow shell is at the core of the pilgrim community, showing the right direction to follow, bringing together individuals on a universal route and reinforcing their ties when sharing the struggle. Pilgrims are instantly recognised by the way they dress – the backpack aesthetic – and by the trail they follow. All roads felled with yellow arrows or yellow shells painted on a blue background, lead to the city of Santiago de Compostela, the spectacular end of that one-way journey, where the Apostle Saint James was buried. The yellow shell is also a product of consumption, a brand that may lead some pilgrims to behave as tourists in every town they walk through, while modifying local areas to satisfy their paradoxical need of locality. Interestingly, some people walk to disconnect from the intensity of city life to find their own utopia that they may not find as easily reachable as in urban environments. One may escape from a routine to enter in another, with its codes and rules, and that is how the step-by-step trail may reassure those who may seek adventure without being too adventurous. On the other side, from a pantheist perspective, the landscapes used by the Christian religion as a scenario to obtain God’s miracles and indulgences in medieval times, are in turn consumed by the mass of the twenty-first century. In summer, the last stages in Galicia largely exceed the capacity of people that small towns could and should receive, without mentioning those who only walk the last hundred kilometres to obtain a certificate of merit on completion of their journey. In the past, walking used to be a monetary value for shrines, but today the papacy has not the monopoly anymore, letting others obtaining benefits of the pilgrimage industry such as private hostels, restaurants, pharmacies, and even Correos, the national postal service, by providing backpacks’ transport from one stage to the other to let pseudo-pilgrims walk with lightweight bulks. Nietzsche criticised the Christian interpretation of suffering as ‘the prime argument against life’ rather than ‘a veritable enticement to life’, but this analogy could be applied when observing people’s hard physical effort being overcome by a sense of comfortableness inasmuch as Capital has replaced God. In short, one may flee its urban self and the consumerist mass to find them again on the trail under more subtle forms. The illusion was there, again, and there was only one’s own will to ignore it and find enjoyable these summer holidays, or annual break, the ultimate paradox of the modern adventurer.

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If not paying attention to these obvious contradictions, the yellow scallop shell could successfully work as a powerful symbol of unity. Unknown people helped me every time I was slightly injured and needed food, water or shelter to spend the night, which made me feel an infinite gratitude towards human condition. That Christian morality has not the monopoly of charity is widely known but this increasing and contagious enthusiasm to do good on a daily basis along the trail was unusual in times when many consider our civilization to be decadent. The already weaken religion preserved an historical tradition that may have become a path of salvation for those tired of the deleterious causes and effects of their unhappiness. In Güemes (Cantabria), the rural house La Casa del Abuelo Peuto was one of the most acclaimed hostels of the Northern Camino, in which the hosts’ strong testimony of solidarity and humanism was inviting pilgrims to behave tolerantly beyond the trail, recovering a forgotten spirituality. Back to Barcelona, the yellow traffic lines and signage panels replaced instantly the yellow arrows and scallop shells. The path of redemption brightens with that yellow – easily recognizable over dark tones – that was merged into a codified city order. Back to the Mediterranean coast where the sunshine’s light, food and music bring amusement to people, I started paying more attention to those men walking with hiking shoes and backpacks wandering the streets. There were not pilgrims with whom to share past experiences; their homeless condition was hiding a much worst suffering. The trail may give sense to senseless lives as religion may do, and that is how people’s altruistic instinct along the Camino prompted me to return the same gesture to those who were truly in need, for whom my month illusion was a life reality. Thus, that is the apotheosis of the utopia, when one obeys its own instincts without reflection, without asking why these moral values have suddenly such effect on one’s actions as if the coherence of the argument was reasonably convincing. Before engaging myself as a charitable soul, a wall had to be taken to honour the Camino’s legacy, with a pseudo-artwork that I painted and stuck near Plaza del Sol – the sun square – predicting the next steps to follow.