First years
At its medieval peak, between the 12th and 13th centuries, as many as 250,000 pilgrims a year - some estimates go much higher - made their way to the tomb of Saint James in Santiago de Compostela.
The Camino was one of the three great Christian pilgrimages, alongside Jerusalem and Rome. It shaped Europe’s roads, hospitals, churches, and imagination.
Then, almost everything that could go wrong did.
Wars, pandemics, religious upheaval, political isolation, and centuries of neglect nearly erased the Way.
By the mid-20th century, only a handful of determined walkers still reached Compostela each year.
In 1985 the official count was just 1,245 pilgrims.
Yet today the Camino is more popular than ever.
In 2025, 530,919 people received the Compostela — a modern record.
How did a nearly forgotten medieval path survive centuries of crisis and return stronger than before?
This is the story of decline, near-disappearance, and an extraordinary revival.
The long decline
The first serious cracks appeared in the 14th century.
The Black Death (1347–1351) killed an estimated one-third of Europe’s population. Roads became dangerous, albergues emptied, and the flow of pilgrims slowed dramatically.
The Hundred Years’ War between England and France further disrupted travel from northern Europe, pushing some pilgrims to shorter sea routes instead of the long overland journey.
In the 16th century the situation worsened.
The Protestant Reformation, led by figures such as Martin Luther, attacked the very idea of pilgrimages and the system of indulgences that had motivated so many medieval walkers.
Religious wars in France and Spain’s conflicts with England and other powers made crossing the continent risky.
English pilgrimages effectively stopped after Henry VIII’s break with Rome.
At the same time, the quality of “pilgrims” changed.
Genuine religious travelers were increasingly replaced by people sent as punishment, professional walkers paid by others, or simply vagrants seeking free lodging.
The old infrastructure of hospitals and hostels began to attract crime and decline.
By the late 16th century, fear of English privateers (including the threat of Sir Francis Drake) led cathedral authorities to hide the relics of Saint James.
They remained hidden for nearly three centuries.
Almost disappeared
The 18th and 19th centuries brought new blows. The French Revolution and Napoleonic invasion of Spain damaged the remaining pilgrim infrastructure.
In the 1830s the Spanish government seized monastic lands (the Mendizábal confiscations), eliminating much of the traditional support system for walkers.
Secularisation, the rise of the railway, and changing social patterns further reduced interest in long foot pilgrimages.
Between 1825 and 1905, in 80 years, only about 10,685 pilgrims reached Santiago in total — an average of roughly 130 per year, mostly local Spanish and Portuguese peasants.
In 1867, just 40 pilgrims were recorded.
Even Holy Years produced only a few hundred walkers.
By the early and mid-20th century the Camino had become a faint memory.
The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Second World War, and Spain’s relative isolation kept numbers extremely low.
In the early 1970s, only a few dozen people walked the route in an entire year.
For nearly five centuries the Camino had been shrinking. Yet a few sparks of recovery were already glowing — and one man with a bucket of yellow paint was about to change everything.
What happened next is the most remarkable part of the story.
The revival
The first quiet signs of recovery appeared in the late 19th century.
In 1879 the relics of Saint James were rediscovered under the cathedral altar.
In 1884 Pope Leo XIII officially confirmed their authenticity.
This gave the Church a new reason to promote the pilgrimage, though numbers remained tiny for decades.
In the 1950s and 1960s the first modern associations of Friends of the Camino appeared (Paris 1950, Estella 1963).
The pilgrim credential was formalised in 1958.
Franco’s regime promoted the cult of Saint James for nationalist reasons, organizing mass youth pilgrimages, but the numbers of genuine long-distance walkers stayed low.
The true turning point came with one man: Don Elías Valiña Sampedro (1929–1989), the parish priest of the tiny mountain village of O Cebreiro.
Valiña was a scholar of the Camino who wrote his doctoral thesis on its history and legal aspects.
When he arrived in O Cebreiro in 1959, the old paths were overgrown and almost forgotten.
He began restoring the local sanctuary and hostel, then set out to recover the original route of the Camino Francés.
In the early 1980s he took a radical, practical step.
Armed with leftover yellow road paint and his old Citroën 2CV, he drove from the French border to Santiago, painting simple yellow arrows wherever a pilgrim might get lost.
The color was chosen for visibility and availability. When stopped by the Civil Guard near the border and asked what he was doing, he famously replied: “I’m preparing a great invasion.”
He was right.
Those yellow arrows became the modern symbol of the Camino.
Associations of friends of the Way multiplied.
Albergues reopened.
In 1985 only 1,245 Compostelas were issued.
Pope John Paul II’s visits to Santiago in 1982 and 1989 gave the revival powerful international visibility.
By 1993 — the year UNESCO declared the Camino Francés a World Heritage Site and the Council of Europe named it the first European Cultural Route — the number had jumped past 100,000.
The combination of clear waymarking, growing infrastructure, cultural recognition, and a new generation of walkers seeking meaning, adventure, or spiritual experience created unstoppable momentum.
The explosion
From a few hundred walkers a year in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Camino has grown into one of the great cultural and spiritual phenomena of our time:
- 1985: 1,245 pilgrims
- 1993: over 100,000
- 2010 Holy Year: 272,703
- 2019: ~347,000
- 2020 (COVID): 54,144
- 2024: 499,239
- 2025: 530,919 (new record)
Today more than half of all Compostela recipients are international pilgrims.
Motivations have diversified: religious, spiritual, cultural, athletic, personal transformation.
The Camino has become both a living medieval tradition and a thoroughly modern phenomenon.
Conclusion
The story of the Camino’s survival is, in many ways, a perfect metaphor for the pilgrimage itself.
Long periods of difficulty, near-disappearance, then unexpected renewal through the quiet persistence of a few dedicated people.
What almost vanished under the weight of wars, plagues, and centuries of neglect was brought back not by a single grand plan, but by scholars, priests, associations, and ordinary walkers who refused to let the path die.
When you follow a yellow arrow today, you are walking in the footsteps of medieval pilgrims — and also in the footsteps of Don Elías Valiña and all those who kept the memory alive when almost no one else was watching.
The Camino survived because people continued to believe it was worth walking.
Buen Camino!
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