Camino Photo of the Day: Don Elías Valiña Sampedro

The other side chapel of the Iglesia de Santa María la Real in O Cebreiro, dedicated to Santiago, contains what many would say is another miracle. This is the tomb of Don Elías Valiña Sampedro. He was the parish priest here in the 1970s, and he was the man who first painted the yellow arrows along the Camino route. He very much rescued the Camino from it’s nineteenth and twentieth century obscurity and popularized it for the modern age. His guidebook, published in 1984, was the first in centuries.

There are only a handful of people who can truly be said to have shaped the Camino – Saint James himself, Bishop Theodemir, King Alfonso II of Asturias (the first pilgrim), Santo Domingo de la Calzada, San Juan de Ortega. To these, we must add Don Elías.

Date: 25 April 2016
Place: O Cebreiro (Galicia, Spain)