Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Medieval City

The origins of the city of Santiago de Compostela as a shrine date from the discovery of the relics of James the Apostle in the ninth century AD, this heralding the beginning of the arrival of pilgrims from the north of the Iberian Peninsula and the Frankish Kingdom. However, it would not be until the eleventh century that this pilgrimage acquired great popularity, leading to the creation of a structured network of towns and cities in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, a network of Christian towns and cities of which the most important were Pamplona, Logroño, Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Burgos, Sahagún, León, Astorga, Sarria, and Santiago de Compostela, around which the Christian kingdoms of the north of the peninsula were founded. These towns and cities were connected with others, further to the north and on secondary pilgrim routes, such as Oviedo or Bilbao.

The Camino de Santiago, or Way of St. James in English, provided the basis for an economic and social network stretching between Compostela, the north of the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe. The most significant towns and cities along the French route were Tours, Le Puy, Vézelay, Toulouse, Nimes, Bordeaux, and Paris. Various ports in the British Isles were also points of departure for the sea routes leading to Santiago, among them Plymouth, Canterbury, Portsmouth, Cork, and Dingle, as were cities belonging to the Hanseatic League, such as Hamburg, Kiel, Gdansk, Riga, Bergen, and Copenhagen.

As Goethe once said, Europe made itself by walking to Santiago, and much of its urban network was interconnected thanks to the pilgrim routes to Compostela. What is more, the towns and cities along the various routes, to a large extent, share the same kind of urban structure. [Page 683]They are longitudinal in nature, with a generally regular pattern of criss-crossing side streets articulated around a main street in which the church dedicated to St. James and the cathedral occupy a prominent symbolic position in the city center. Another common characteristic is the high density of commercial establishments, due to the fact that for centuries the Way of St. James was the main artery for the exchange of goods in medieval Western Europe.

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