Elías Valiña, the priest who had a pilgrim vision

Portrait of Elías Valiña.Archive of the Valiña family

Of the infinite number of pilgrims who pass through O Cebreiro, Galicia, every year, almost no one knows Elías Valiña (1929-1989).

While they drink their beers and their sandwiches and learn about the best remedy for blisters, even when they talk about how the Camino soothes their soul and all that, they never remember the priest.

They would honor him if his story were disclosed, beyond a bust of him next to the church.

Valiña was the parish priest of O Cebreiro and had a vision and a mission, that the medieval route would once again be the reference of centuries ago.

To remedy some of the forgetfulness of him comes

Elías Valiña, or inventor of yellow frechas,

from Arraianos Produciones.

It is a website (eliasvaliña.gal) and a traveling exhibition whose first stop was the Casa de Galicia in Madrid and which in spring will travel to A Coruña, Lugo and Lisbon, and then continue its pilgrimage.

“He was a Renaissance man, a type of action and at the same time an intellectual and a dreamer, although not even in his wildest dreams could he have imagined where the revival of the Camino reached,” says Aser Álvarez, director of the project.

In 1989, when Valiña died, 3,500 pilgrims were registered in Santiago.

In 2023 there were close to 450,000, the record.

Manuel F. Rodríguez, author of the

Great Encyclopedia of the Camino de Santiago

, states that in the eighties in other European countries interest in the route had already been revived and that Valiña's great contribution was leading it in Spain.

He was born in Sarria, another Galician town on the Camino, into a humble family.

He read and wrote well, so they sent him to the seminary at the age of 12.

He studied Canon Law at the Pontifical College of Comillas.

In 1959 the Church sent him to O Cebreiro, a mountain village where he lived in the basic, hard and incomparable pallozas - pre-Roman houses made of stone and thatched roofs -, without electricity or running water.

That is, to a place of those that we call lost and empty, we so full and oriented.

For the young Valiña it was as if he were sent to the center of the world, at least his world, because, as he was already a student of the Camino, being in O Cebreiro, the mythical first Galician stop on the French Camino, the northern Jacobean route, felt at the core of the legend.

From the beginning he focused on social help to the neighbors, on studying more about the Camino and on learning from the pilgrims, especially Central Europeans, who crossed the cold and fog of O Cebreiro as free, wandering souls.

Valiña was awarded the National Research Prize with the first thesis on the Camino de Santiago.

And at the end of the seventies or beginning of the eighties, it is not known exactly, he decided to make the entire journey from Roncesvalles (Navarra) to Santiago de Compostela, pointing with yellow arrows in the direction of the road, which had no indications.

He did it with his pious old Citroën 2CV, the

two horses,

a bucket of paint and a brush.

The priest said that one day, while crossing Euskadi, the Civil Guard stopped him at a checkpoint.

When they opened the trunk and saw the paintbrush and the bottle, the agents suspected that, despite his accent, he could very well be an

Abertzale

who was doing graffiti.

Valiña, as always, dressed in street clothes, explained his task to them.

They didn't believe it and took him to the barracks.

When the sergeant ordered him to explain the story that he was painting the historic Jacobean route, the priest looked at him and said: “I am preparing the great invasion.”

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