The Man Who Keeps Coming Back to the Camino
When Jaime has two weeks off, he doesn’t go to the beach. He takes his backpack, finds a train or a plane or a bus, and goes back to where he left off on the Camino de Santiago the year before.
Jaime is a Tour Director—the specialists who lead our small-group active travel tours across Europe and beyond. Tour Directors aren’t guides in the conventional sense. They’re people who live in, or have lived deeply inside, the places they lead. They know which stretch of trail most people miss, which village is worth the detour, which moment on a long day changes everything. One of Jaime’s territories is the Camino de Santiago, the ancient network of pilgrimage routes that winds across northern Spain toward the cathedral city of Santiago de Compostela—and he knows it the way most people know their own neighborhood.
He has completed two full Caminos—the northern coastal route, one of the oldest in existence at 35 or 36 stages, and the primitive. He has walked individual stages of various other routes more times than he can easily count.
“The backpack that you carry is the backpack you carry in your life,” he says. He goes back, he explains, because the Camino does something most travel doesn’t—it pulls you out of your comfort zone without pushing you into panic. And because that feeling is worth repeating, he keeps returning to it.
It’s a useful window into how Jaime thinks about the Camino—not as a destination to be checked off, but as a practice. Something you return to not because you didn’t finish, but because finishing was never the point.
For centuries, people walked the Camino for religious reasons. Today, they come for all kinds of reasons—athletic challenge, personal reset, a friend’s invitation, a vague feeling that it might be worth it. Jaime is careful to say that the community is not a religious one, even if it can become a spiritual experience. What unites people isn’t faith or fitness. It’s the act of moving through landscape at human speed, with nothing much to do but walk and talk and notice things.
He believes walking speed is the best way to know a place, to know a country. “Camino is not just to reach the end of the stage,” he says. “In between the starting and the end of the stage, there are many, many small chapels, special trails, landscapes. And only if you are hiking, you can get the attention to that and be surprised for that—not just be taken to that place.”
The routes EF Adventures takes draw from the best of several Caminos, threading through the north of Spain—the Basque Country, Asturias, and Galicia. Jaime considers this the finest food region in Spain. “We have the best vegetables, the best seafood, the best meat,” he says. “Get ready to eat a lot.” On his first Camino tour, he recalls, travelers stopped asking what the next hike was. They started asking what the next meal was.
One of the things Jaime is most careful about is who the Camino is actually for. The mood on trail is different from a conventional hiking tour, he explains, because many of the people walking it have never hiked before in their lives. “They decided this year to accompany a friend,” he says. “So the mood is different. It’s not so professional. It’s more casual.”
What he wants travelers to feel when they take their first steps is simpler than most people expect. “To really stop their minds,” he says, “and to open—to speak to new people that come from everywhere in the world. There are no defenses, nothing to defend. Just be yourself.”
Part of what makes that possible is a greeting so ordinary it becomes extraordinary. Along the Camino, everyone says it to everyone they pass: buen camino. Have a good journey. Jaime loves watching travelers use the phrase for the first time—the surprise, he says, at how openly people respond. “It’s not just a ‘hi, hi,’” he says. “It’s like—buen camino—and then buen camino! And then it’s like an invitation for a conversation that can happen or not. But they really open their eyes. And they really feel for the first time that they are in the Camino. This is different.”
He’s watched the phrase start friendships. He’s watched it start more than friendships. Many people, he says, have met their partners on the Camino and ended up living together. They started by saying buen camino, and ended with I do.
Jaime talks about two archetypes he sees on trail: the climber, who needs the summit, whose success is measurable and whose failure is clear. And the pilgrim, who has no summit. “There’s no summit,” he says simply. It is, he believes, one of the only places in the world where that’s truly true—where what you came for and what you find are rarely the same thing. “When you think you are coming to the Camino for one reason, what happens is that you come back home with the real reason that you didn’t know until it happened.”
He has a favorite stage—the ascent to O Cebreiro, the entrance to Galicia. It’s a hard climb, especially at the end of a long day. But in spring or autumn, the colors and the openness of the landscape are impressive. And at the top: a chapel from the 7th or 8th century, with local stone constructions you cannot find anywhere else in Europe. “Everything is complete once there,” he says.
In his first Camino tour with EF Adventures, there was a woman in the group who arrived with a recent surgery, her mobility not quite what it had been. Her luggage was delayed in the early days of the trip, and she was quietly, persistently worried about something inside it. When the team offered to replace whatever was missing, she said no. It was something, she told them, that couldn’t be bought.
The suitcase arrived the day before the group reached O Cebreiro. Inside it were the ashes of her husband.
She had come to the Camino to grieve him. To honor him in that particular place, at that particular moment of her life. She hadn’t told anyone. She had simply walked, day after day, present and warm and generous with everyone around her—and carried it all the way to the top.
“She decided to do that in this particular moment of her life, during the Camino tour,” Jaime says. “And she offered so much happiness to us during all the week. I really believe that it’s one of my best memories of the Camino.”
Walk the Camino with EF Adventures
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