'WOULD YOU like a nice cup of hot chocolate?" one of the women by the door asked Natasha, my 16-year-old daughter, as we stepped in out of the rain, writes PETER MURTAGH
The answer wasn't long coming and soon we were sitting in front of a wood-burning stove, boots off, feet to the fire, thawing nicely. The weather was tipping down and we had covered 21.5 kms since our last overnight.
We were in Rabanal del Camino, a small village west of Astorga on the Camino de Santiago, the Way of St James in northern Spain. And the warm welcome was at the Refugio Gaucelmo, a well-kept, stone-faced building adjoining the Benedictine monastery of San Salvador del Monte Irago. The refugio provides overnight accommodation for pilgrims walking (and in some instances cycling) the Camino. Both it and the monastery are fairly small - as is the parish church opposite: not much larger inside than a decent-sized living-room, with half its floor dug up to reveal empty sarcophagi. All part of a restoration plan which had not advanced an inch since my last visit nearly a year before. The plan is sadly mired in local bickering.
But back to the refugio. The two women on duty to welcome us a few weeks back turned out to be Margaret from Wickham Market in Suffolk and Gillian from Coventry. They dutifully inspected our pilgrim passports to confirm our status as genuine Camino pilgrims and stamped us in for the night. No, they told us, there was no fee, just a donation. The amount was up to us. €10 went into the donation box, about the average cost for two beds in similar refugios along the Camino.
For this we got - apart from warmed feet and hot chocolate - bunks in a small, tidy dormitory with accommodation for about 20 pilgrims. Windows overlooked the square and tiny church. There was a communal bathroom and facilities for washing clothes. The walls were whitewashed. Downstairs, apart from the sitting-room and its small library, there was a well-equipped kitchen, where we cooked some pasta which we ate with bread and salad and wine.
Back in the hallway, notices told of the popularity of the Refugio Gaucelmo. Last year, 6,329 people stayed there - 1,263 of them from Germany, pipping the Spanish, who managed only 1,153. Ninety-seven came from Ireland. On April 6th last, a Basque man, Jorge Manot Etxabe, must have been surprised to find himself hailed as the refugio's 104,000th pilgrim - a significant milestone for a place that 18 years before was little more than a pile of rubble.
Rabanal is a small village on the lower slopes of the Montes de Leon. Thankfully there are almost no cars; they bypass Rabanal, preserving it as a sleepy backwater. There are two churches and the monastery, a couple of small shops and a pub-cum-restaurant (three course pilgrim's dinner plus half-bottle of wine for €8). Rabanal's homes are made of uncut stone, like innumerable rural hamlets in the region, and most of the occupants make their living off the good farming land that surrounds the village.
When it was derelict (roof collapsed, fallen beams slicing through walls), the Refugio Gaucelmo must have been the village eyesore. But then it was eyed by a few members of the Confraternity of St James, an organisation founded in 1983 by six English people of faith. They were Ian Dodd, who worked for the General Synod of the Church of England; Peter Johnson, who was in insurance; Robin Neillands, a travel writer and publisher; Patricia Quaife, a local government officer; Mary Remnant, a musician and musicologist; and Jocelyn Rix, a horticulturist - an eclectic group who shared a love of the Camino and wanted to promote it.
The confraternity has about 2,000 members now; in the early days, enthusiasts concentrated on giving talks and publishing articles exploring the religious, spiritual and historical aspects of the story of St James and the Camino. By 1990, they were looking for a meaty project and came upon the rubble of what was Rabanal's defunct parish house. An imaginative partnership between the Confraternity, their Spanish counterparts - the El Beirzo branch of the Federación Espanola de Asociaciones de Amigos del Camino de Santiago - and the Bishop of Astorga saw the wrecked building given, in effect, to the confraternity on the basis that it would be rebuilt and turned into a refugio with funds from the Confraternity and building works supervised by the El Beirzo amigos.
Today's gem is the result: a place of shelter, a meeting-place for the gaggle of people from all over the world constantly making their way to Santiago. To borrow Hemingway's phrase, it is a clean, well-lighted place
We slept well - who wouldn't after walking 21.5 klms and downing a bottle of wine? - and next day tackled the mountains: two sets of them, rising to 1,500 meters, dipping back down to 600 and then up again to about 1,350. And onwards to Santiago, spending nights in refugios, but few a nice as Gaucelmo.
As we came down the gentle slope into Samos, a small Galician town with a vast monastery, a slight women walking the other way spied our flags. "Irish," she pronounced with certainty and delight. This was unusual because almost everyone assumed we were Italian. We stopped and chatted. Rabanal came up somehow and I mentioned the refugio run by the two English lady volunteers.
"Yes!" exclaimed the woman, "I'm looking forward to seeing it." And she explained how 25 years previously she had walked to Santiago from Canterbury. Walked. The whole way. Now she was going from Santiago to Le Puy in France.
Natasha and I marvelled at her enthusiasm and warmth and I cursed myself for not asking her name. Back home, I emailed Margaret from Wickham Market. "She knew all about the refugio and the Confraternity," I said. "The person you met was Jocelyn Rix," said Margaret. Jocelyn Rix! One of the founders of the Confraternity, one of the movers behind creating the Refugio Gaucelmo. What a coincidence!
Interesting things happen on the Camino and the people you meet on it are brill. . .
• Tonight in London, the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Confraternity of Saint James will be celebrated at a reception in the House of Lords hosted by Baroness Kay Andrew. Information about the Irish Society of the Friends of St James is available online via www.stjamesirl.com or from the society at 14 Sandymount Road, Sandymount, Dublin 4.