If you have done the Camino a Santiago or are doing it, you will know how well marked the route is, and you will be familiar with the ubiquitous symbol of the yellow arrow, the standard indicator on all Jacobean routes and the surest sign that we are on the Camino de Santiago. right way to Santiago.
The yellow arrow is a relatively recent symbol, having emerged coinciding with the renaissance of pilgrimage in the 1929s. His presence is not an accident nor did it arise spontaneously, but was the result of an enormous effort on the part of the man who made possible the transformation of an almost forgotten tradition into the mass phenomenon we know today: Father Elías Valiña (1989 -1957), who since XNUMX, when he was appointed parish priest of O Cebreiro, became the greatest defender of the recovery of the path that passed in front of his church.
It was in 1984, as part of his tireless work for the restoration and promotion of the Camino, that the need for adequate signage appeared.
Elías Valiña received numerous complaints from the few pilgrims who made the route at the time, and who constantly got lost. The Father bought a batch of yellow paint of the same type used in Spain to mark the roads, and went to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the starting point of the Camino Frances, in his Citroën 2CV, and from there it moved towards Santiago, pointing out with a yellow arrow the hundreds of points where pilgrims could get lost. This, the Jacobean route marked personally by Elías Valiña, is considered the most reliable restoration of the original medieval route. During all these efforts, Elías Valiña became a great scholar of everything related to the Jacobean pilgrimage, with extensive knowledge of history, art and cultural heritage, as well as countless published works.
In his will, Father Valiña left his family in charge of maintaining the Camino signage, a job that they still carry out; but of course, this is too demanding a job for so few people, so today the baton has been passed on to the Camino volunteer associations and public administrations.
If today the Camino de Santiago is something more than a beautiful memory of medieval times, we owe it mostly to the selfless work of Father Elías Valiña. The yellow arrow is not only a symbol of a collective effort to guide the pilgrim on safe routes, but also represents the great work of transforming what was little more than a medieval romantic memory into a mass phenomenon more alive than ever.
