El Camino Frances, an ancient pilgrimage route, starts at St Jean Pied de Port in France and continues for about 800km across the northern part of Spain to Santiago de Compostella

Ellen and I arrived in Madrid on the 25th of April 2002 and took the subway to Violetta,s ( a friend of Ellen,s son Ralph) apartment where we would stay the first night in Spain. As we only had three weeks for our journey we decided to take a bus from Madrid and start walking at the old Roman city of Astorga.

It would take us 14 days walking to reach Santiago de Compostella. About 275 kms from Astorga to Santiago
The names of the towns on the left are the places we stayed each night on the walk. On the following pages there are some pictures I took along the way. Not many as it seemed to be too much trouble to get the camera out of the back pack most of the time.
Next page: Day 1,2,3 and 4