A Lovesong for Sellos
A Lovesong for Sellos
by Thom Ryng | Tacoma, WA
Famously, if you wish to receive a Compostela, the cathedral in Santiago requires pilgrims on foot or horseback to obtain at least two sellos on their Credencial for each day of the last 100 kilometers (for bicycling pilgrims, it’s two sellos per day for the last 200 kilometers). I’ve run into many folks who find this to be an onerous requirement.
I’m a little different. I get sellos at every gîte and albergue I stay in, every open church that has one, and every café, bar, and restaurant I go to. I’ve gotten them from individuals, from roadside stands, and even amidst ruins.
When people ask me, my go-to response is to quote the venerable sages of Pokémon: “gotta catch ‘em all!” I can, without too much effort, fill an entire Credencial every 100 miles or so in Spain. It’s a little trickier in France, but even there two or three a day is entirely reasonable.
But why?
There is, to me, no better souvenir—no better memory—of the pilgrimage. They are individual to each location, and they don’t weigh a thing. While some of them are unusual or even beautiful, many are quite plain—maybe even boring. But they are, each of them, unique.
And they are part of my regimen for coping with the post-Camino blues. They tell the story of my walk, both as individual stamps and as they appear in sequence. Just perusing my old Credencials can bring me back to the Camino in my memory.
Every stamp tells a story. There’s the roadside café at the top of the hill where I sat in the shade with an Orangina and a sandwich, recovering from the afternoon heat. There’s the albergue we ran to through a sudden hailstorm. There’s that creepy restaurant that seemed to be the only inhabited building in the whole town.
The sequence tells the story, too. I will never forget the experience of a storm in the Pyrénées so vicious that it soaked through three layers to dampen my Credencials and turn many of my stamps into a blurry mess. That was a harrowing experience, and it’s reflected in the state of the stamps.
Whether you frame your Credencials or store them in a shoebox, it’s worth pulling them out every now and again and remembering your steps and your stops along the way. And you can’t do that if you don’t collect the sellos in the first place!
