All of a sudden these shadows become visible. They must be the first houses of what I’ve been half fearing half wanting for a long time: legendary Foncebadón. There’s nothing more heartbreaking than a village recently abandoned and beginning to fall into ruin. Foncebadón fills me with fear, I prefer to follow that path that goes round it over to the right.

[...]

These ruined houses that are beginning to surround me inside the cloud are taking on the multiple grotesque forms of a chain of Leonese mountains: sierras, peaks, pinnacles, ridges, buttresses, hills, hillocks, knolls, slopes, valleys. Other houses are only at the start of their collapse, displaying their secrets, their private life, with a certain embarrassment for themselves and for the viewer: that proud chimney is covered with brilliant semicircular slates, overlapping like gigantic scales of jet, but some have fallen out, revealing that it is made of humble adobe. Houses should not be obliged to show their inner wretchedness. What can have happened to their inhabitants? On a wall of the biggest, saddest ruin, the parish church with its collapsed roof, a postbox gleams yellow; and the desolation of Foncebadón becomes even more heartbreaking because I realize that a human being lives here in the midst of such ruination. Who? Where? How can they survive in this desert? The cloud-drenched solitude of Foncebadón is dense, suffocating.

[...]

Up and up, up and up. The famous Milladoiro is a great mound of stones that supports the ancient Cross of Iron, the Cruz de Ferro, at the highest point of the Way, and all pilgrims must add their own stone, carried up here from down below. The more it weighs and the greater the climb with it, the more days of purgatory you save yourself. The truth is that my stone deserves little praise either for its dimensions or for its climb.

[...]

I deposit my stone on the Milladoiro of the ancient Cruz de Ferro. Every little helps. I sit on a stone bench in the shelter of a chapel that huddles by the side of the Milladoiro. Exhaustion and solitude amidst the clouds and the wind on the top of the world, in the celestial region. This is the marrow of the bones of the Pilgrimage.

John Rutherford,

unpublished translation