The Dirección General de Turismo of the Junta de Castilla y León writes of “Way from Madrid,” one of the Santiago pilgrimage trails:
Who go along it encounter stretches of Roman road, overcome with joy the mountain’s summit Fuenfría, emulate the Galician reapers along the trails that led them to labor camps in Castilla la Nueva and, ultimately, pay homage to Pilgrim Virgin of Sahagun while are linking to the path that comes by the traditional way which starts at Somport or Roncesvalles in Spain.
The next paragraph establishes a new frontier between metric and imperial measures in the ever-evolving cultural geography of Europe: while the distance from Madrid (which we are helpfully reminded is the capital of Spain) to Sahagún is 325.3km, when in that thriving metropolis we join the French Way French influence mysteriously ends and we are told, in a manner comprehensible only to elderly Anglo-Saxons, that the remainder of the journey is “something over 364 miles.”
Translation is hard work, so the next-but-one paragraph is quite sensibly left in Spanish. Finally, having transported us all this way from the capital of the empire, “only straight horizon which is broken by the verticality of the towers of the churches and trees like protagonists of the banks of rivers and streams,” our guide has a sudden and miraculous change of heart and decides that this is not in fact “Way from Madrid,” but “Way to Madrid,” perhaps as in “All roads lead to…”
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