Bercianos del Real Camino: a pure Camino village on the meseta

Few places live the Camino de Santiago as completely as Bercianos del Real Camino, a village of barely two hundred souls on the plains of south-eastern Leon. Its very name tells its story: settled around the 10th century by people from the Bierzo, it grew along the royal French Way, and even today its main street is the pilgrim road itself, 353 kilometres from Santiago.

Pilgrim heritage

Documented from around the year 950 in donations to the great monastery of Sahagun, Bercianos welcomed walkers for centuries, and in modern times it founded one of the first volunteer-run pilgrim hostels of the Leonese stretch, in the old parish house of 1850. At the entrance to the village stands the little brick hermitage of Nuestra Senora de Perales, "La Perala," which in the 12th century belonged to the famous pilgrim hospital of O Cebreiro; an old inscription promises forty days' indulgence to those who pray a Salve there.

Adobe, church and lagoon

The village keeps the earthen architecture of the Tierra de Campos, and its church of El Salvador holds a fine 16th-century carving of Saint John the Baptist and the tomb of Leonor de Quinones, lady of the place. Nearby, the steppe wetland of the Laguna Grande attracts birds of the open plains.

Getting there

Bercianos lies about ten kilometres from Sahagun on the A-231 between Burgos and Leon, between the stages of Sahagun and El Burgo Ranero.