Road to Santiago
The province of Burgos is the main figure on the Road to Santiago within the Iberian Peninsula. Over the almost 114 kilometres that cross its territory there is an impressive heritage which has rightly won the name of Heritage of Mankind. Redecilla del Camino, Belorada, Villafranca Montes de Oca, San Juan de Ortega, the city of Burgos, San Anton and Castrojeriz are the main milestones.
The province of Burgos has a strategic geographical situation, which made it a compulsory passing for the millions of European pilgrims who, from their countries of origin, went in search of the tomb of St. James the Apostle.
With a clear and decisive route, the French Road, an itinerary that coincides with the route described in the 12th century by the French monk, Aymeric Picaud, crosses the whole province from East to West. Following an almost equidistant corridor between the Cantabrian Mountain Range, to the North, and the river Duero, to the South, the different villages, towns and landscape appear to the passing pilgrims.
Apart from a contrasted and beautiful nature where flatland, hills, valleys and moors alternate, all the places crossed by the 114 kilometres in the province of Burgos of the French Road preserve an important mark of its passing.
On the inside of the church of San Juan de Ortega an exceptional phenomenon in the Christian world can be contemplated. Every year during the spring and autumnal equinoxes a ray of the setting sun comes in through a window and clearly falls, in a surprising mixture of architectonic techniques and astronomic observation, upon a Romanesque capital where a beautiful representation of the Virgin's Annunciation is sculpted.
Burgos guide