Slow Travel, Nature and Pilgrimage: Learning to Pay Attention on the Camino

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

 

Simone Weil, letter to Joë Bousquet, April 13, 1942

 

The World at a Walking Pace

 

Over the years we have come to think of walking as one of the simplest things we do and one of the most complicated. At its most basic, there is very little to it. We put on our backpacks, find the next arrow or trail marker and put one foot in front of the other until eventually we reach wherever we are going. Yet somewhere in that deliberately inefficient way of travelling, when kilometres require hours instead of minutes and the landscape passes at the speed of our own efforts, something begins to change. We see more. We listen differently. Things that would disappear through the window of a car or an airplane begin to occupy our attention, while places we might once have dismissed as ordinary, inconvenient or unattractive become part of the journey rather than spaces to be endured between destinations.

 

By the time we reached the end of the Camino Portugués Coastal and Espiritual, this had become one of the most important lessons of our travels. We had not set out years earlier on the Camino Francés with a philosophy of slow travel understood or planned in advance. We were simply trying to walk across Spain, learn how to be pilgrims and make sense of a difficult period in our lives. Since then, however, pilgrimage had taken us across France on the Via Podiensis, through Portugal on the Camino Portugués Central, over quieter routes through Spain and eventually back to Portugal, where this journey began on the Rota Vicentina before carrying us north onto the Camino again. Somewhere amid all those kilometres, walking stopped being merely the way we travelled between places. It became part of how we understood them.

 

Perhaps more importantly, being more attentive changed what we thought was worth noticing.

 

Learning to Look Up

 

On our first Camino, much of our attention was practical. We worried about whether our packs were too heavy, where we would sleep, whether we were following the right arrows and how our feet would survive another twenty kilometres. Landscapes surrounded us, wildlife occasionally interrupted our thoughts and remarkable moments were recorded in our travel journals, but we were not yet consciously travelling as naturalists. We were learning how to be pilgrims and, like most beginners, much of our concentration was directed toward the mechanics of the journey itself.

 

With experience, some of that mental space gradually opened. Finding an albergue no longer felt mysterious. A stage did not necessarily seem intimidating simply because a guidebook noted a large number of kilometres for it. We knew that rain eventually stopped, sore muscles usually got used to the routine, and plans made over breakfast might bear little resemblance to where we actually ended up sleeping that evening. We also became increasingly willing to abandon the idea that progress had to be measured only by kilometres covered or destinations reached.

 

That change created room for curiosity. A bird calling from a hedgerow could delay us. An unfamiliar plant beside a road might cause us to stop. A strange building, an old wall, a wetland seen beyond an industrial estate or a path disappearing toward the coast might draw us away from whatever schedule we had planned for the day. None of these moments necessarily changed where we were going, but collectively they changed how we saw the world and the mindset we arrived with.

 

This may be one of the more essential gifts of slow travel. Walking does not automatically make anyone observant. It is entirely possible to march along a trail planning tomorrow, worrying about yesterday or staring at your phone or the ground directly in front of your boots. Slowness simply creates the possibility of noticing the wonders in the world, and over time we began to understand that every day (some days more than others) we still had to make the active choice to remain attentive.

 

The World We Keep Walking Past

 

Modern life provides almost limitless opportunities not to make that choice. Our days are increasingly designed around speed, convenience and distraction. We travel quickly because arriving is considered more important than moving through the places between, and we carry devices capable of filling every empty moment with headlines, messages, videos, entertainment and the lives of people thousands of kilometres away. Even when we step outside, it can be remarkably easy to remain mentally somewhere else, moving through a landscape while our attention stays fixed on a screen, a schedule or whatever problem we carried with us from home.

 

Walking disrupts that rhythm, although not always comfortably. There is only so much stimulation available on a road stretching across farmland or along a forest track. After the conversations fade and the initial excitement of beginning a new stage wears away, there may be nothing obvious left to occupy the mind. At first this can feel like boredom. Eventually, however, what seemed empty begins filling with detail. The wind changes direction, the light shifts across a field, the smell of vegetation changes as a path enters a forest, bells sound somewhere beyond a hillside, and water becomes audible before a river is visible. Birds that initially formed an indistinguishable background begin separating into individual songs and movements, while a village that would have appeared and vanished through a windscreen takes an hour to approach, pass through and leave behind.

 

None of this is particularly dramatic, and that may be precisely the point. Curiosity does not require the world to entertain us before we are willing to pay attention to it. It requires enough patience to remain with a place until something we had overlooked becomes visible.

 

The Ordinary Camino

 

Some of the strongest lessons in this regard came not on the most spectacular sections of our walks, but on those we initially wished would end. Years earlier, leaving Lisbon on the Camino Portugués, we spent long stretches on cobbled streets, beside highways, rail corridors, factories and industrial developments. Guidebooks warned that parts of the route were ugly and suggested ways of avoiding them. There were a number of moments we understood that same temptation. Fast traffic, concrete, noise and industrial ruins were not what we had imagined when picturing a pilgrimage across Portugal.

 

I remember impatiently wanting one unpleasant section to finish so that the “real” Camino could begin. Yet almost as soon as the thought formed, it seemed ridiculous. This was all part of the Camino. If pilgrimage meant walking continuously from one place to another, we could not simply declare that the landscapes we disliked were somehow outside the experience. Portugal did not exist only in picturesque villages, historic churches, vineyards and beautiful coastlines. It also existed in transportation corridors, industrial suburbs, ports and the places where people work.

 

Once we stopped mentally trying to escape those stretches, other things became visible. There was life in the neglected spaces beside factories. Plants spilled over fences, fascinating insects moved among flowers growing from disturbed soil and birds occupied drainage corridors, vacant lots and roadside vegetation. Small ecological relationships continued in places that, at first glance, seemed almost entirely shaped by machines, concrete, and neglect. That realization changed something in the way we walked because it suggested that nature did not begin where development ended, and attention did not have to wait for beauty.

 

When the Landscape Does Not Ask to Be Admired

 

As our walking continued, this lesson became increasingly important because long-distance journeys are rarely made entirely from celebrated views. We remember mountain passes, coastlines, cathedrals, cliffs and dramatic sunrises because those places are so dramatic that not noting them would be difficult. Yet between these highlights are the ordinary kilometres: agricultural roads, suburban edges, commercial districts, plantation forests, long straight tracks and communities that will likely never appear in a tourism brochure. In addition, some days simply do not provide the sort of moment that looks impressive.

 

Repeated walking gradually taught us that attention could not depend upon spectacle. A mountain does much of the work of capturing our gaze, while a roadside verge requires us to bring something of ourselves to the encounter. An ocean sunset virtually insists that we stop, whereas a lizard moving among weeds or litter behind a warehouse can disappear without anyone ever realizing it was there. The difference is not necessarily in the value of one place over another, but in the effort required to see them.

That realization also changed the kinds of questions we carried with us. Instead of asking only whether a section was beautiful or worth walking, we became more interested in why a landscape looked the way it did, who lived within it, how people had altered it and what survived alongside those changes. Agricultural fields began to tell stories about food and settlement. River corridors revealed transportation, flooding and habitat. Old walls supported plants, insects and lizards while also recording centuries of human effort and livelihood. Even places we might never have chosen as destinations began offering something once we stopped judging them solely by whether they were picturesque.

 

Curiosity became less about finding extraordinary things and more about recognizing that almost every place contained more than we had initially seen.

 

Nature Without Wilderness

 

The months and years of walking before setting out this year on this journey have gradually taught us to look for the living world within whatever landscape happened to surround us, rather than waiting for the route to deliver us somewhere spectacular. This was perhaps one of the most useful assumptions that slow travel has given us. We deeply value wild places, and long stretches away from roads, buildings and crowds provide a kind of quiet that is increasingly difficult to find. Yet most people do not live in wilderness, and most pilgrimage routes do not only cross it. The Camino passes through landscapes that people have cultivated, logged, grazed, engineered, drained, planted and built upon for centuries. Fields are harvested, rivers are channelled, forests may be plantations, coastlines hold ports and resorts, and ancient paths are repeatedly crossed by highways, railways and expanding cities.

 

If meaningful contact with nature required human absence, much of the Camino would offer very little. Yet our experiences have increasingly suggested the opposite. The living world persisted inside the places people inhabited, sometimes visibly and sometimes almost unnoticed. Birds nested in buildings, insects pollinated flowers beside roads, vegetation reclaimed walls, and waterways continued supporting life even as bridges and factories crowded their banks. The boundary we often draw between a human landscape and a natural one became harder to defend the longer we walked through both.

 

That does not mean pretending that development has no ecological consequences or that every altered landscape was healthy. As naturalists, we are aware of the impact of habitat loss, pollution, invasive species, plantation forestry and the pressures that tourism, agriculture and urban growth placed on the places we crossed. Yet recognizing those impacts also makes it harder to dismiss disturbed landscapes as ecologically empty. Life was still trying to persist within them, and sometimes its resilience became more striking precisely because the surroundings appeared so inhospitable.

 

Nature, like pilgrims on a long trek, is often far more resilient than we initially realize.

  

Nature and Spirituality

 

At first glance, some of the ways we walk might seem almost contrary to the traditions of pilgrimage. Pilgrims are encouraged to carry as little as possible, yet we have deliberately added binoculars, professional cameras and identification guides to packs already heavy enough. We often walk more slowly than we could because a bird has called from a hedgerow, a lizard has disappeared into a wall, or something unfamiliar is moving beside the trail. On busy Caminos, where conversations sometimes turn to distances, departure times and the familiar “race for the bunks,” choosing to stop can feel almost like stepping outside the accepted rhythm of the pilgrimage.

 

Yet I have increasingly come to believe that this way of travelling does not run counter to pilgrimage at all. For us, paying close attention to the living world has become one of the ways we enter more deeply into it. Both nature and spirituality can draw attention away from the self. Both ask us, at least occasionally, to quiet the constant interior conversation and set aside external distractions long enough to become receptive to what is actually around us. Neither guarantees revelation, and I admit that most days on the Camino contain little that could reasonably be described as miraculous. Yet by paying attention and looking closely, we begin to recognize that the world is far more alive and more dynamic than it first appears. Birds, plants, insects, waterways, weather and landscapes continue in relationships and rhythms that have little to do with our own concerns, whether or not we happen to notice them. That realization alone opens up new possibilities for how we see ourselves, others and how we move through the world.

 

Pilgrimage on the Camino gives us unusual amounts of time in which to practice that attention. Carrying binoculars, stopping for birds or arriving later because we paused beside a wetland might look like distractions from the Camino. Increasingly, however, I think those moments are a key part of our Camino. They are one of the ways we slow down enough to become present to the world through which we are passing. I do not necessarily walk expecting answers. I walk because the practice of paying attention - to landscape, to other people, to the natural world and occasionally to my own thoughts - creates space for questions that ordinary life too easily crowds out.

 

In that sense, stopping to watch a bird is not a departure from pilgrimage. It is one of the ways I have learned to practice it.

 

Paying Attention in a Distracted World

 

Years of long-distance hiking had made us stronger and often capable of covering considerably more distance regularly than when we first stepped onto the Camino Francés. What has changed is not necessarily our walking speed but our willingness to interrupt ourselves and embrace a moment along the Way.  We have become more comfortable stopping when something catches our attention, even when it had nothing to do with reaching the day's destination. We were more willing to change pace, photograph something, look more closely at a landscape or simply stand still for a few minutes without treating it as lost time or giving way to a feeling that “we are falling behind”. These interruptions increasingly feel less like deviations from the journey and more like the reason for undertaking it in the first place.

 

That distinction has changed how we understand slow travel. Moving slowly is not valuable simply because slowness is virtuous, nor because travelling on foot somehow makes a person more thoughtful than anyone travelling by train, bicycle, ship or car. The value lies in creating enough space for curiosity to operate. When every hour is scheduled and every destination optimized, there is little room for the unexpected to matter, or random thoughts to develop. Walking gives uncertainty and distraction a little more room to enter the day, but what we do with that opportunity remains our choice.

 

The most important part of this realization is that none of it requires walking hundreds of kilometres across another country. The Camino creates conditions that make attention easier because daily life is simplified and much of the usual noise falls away, but pilgrimage does not own curiosity. We can practice the same attentiveness on a familiar street, beside an urban river or while walking through the neighbourhood where we have lived for years.

 

All of which sounds both wonderful and easy – but it is actually much harder than it sounds.  Familiarity encourages us to stop looking. A route becomes merely the way to work, a park becomes something crossed on the way elsewhere, and birdsong becomes part of the background. We assume we already know the places around us and therefore stop asking what might have changed since yesterday. In this sense, distraction is not only caused by phones or schedules. It also comes from believing that what surrounds us is something we already know – and in the process we stop being curious about it. As taking the time to slow down on Camino is a choice, so too is it a choice to remain attentive at home and in our lives. 

 

And if we make that choice, to stay in the moment, where we actually are and not where our thoughts are wandering off to, and to set aside the distractions around us, we see a more interesting and authentic world – one that is far too often overlooked.

 

Looking back across the Caminos and trails that eventually brought us to this moment, perhaps the most important change was not in the landscapes at all. It was in the way we opened ourselves to see them, which, in turn, altered how we moved through them.  Beautiful places are easy to admire.  The greater challenge is learning to remain curious when the world is not dramatic or spectacular.   The plants in the cracks of a sidewalk, a roadside ditch, an ordinary city street each offer something – once we look at them carefully.  Attention does not magically transform every landscape into something beautiful, nor should it. What it can do is reveal complexity and wonder where we had previously seen only the mundane.   

 

Perhaps pilgrimage has always involved a return to this kind of focused living and looking at the world. Pilgrims have traditionally walked toward a sacred destination while searching for something less tangible along the way. Our own route into that search has increasingly involved curiosity about the living world through which we move. We have found no final answer there, and I am not sure that we should expect one. What we have found is a way of paying attention that I hope to carry with me beyond Santiago. 

 

See you on the Way!