Santiago de Compostela – Lo Vedo Life

The Chemin in bloom

Le Chemin fleuri

It’s all about the flowers
In May, my friend Claude and I completed the second half of one section of the Chemin de Compostelle, or Camino de Santiago. The full section starts in Le-Puy-en-Velay and finishes in Conques. You can read about it here. For last year’s two posts about the first half of this section, click here and here.

I always make photographs of flowers, and in May, the flowers were abundant. Because I had so many photos, I decided to do a second post that’s all botanical. I’m also going to try doing this one in both English and French.

Chemin de Compostelle, Redux

This photograph summarizes our walk on the Chemin: wet weather, muddy terrain, and a whole lotta green.

From Le-Puy-en-Velay to Conques
In May we returned to the Lozère-Aveyron area to walk the second half of the section of the Chemin de Saint-Jacques that we had begun in June of 2022. You can read about the beginning of the adventure here and here.

A refresher: my friend Claude had long wanted to walk from Le-Puy-en-Velay to Conques. Many French people consider this to be the prettiest section of the Chemin in all of France, which is saying a lot. Take a look at the black and grey map below to see how France is covered with variations of Chemin routes, nearly all of them converging in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port.

Chemin de Compostelle (Part Two)

And they’re off!
As I wrote in the previous post, we began our walk in Le-Puy-en-Velay, a lovely historic city about two hours southwest of Lyon. It’s one of the ancient starting points in France for the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela (Saint-Jacques de Compostelle in French) in northwestern Spain, 1,522 kilometers away (946 miles).

This route is often called the Via Podiensis, although its more utilitarian name is the GR 65, where “GR” stands for Grande Randonnée (great trek). All of the GR routes are marked with a white-and-red blaze, which you’ll see in the photos below. This section of the GR 65, between Le Puy and Conques, is considered by many French people to be the prettiest in all of France. Our plan was to walk half of it now, and half later. When we started out, I tried to say “Conques or bust!” to Claude. As often happens, it fell flat, but we finally figured out that “Conques ou rien!” would be the translation (Conques or nothing).

Chemin de Compostelle (Part One)

Too many photos! Too many stories! So I’ve divided our adventure into two blog posts. Part One is the background of our journey on the Chemin de Compostelle and the big kick-off in the historic and beautiful city of Le-Puy-en-Velay. Part Two covers our eight days of walking, through lovely, ever-changing country … with a lot of cows … and flies.

How did I get here?

As often happens, I was chatting with my friends Maryse and Claude about interesting places to visit in France. Somehow, we landed on the Chemin de Compostelle (Camino de Santiago, or The Way), and in particular, the portion that starts in Le-Puy-en-Velay and ends in Conques, a walk of about 220 kilometers. They agreed that this is widely considered to be the prettiest section of the Chemin in France.

Claude gave me a wistful look and said that he’d wanted to do this for 40 years. So I said, “Let’s do it!”