The Association of Friends of the Camino de Santiago in Ávila has presented a guide to pilgrimage from the province to Santiago de Compostela, through the southeast or Levante route.
The book collects all the cities through which this route runs, as well as maps, stage profiles and other useful tourist information for all those who wish to start their pilgrimage from Ávila.
The authors of this work, Manuel Aliaga and Francisco Serra, have presented the guide, making known a part of the work that began in 1993, studying the Army cartographic plans.
Serra, in charge of the practical part, assures that they have been based on the roads described by Juan Villuga, “a Valencian royal postman from the 16th century who wrote a small book as a compendium of all the known post roads in Spain up to that point. epoch“.
“This guide has involved many efforts for our group “, says the president of the Association of Friends of the Camino de Santiago, Raquel Martín, who highlights the importance of this work to travel the more than a thousand kilometers of the southeast route , which connects Valencia, Alicante or Murcia, as the case may be, with Santiago de Compostela.
Also present was Manuel Fuentes Hernández, commissioner of the Roads to Santiago by Castilla y León, who affirmed that “it is essential that the southwestern or Levante road unifies the name and the objective”.
On the other hand, the Friends of the Camino de Santiago de Ávila association has scheduled activities for 2009.
In total, there will be four commissions. The first will be in charge of signaling the road, including the interior of the municipalities. Another will study the creation of shelters in Cebreros, San Bartolomé de Pinares and Arévalo. Another of the work teams will be dedicated to the edition of a quarterly magazine and will be entrusted to the organization of the pilgrimages.
The organization of a congress in Avila on the Camino del Sureste stands out, which will be supervised by the Supranational Organization of North Atlantic SMEs (Ospea).
They will also focus on the dissemination of the path in educational centers and will publish a new informative brochure. Added to all this is the holding of a traveling exhibition of photographs of the road from the contest held last year.
Likewise, the association will continue with activities such as the stages of the French Way and the marches on the Camino del Sureste through the province of Avila. They will repeat with the Bajada del Sella in which they will make the primitive path and that of the Cinco Villas. And also, together with the non-governmental organization Manos Unidas, they will hold a march on the road to poverty in the third world. On the other hand, they also plan to hold the cycle of conferences.