Living on the Camino de Santiago

Ramblings

BBC

Science, Nature, Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.6 • 732 Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Clare meets a man who completely changed his life after walking the Camino de Santiago. Andrea Abbatemarco is originally from Milan, and first completed The Way in 2005 in memory of a friend who died a year earlier in the Indian Ocean tsunami. A few years later, he walked it again with his girlfriend and just a matter of months after returning to Italy, they packed up their lives, bought a house along the Camino, and now run a hostel for pilgrims.

The Camino de Santiago is a network of footpaths that run across western Europe, all converging upon the Cathedral at Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. One of these trails is the Sanabrés which begins in Granja de Moreruela and stretches for around 225 miles to Santiago de Compostela. Clare met Andrea on the Sanabrés, around 30km out of Santiago where he runs Casa Leiras, an Albergue, or hostel, specifically designed for Camino pilgrims. Joining them is Manni Coe, a guide who leads walks on the Sanabrés, who's known Andrea for years. Manni also featured in episode one of this series which is entirely themed around the Camino.

Presenter: Clare Balding Producer: Karen Gregor

Transcript

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0:00.0	Why do some big successful brands go bust?
0:05.0	Toast is back for a new series, taking a look at the decisions that often left investors burnt.
0:11.0	I'm Sean Farrington, a BBC business journalist. I'll be hearing about the hype.
0:15.0	They're going to do the deal that makes them the most money at that point of time.
0:19.0	And I'm picking what went wrong, talking to owners and employees to ask, what can we learn?
0:25.4	It was being undercut by similar rivals.
0:28.5	It just couldn't survive.
0:30.3	Toast. Listen first on BBC Sounds.
0:34.9	BBC Sounds, music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:39.4	Okay, we're beginning another stage.
0:41.7	We're 29 kilometres outside of Santiago.
0:45.4	We can start to feel it and see it before too long.
0:48.9	Today is a wonderful walk.
0:50.4	We're going to walk through a village that has one of the oldest chapels, a Romanesque chapel, dedicated to none other than Santiago.
0:58.0	St. James is very much the theme, not just of this programme, but of this whole series of ramblings, which in celebration of our 25th anniversary,
1:07.0	is taking us to Spain for the first five programmes, walking different sections of the Camino de Santiago.
1:14.5	And today I'm back on the San Abres route with Manico, who was my guide on the very first program of this series.
1:22.9	And we're going today to meet a friend of yours who may be actually on a tractor in the distance.
1:28.9	We're hoping that's him. Yeah, there's a friend of mine, he's Italian, Andrea.
1:34.4	Because he's Italian, he's got one of the best coffees on the whole Camino San Abres,
1:38.2	and he lives here in this house that we can see in the distance with his wife and two children.
1:44.4	And it's a really idyllic rural setting where we're starting to walk just on a wide tarmac.
	...

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