o camiño empeza agora
We are Jose and Isa
We walked the Camino de Santiago some years ago. It was a way to meet ourselves and each other. It was a way to fall in love. Now, we are a couple and we live together in Santiago. Our experience as pilgrims was transformative. The Camino was the beginning of many things in our lives but the end of that adventure. Just then we understood that walking changed our lives and you cannot ever stop walking. Each end is a new beginning. The camino is always changing and is always a new beginning. At the farthest end, the way begins now (o camiño empeza agora).
Every year thousands of pilgrims arrive in Santiago and yet we felt a certain indifference to our arrival on the part of the city. When we arrived in Santiago, we found hundreds of shops that offered repeated copies of the same souvenirs and many shop assistants didn’t understand what we had just lived. We felt the need for something different, a place where we could swap our experiences and feelings in the Camino and find a unique present that could represent our experience when returning home.
That idea was evolving and came to life with our shop: o camiño empeza agora. We offer craftworks, literature and gastronomy, not only from Galicia, but also from different places along the Camino de Santiago, taking as a reference the French Way (Navarra, La Rioja, Burgos, Palencia, León and Galicia). We hope that pilgrims can appreciate our place as a part of their route, a place where their feelings are understood and shared.
We have also learned that life itself is a way that never ends. And to fully understand it, we need to live in the here and now. The most important thing is each step and not the place from we started or where we arrive. What makes the difference is the vital experience of being, here and now. For this reason, our shop is not only addressed to pilgrims, but also to everyone that values a conscient life, people who search for gifts where the craftsmen put their own experience of life and time.