I love the story I was told at the end of my first camino in 2003.
Like many, after the excitement of arriving at Santiago and receiving my compostela, I wandered into various stores, not willing to just sit and rest. One of the first stores I entered was full of what I thought of as "kitchen witches".
I asked a 30-something, young (to me) man if there was any significance to the overwhelming number of "brujas" hanging from the ceiling. He looked at me slowly and said in Spanish, "Well - you are perhaps aware that the people from Galicia are of Celtic origin". I nodded and he continued "The Celtic people have a tradition of having certain families of females who are healers. They are called "Meigas", not brujas, and that tradition has not been completely forgotten by us here in Galicia."
"However," he continued, "Of course we are now a very modern people and we don't go to Meigas, we go to doctors and hospitals when we are sick. As modern people, we want to forget all the strange old traditions and when we create these witches to look funny, it helps us to forget."
"But" he said, "When the doctors can't heal us, we know that the Meigas can, and we go to them for healing. It is in this situation, that our funny witch images help us to remember".
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Hard times for witches on Camino Ingles. The two first pictures from 2016, the last from 2017.
