On a recent trip to the Franconian village of Bamberg I stumbled across this while on a long hike in the woods:
An old and often historically old marker like this, with a shell, symbolizes that you are on the world famous but “Ken disappointing” religious pilgrimage route, dating back to the early Middle Ages and leading to a cathedral in Galicia, Spain.
It made my day! I try to hike sections of Jakobsweg whenever I get the chance, and in fact a short segment passes through Winterthur in Switzerland and is often a part of my 15 km daily Nordic walk. So I was quite thrilled to find this very unexpected branch of the trail!
Well, I was not surprised when my eyes sometimes later caught this fountain in downtown Bamberg, also adorned with a shell:
Don’t get me long – I love hiking the Jakobsweg, as countless people have been on these very same trails dating back many hundreds of years. But I say “Ken disappointing” because, after many years on my bucket list, I recently had the chance to visit the destination of the pilgrimage route, a cathedral in the Galician city of Santiago de Compostela – and I was thoroughly disappointed.
It’s on my bucket list to do a bit more research here. Did Santiago himself pass through Bamberg at some point?