In Spain, there exists a monthly magazine about the Camino de Santiago. The articles are beyond my level of Spanish comprehension, but the charts and graphs. . . those I can follow.

This is how I learned that 438,000 people walked into Santiago de Compostela last year. Seventy-three percent of them arrived via the two most popular pilgrimage routes: The Camino Frances and the Camino Portuguese.

And how many came in on the route I was about to start? 0.05%

My husband Michael was concerned. “You like the Camino because you like to meet people,” he reminded me.

“I know. But every time I look at another route, my intuition keeps bringing me back to the Camino Invierno.”

So off I went.

I was a bit nervous. After all, back in 2014, I had abandoned the Camino Portuguese Coastal route for lack of people. And lack of trail markers. And lack of food. And lack of sun.

I was hoping it couldn’t get any worse than that.

My idea was to do this Camino like I’d done my first: carrying a pack, walking until I was tired, and then finding a place to stay.

I showed up in Ponferrada, started walking toward a hostel, found another along the way that my intuition told me was a better idea, and checked in.

Ponferrada is on the most popular Camino route so it was inundated with pilgrims. But the increase in population wasn’t what struck me the most. It was that hardly any of them were talking to each other.

They were all on their phones.

Sometimes I’d see someone cooking something in the kitchen. Alone.

Or a pilgrim sitting in the living room. Alone. Staring at their phone.

One of the things I like most about staying in hostels on the Camino is the conviviality. Was that now a thing of the past?

I sat at a table in the kitchen and pulled out my journal. An Asian woman sat down near me to eat her dinner. I smiled at her. She smiled back. Success! I can’t remember what I said to her, but she was happy to talk and we did so for twenty minutes.

I sat in the living room for a time flipping through some of the books on the coffee table. I could see the kitchen and front desk from my spot. Pilgrims came and checked in one by one. Hardly a word was shared beyond that.

A man sat down on a nearby chair. I looked up, but he was pulling out his phone. I’m not sure he even knew I was there.

The next day 99.95% of these people would be continuing their walk on the Camino Frances. I, wanting to avoid the increasingly popular routes, would be walking the Camino Invierno–which wasn’t even a recognized Camino route until 2016. Its history, however, dates back to Roman times–long before Santiago de Compostela even existed.

So the fact that no one wanted to talk? Well, I guess it was just the universe preparing me for the solitude of the route on which I was about to embark.