The Camino

The Camino de Santiago is a historic network of pilgrimage routes leading to Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain. For more than a thousand years, people from all over the world have walked these paths for spiritual, personal and reflective reasons.

Today the Camino is walked by people from many different backgrounds — pilgrims, hikers and travellers seeking time to think, recover or simply move forward step by step.

My first encounter with the Camino happened many years ago, long before I could have imagined walking it myself.

In my twenties, while working at Shell, a colleague recommended that I read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. After that book I discovered another of his works, The Pilgrimage, in which he describes his own journey along the Camino de Santiago.

That was the first time I learned about the Camino — a path walked by people from all over the world in search of meaning, reflection and transformation. At the time, the idea of walking the Camino felt distant and almost symbolic.

Years later, life would take an unexpected turn with Long COVID, and the Camino gradually returned to my thoughts — this time not only as a story, but as a journey I would one day walk myself.

Walking this pilgrimage is not only a personal journey. It is also a way to raise awareness for Long COVID and other Post-Acute Infection Syndromes (PAIS), and to support research and patient organisations working towards better recognition, care and treatment.

In April 2027 I will walk the Portuguese Coastal Camino from Porto to Santiago de Compostela. This route follows the Atlantic coastline through northern Portugal and Galicia in Spain.

The journey covers approximately 270 kilometres and normally takes around two weeks to complete. Because of Long COVID and the need to pace my energy carefully, I will walk the route in a slower rhythm over three weeks.

Each step on the Camino represents the resilience of people living with chronic post-infectious conditions around the world.