The website of its City Council, defines Molinaseca as an oasis on the Camino. And certainly it is, especially for the pilgrim who, coming from the Astorga maragata, sees partly the penalties of his route completed by the intricate roads of Mount Irago and the Valley of Silence.

Before entering the city, his first and at the same time required visit, is located in the peculiar Sanctuary -excessively modified, to the point of offering an extremely neoclassical aspect, oblivious to all traces of what could be his original and original factory Romanesque - of the Virgin of the Way, whose apse, however, forms an extension of the grotto on the slope, indicating, possibly without margin of error, that the place must have been, in time immemorial, a sacred space dedicated to cults pre-Christian.

Then, and also as an extension of the most peculiar street of the place - that of the Pilgrims, as it could not be otherwise - the ancient medieval bridge, made of stone, constitutes a gratifying bastion, rising up to the Meruelo river, which precisely in that place, it forms natural pools, ideal for bathing in the heat of the summer.

It should not be strange, too, that once the bridge is crossed, the pilgrim who faces a long, narrow street for the first time has the feeling that not only have the rusty mechanisms of the clocks been stopped, but that even time itself - generally skillful and elusive as an imaginary eel - would have fallen prisoner in the prison of that no less imaginary magical board that is the game of the Goose, and remain, idle, lethargic and possibly intoxicated, waiting for the chance to see liberated to continue his inexorable path.

But it is difficult to get it, because, by appearance, one would think-if it were not for the inopportune presence of a new building, which alters with its vision an ancestral harmony-that some terrible spell -perhaps similar to the imperious veto of silence with which San Genadio punished the creatures of the Valley of Silence- he has fallen on a street, which, even today, maintains, at least in form, on either side, those inns and taverns, which made Molinaseca undoubtedly one of the most prosperous and welcoming places of the Jacobean Way.

At the end of the street, where it forms an angle of forty degrees with the road that two kilometers beyond, flows into Ponferrada, a stone cross -monxoi, to play by the steps that serve as a base- houses a lantern maragato that, similarly to that one that can be appreciated in Castrillo de los Polvazares, keeps with pious devotion a small image of Christ.
Both, located in front of a corner inn, seem to suggest to the pilgrim the opportunity to feed, twice, soul and body.

And once after doing so, and back to the road that, as I said, two kilometers beyond leads to Ponferrada and continues to the monastery of Carracedo and Villafranca del Bierzo, before facing the hardships of the climb to Mount Lucense de O Cebreiro, one can not think, if not, in that miraculous effect that makes, by an optical effect -or perhaps, by a trick of the old Maya, the Illusion- that the simple statue of Iacobus, bless him and tell him to see you soon , floating on the waters.

It is difficult, then, that in one way or another, one does not feel part integrated in the immemorial magic of a region, El Bierzo, and some towns that seem to have been born by and for the Way of the Stars.

Villages and mysteries of the Camino de Santiago.

NOTICE: Originally posted on my blog MEMORIES OF A PILGRIM. Both the text (revised and expanded) and the photographs (unpublished) are my exclusive intellectual property. The original entry, where you can check the authorship of juancar347, can be found at the following address: https://jc347.blogspot.com/2012/04/molinaseca-un-oasis-en-el-camino.html