Roads to Santiago

The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom has had a long love affair with Spain, a country where he has lived and worked part of each year for several decades. Derived from studies and sketches made between 1979 and 1992, Roads to Santiago is his many-faceted pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, taking in countless digressions through ten centuries of Spain’s history – its politics, its architecture, its landscape and its people. His scholarly curiosity leads him to unravel countless mysteries of the country and to unfold the more obscure riches of Spain. The harvest of so much learning and a long immersion in Spain’s dramatic past and its lively present is a magnificent book. In Roads to Santiago Cees Nooteboom unlocks doors to a Spain we hardly know and which he has discovered through an obsession that has lasted forty years. It is a gracefully written and thought-provoking study of a fascinating land.