DNA testing identifies Teodomiro, the bishop who founded the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage 12 centuries ago.
An international investigation confirms that the remains found in 2019 belong to the man who found the supposed tomb of the apostle James in the Spanish region of Galicia.
On a July afternoon, in the central nave of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the incense of the Botafumeiro fills the air as thousands of tourists and pilgrims gather around waiting to embrace the apostle. Trying to blend in so as not to attract curious onlookers, archaeologist Patxi Pérez-Ramallo opens a trapdoor almost at ground level and points to a dark staircase leading downward. A few steps down, four meters below the temple, and we have entered the ninth century.
“The first two houses in Santiago were here,” says Pérez-Ramallo. These poor quarters, built more than 1,100 years ago, soon became the tombs of the first necropolis in the area, when the Spanish city of Santiago was just a village of devotees who came from other parts of the Iberian Peninsula in search of sanctuary. The remains of the first wall of the necropolis can still be seen, and within its walls, a chaotic jumble of tombs: extravagant sarcophagi for the rich, broken tombstones for the poor, large graves for adults and tiny ones for children, all buried without valuable objects, because it was thought that one should go to God without signs of material wealth. In several of the tombs, the dead still rest, now just bones.
In the richest and noblest part of this cemetery — which was used between the 9th and 12th centuries and where the dead even had tombstones with their names — the archaeologist Manuel Chamoso Lamas found Teodomiro’s tombstone in 1955. It was a historic discovery that has been shrouded in controversy and mystery ever since.
Teodomiro was the bishop of Iria Flavia — a settlement in the Spanish region of Galicia, now called Padrón — one of the few bishoprics that remained after the Muslim invasion of the Peninsula in 711. According to legend, the prelate found the lost tomb of the apostle James, a gifted disciple of Jesus, in a forest called Libredón. Against all odds, the bishop immediately moved to this inhospitable place, where a small temple was built. King Alfonso II of Asturias visited this temple following the coastline, thus inaugurating the Primitive Way, one of the most emblematic routes of the Camino de Santiago, or Way of Saint James. It was the beginning of a pilgrimage that continues today: almost half a million visitors come to Santiago every year to contemplate the Portico of Glory and the rest of the wonders hidden in the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral.
Until the discovery of the tombstone, it was thought that Teodomiro had never even existed. During excavations, human remains of a person were found in the grave with his name, but an analysis of the bones could not determine whether they belonged to a man or a woman
