Since the Middle Ages, the faith of Christians who undertook enormous distances for a strictly religious purpose was one of the essential features in the consolidation of the different pilgrimage centres in the peninsula. All this was a direct challenge to human capabilities, an unmistakable feature of the pilgrim setting out on the way: distance, terrain that was hard to cross, lack of roads or poor conditions, problems with lodging, scarcity of food and human dangers.
For this reason, one of the main problems the Guadalupe institution had to face in establishing these pilgrimage ways was the huge unpopulated expanse of the districts bordering the Monastery. This made the journey difficult for pilgrims, who had to cross completely uninhabited hills over several days of hard walking, without finding shelter along the way and therefore more easily falling victim to highwaymen.
Not to mention the lack of food that might befall them through improvisation, ignorance or chance circumstances.
The reality is that a good number of pilgrims who set out for Guadalupe died on the way from these causes. The problem posed by travelling through these lands was well known to King Peter I himself towards the end of the 14th century, who saw at first hand the difficulties of the journey. Nevertheless, we know that the flow of pilgrims from the east, especially in the 15th and 16th centuries, used this way because they considered it safer than the other two Guadalupe pilgrimage routes, namely the Camino de los Montes de Toledo and the Camino de Levante from Saceruela.
A leading figure of this way, who helped to establish it as a safer route, was Alfonso XI of Castile (1312-1350), founder and great benefactor of the Monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe. During his reign he ordered the levelling of the area where the Sierra de Altamira begins to descend, as it passes Puerto Rey, to make it easier for the royal retinue and pilgrims on their way to the monastery.
Our route starts in the village of Alcoba, part of the Montes de Toledo, which from 1542 belonged to the former ‘Estados del Duque’ or ‘Estados del Duque de Medinaceli’ (the Duke of Medinaceli’s estates).
