La Espina

La Espina sits at a historic crossroads on the high ground of the Sierra de La Espina, between Salas and Tineo. Today it reads as a practical waypoint on the Camino Primitivo, but the area carries one of the more quietly significant histories on the entire route.

Medieval records connect La Espina to two pilgrim-aid establishments known as "hospitals." These were not medical facilities in any modern sense. On the Camino, a medieval hospital functioned as a combined shelter, food stop, and place of charitable care for pilgrims, travellers, the sick, and the poor. They were essential infrastructure for anyone crossing exposed upland terrain like this.

One of these establishments may trace its origins to land donations made under King Alfonso III in 883, which would place the roots of pilgrim aid here among the earliest documented on the Camino. The details are genuinely contested: some sources link that 883 tradition more precisely to the nearby area of Bourres/Villarmilde rather than La Espina itself, so the claim deserves a little caution. What is clearer is that by 1268, the administrator of one of these hospitals reportedly owed four good oxen annually to the Archbishop of Santiago, suggesting an ongoing institutional relationship with the Compostelan church. The second hospital was connected to San Pedro Apóstol and to Fernando de Valdés Salas, the powerful Asturian cardinal and founder of the University of Oviedo.

The crossroads character of La Espina helps explain why all of this developed here. It was a convergence point between central and western Asturias, and pilgrims moving toward Galicia would have passed through this elevated ground regardless of their precise starting point.