Samos

Samos sits in the province of Lugo, in Galicia, at the heart of the Samos variant of the Camino through the Oribio valley. The town is built around the Monasterio de San Julian y Santa Basilisa, the great Benedictine monastery that has defined Samos for nearly 1,500 years. The Camino enters the town through the gates of the monastery itself.

The Monasterio de San Julian de Samos was founded in the 6th century, traditionally by Saint Martin of Dumio, and ranks among the oldest still-active monasteries anywhere in the western world. The community has been continuously Benedictine since the 8th century and has operated through Visigothic, early medieval, and modern Spain - a thread of monastic life almost without parallel. The monastery was a major centre of Galician learning, book copying, and pilgrim hospitality through the Middle Ages. King Alfonso II of Asturias, the same king who first formally pilgrimaged to Santiago after the discovery of the apostle's tomb, was educated at Samos as a child. The 16th-century Cloister of the Nereids and the 17th-century Cloister Grande (the largest monastic cloister in Spain) dominate the interior of the complex. The Baroque monastic church was rebuilt in the 18th century. The community of Benedictine monks who live here today maintain the daily office, run the monastery school, and operate the pilgrim albergue inside the walls.

Samos has reasonable services for a small Galician town. There is a pilgrim albergue inside the monastery itself (an unusually atmospheric overnight), plus private albergues, hotels, restaurants, cafes, bars, a shop, a pharmacy, and an ATM. The town has bus connections to Sarria and Lugo.