Chemin d’Arles / Via Tolosana to Santiago de Compostela

Near the Adagio Aparthotel in Aix-en-Provence there is a road called Route de Galice.  Galice?  Galicia?  Was this a pilgrim road connecting to the Camino de Santiago?  It isn’t a far-fetched idea since we ran across markings for the Camino in Switzerland.  It turns out that indeed there was a pilgrim route from Arles through Toulouse and over the Pyrenees that connected with the Camino Aragonés that runs through Jaca in Spain and connects with the Camino Frances at Puente la Reina.  And the significance of Arles was that it was also a starting point for the pilgrim route to Rome.

The road from Arles to Rome, the Via Aurelia, goes through Aix on its way to Genoa, Lucca, Siena and Rome and the Italian section was built by the Roman consul Gaius Aurelius Cotta in 241 BC.  In 13 BC the road was extended to Arles, a significant Roman town, by the Emperor Augustus.  Recently a hiking route has been mapped out (Grandes Randonnee GR653-A) to trace it but it goes up into the Maritime Alps rather than through Nice and the coastal cities.  I can’t imagine the Romans building a road through the mountains when they could go along the coast line.  But maybe the new route is to appeal to hikers and avoid the cities and towns.  One hiking blog mentioned that on parts of the trail he didn’t see a single person, and this was in August, the height of the tourist season, but maybe they were avoiding the heat.

If you want to explore the route more closely, Les Amis des Chemins de Compostelle et de Rome offer an interactive map.  Their website is in French but with Google Translate…. We will let you know if we run across any scallop shells.