I spent a month in Spain, and it began with the Camino.
It was one of the first times I’d brought my camera with the intention of taking good photographs - not just the obligatory tourist shots destined for a quick Facebook dump to family and friends. I photographed what I liked, not what I thought I should. Cows standing in morning mist. Trees bending into natural frames. Long, empty roads lined with green. The way the light shifted through the forest.
On the Camino, you walk for hours without a map, following painted yellow arrows from village to village. You don’t book ahead - you just arrive in the next town and ask the albergues if there’s a bed for the night. It all feels beautifully old-world… until it doesn’t.
I remember passing a small patch of grass where a robot lawnmower was making its way along the field. It stopped me in my tracks. For days, I’d been living in a way that felt far removed from the modern world. It felt like just me, my backpack, and my boots. In the silence was this quiet, humming reminder that outside this little bubble, the year was still ticking on, technology and all.
The Camino is made of moments and strangers you never forget. A woman with all her belongings hitched to a small cart behind her. A man named David running the opposite way with his dog, Jax, on a journey from Portugal to Istanbul (last I heard, he's just finished his journey! You can follow him here).
"I learnT a lot on this journey. One of these lessons was to not be afraid to take my camera."
I used to leave mine behind out of fear that it might break, get stolen, or simply be too heavy to carry. But without it, I realised I couldn’t capture the moments that mattered to me in the way I wanted to. An iPhone could do the job, yes, but I wanted the weight of the camera in my hands, the feeling of framing a shot through the viewfinder, the anticipation of sliding an SD card into my laptop at the end of a day. Editing has always been half the joy, it’s where I get to relive the moment and make it mine again.
After the Camino, I moved south. I visited Madrid, Málaga, Seville, and Mallorca. Each place brought new light, new faces, and new textures to collect. In Seville, I tried street photography for the first time. The city was alive in every corner, from the flash of flamenco skirts to the quiet stillness of tiled courtyards.
And as for the Camino, I’ll carry it with me the way I now carry my camera: not as an extra weight, but as something I can’t imagine walking without.
