It is said that the Way of Saint James was first taken up by no less than Charlemagne, and that it follows, roughly, the Milky Way. There is quite a lot of star imagery along the trail, including this beautiful piece that a wind energy company mounted (Spain has hundreds of windmills) to commemorate the way of the wind meeting the way of the stars.
Puenta de la Reina is significant for another kind of meeting: the Camino Aragones, the southern route, joins Santiago at this point. Which once again makes bedspace very hard to find. It also attracts a new pilgrim nemesis; the tour groups.
For a lot of people, joining a chauffered tour is as much pilgrim suffering they can cope with. And while generally, these people stay at finer establishments than your local gym floor, they still compete for the unique entitlements all pilgrims need. Notably, the daily passport stamps you need to collect to make you entitled for the certificate de compostella when you arrive in Santiago.
The stamps – nothing special, really – simply prove that you have been to a town, and are usually had at the auberge when you register. So it was after a 28 kilometer day, dead on my feet, that a tour group SWARMED ME, crushing me against the buttress of the auberge so that they could GET THEIR STAMP before getting back on the bus for their luxury hotel, even though I was in the process of getting a bed so that I could REST for the first time in 8 hours, and really just wanted to get out of the way. It took Darcy barking at them to get them to comply.