A 500-mile, 40-day journey across northern Spain

Here there is a cathedral dedicated to St. James, whose body, legend has it, was taken from Jerusalem to Galicia for burial.

Some travellers, like Ms. Hunt, go on to Finisterrae (“the end of the earth”), a lovely city on the sea. “I wanted to see the Atlantic from the other side,” Ms. Hunt said.

Thousands of travellers take the Camino every year, for a variety of reasons, not all of them religious, but to experience a culture from the ground up, for sport or for a prolonged meditation on one’s life and place in the world.

Many books have been written about the Camino and a major movie, “The Way,” starring Martin Sheen, was released in 2010. A documentary,  “Walking The Camino: Six Ways To Santiago,” is now in release.

For Ms. Hunt and Ms. O’Halloran, the first steps were taken at St. Jean Pied-de-Port, on the France-Spain border at the heart of the Basque country, where most pilgrims start.

The Islanders were joined by several other women from Southampton who had decided to walk only for a couple of weeks, but both Islanders were determined to make a complete pilgrimage.

They had trained, beginning with long walks in November of last year. Both had always loved to walk, and Ms. Hunt had done some serous biking, travelling across Kansas and Iowa on two wheels. But lately, she said, she wanted to travel at “a more human pace. Ten or 15 miles an hour was too fast.”

The traveling at times was arduous, with the terrain evolving from flatlands to hills and the surfaces changing from rocks to large stones to dirt and concrete.

Ms. O’Halloran suffered a mild case of sore feet, but Ms. Hunt came through blister-free. “I thanked my ancestors for good genes and blessed the man who sold me my shoes,” she said.

The landscapes they travelled through included views of snowcapped peaks and beautiful, long views of a pastoral world. They trekked past lush scenes of small gardens, pastures with goats, sheep and cows set along orchards and vineyards.

“It was so old, yet not covered up and built on,” Ms. Hunt said.