DNA testing identifies Teodomiro, the bishop who founded the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage 12 centuries ago

On a July afternoon, in the central nave of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the incense of the Botafumeiro fills the air as thousands of tourists and pilgrims gather around waiting to embrace the apostle. Trying to blend in so as not to attract curious onlookers, archaeologist Patxi Pérez-Ramallo opens a trapdoor almost at ground level and points to a dark staircase leading downward. A few steps down, four meters below the temple, and we have entered the ninth century.

“The first two houses in Santiago were here,” says Pérez-Ramallo. These poor quarters, built more than 1,100 years ago, soon became the tombs of the first necropolis in the area, when the Spanish city of Santiago was just a village of devotees who came from other parts of the Iberian Peninsula in search of sanctuary. The remains of the first wall of the necropolis can still be seen, and within its walls, a chaotic jumble of tombs: extravagant sarcophagi for the rich, broken tombstones for the poor, large graves for adults and tiny ones for children, all buried without valuable objects, because it was thought that one should go to God without signs of material wealth. In several of the tombs, the dead still rest, now just bones.

In the richest and noblest part of this cemetery — which was used between the 9th and 12th centuries and where the dead even had tombstones with their names — the archaeologist Manuel Chamoso Lamas found Teodomiro’s tombstone in 1955. It was a historic discovery that has been shrouded in controversy and mystery ever since.

Teodomiro was the bishop of Iria Flavia — a settlement in the Spanish region of Galicia, now called Padrón — one of the few bishoprics that remained after the Muslim invasion of the Peninsula in 711. According to legend, the prelate found the lost tomb of the apostle James, a gifted disciple of Jesus, in a forest called Libredón. Against all odds, the bishop immediately moved to this inhospitable place, where a small temple was built. King Alfonso II of Asturias visited this temple following the coastline, thus inaugurating the Primitive Way, one of the most emblematic routes of the Camino de Santiago, or Way of Saint James. It was the beginning of a pilgrimage that continues today: almost half a million visitors come to Santiago every year to contemplate the Portico of Glory and the rest of the wonders hidden in the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral.

Until the discovery of the tombstone, it was thought that Teodomiro had never even existed. During excavations, human remains of a person were found in the grave with his name, but an analysis of the bones could not determine whether they belonged to a man or a woman.

Almost 60 years later, in 2014, the Santiago Cathedral Foundation launched a project to apply new molecular analysis methods to the remains with the aim of clarifying whether they really belonged to the legendary bishop, without whom the Camino de Santiago would not have existed. “We wanted a complete investigation with all the possibilities that science has today,” says Daniel Lorenzo, priest director of the Foundation. The project fell to Pérez-Ramallo, a 36-year-old historian from Santiago who had worked selling tickets for the Cathedral museum, before specializing in the latest dating techniques and forensic DNA analysis in the United Kingdom, Germany and Norway, where he currently works.

On a cold November night in 2019, after 10 p.m., Pérez-Ramallo waited patiently for the stonemasons to carefully remove the slab of the tomb. Beneath it was a box that archaeologists had sealed with a layer of metal in the 1950s. A blacksmith removed it “as if it were a can of sardines,” recalls the Spanish researcher.

First came shavings, then a protective cloth, and finally the skull, ribs, and arm and leg bones of the supposed bishop, who was buried in 847. Along with them was a message left by Chamoso Lamas for future archaeologists that certified the authenticity of the corpse and the difficulties in determining its sex.

The bones were cut off at their ends, and there was no hip bone or face. “The skull had masculine features, indeed, but also other indeterminate ones; and in general the complexion was very graceful,” recalls Pérez-Ramallo. That night, nothing more could be determined, and all those present agreed not to say a word about what had happened there until a conclusive verdict had been reached.

Five years and a global pandemic later, the results of the DNA analysis extracted from the bones, to which EL PAÍS has had access, leave no doubt: the remains are those of a man. Carbon 14 dating indicates that he died at over 45 years of age. His physical features suggest that he was of weak constitution and did not perform physical work during his life, which fits with a bishop.

The dating of a rib suggests that he died around 820, with a margin of error of up to 15 years more, which would be close to the date of the tombstone. The remains are the oldest found in the entire Santiago necropolis, where Pérez-Ramallo has analyzed some 30 corpses, 10 of them with DNA analysis, in a previous investigation that he paid for by asking money from his parents, a housewife and a mechanic who live in the Spanish town of Boiro.

The carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms accumulated in the bones allowed the researchers to determine what the person ate and where his food came from. The results reveal that he had a very austere diet, almost monastic, but not as spartan as that of the poor peasants of the time, which fits with a bishop who lived like a monk. The isotopes indicate that he always lived near Santiago, but his original origin was further southwest, on the coast, right where Iria Flavia was. With all this data, “we can say that it is Teodomiro with a 98% probability,” says Pérez-Ramallo, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

The remains held one last secret. The analysis of the genome revealed significant ancestry from North Africa. Previous studies have seen the same mark in present-day Galicians, which is a mystery. It is possible that it is the influence of breeding with Muslim invaders, but according to Pérez-Ramallo’s team it is too strong a sign and exclusive to Galicia. This territory was not conquered by the Muslims, although the military leader Almanzor destroyed the Romanesque basilica that preceded the Cathedral of Santiago, in 997.

The most plausible explanation, argues Pérez-Ramallo, is that Teodomiro’s grandparents or great-grandparents were descended from Romans who lived in North Africa during the Empire. Centuries later, in the 8th Century, the bishop’s ancestors were able to cross the Strait of Gibraltar with the Muslim invaders and traveled to the Christian area of the Iberian Peninsula. There, Teodomiro grew up, lived and died next to a humble temple erected in honor of Santiago. At that time, the temple was “nothing,” according to Lorenzo. However, it would later become a place of pilgrimage, rivaling Rome and Jerusalem. The research, led by Pérez-Ramallo, was published on Tuesday in the specialist journal Antiquity.

Geneticist Carles Lalueza-Fox, who was not involved in the research, praises the study. “This is a new example of personal historical genomics, similar to previous studies with the remains of Beethoven or Richard III. Over time, it will become a scientific field of its own that will allow us to reinterpret many characters,” he says. In 2019, Lalueza-Fox managed to read the DNA of the French revolutionary Jean Marat thanks to the bloody newspaper that the Jacobin leader was reading before he was stabbed to death. In the case of Teodomiro, the researcher points out, the only way to 100% identify the remains would be by analyzing the DNA of living or dead relatives, which is a significant challenge for a bishop who lived 12 centuries ago.

The next step will be to deposit, this time permanently, the remains of Teodomiro together with his tombstone, in a clearly visible place in the Cathedral. Would it be possible to do the same DNA analysis with the remains of the supposed James the Greater? According to the Bible, he died around the year 44, and legend has it that his remains arrived in a stone boat in Galicia, and now rest in a shrine next to those of his two disciples Theodore and Athanasius.

The short answer is no. For several reasons: one of them is that there would be no way of knowing who each bone belonged to, Lorenzo argues. The other is that the papal bull recognizing the authenticity of the remains of Santiago, issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1884 after their rediscovery in the 19th century, determines that they cannot be touched. Only the pope could give the order to open the relic and, in doing so, would forever distort the legend that supports the Way of Saint James.

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