google translation of first article for English only pilgrims:
Jema Sil faces her fifth pilgrimage to Santiago this year alone in a wheelchair. He started the Camino del Norte more than a month ago, which he later decided to link up with the Primitivo and connected with the French. "Years ago I spent a New Year's Eve on the Camino and it was wonderful, and this time I wanted to do it for Christmas," he explained yesterday. But this Thursday everything was cut short. It was eight in the morning and he was leaving Melide following the arrows. When he had rolled for a kilometer, in an area with many trees, a man approached him from behind. "He told me: 'Give me everything you have or you will never sit in the chair again.' Then he knocked over my chair and threw me out of it. I had a purse and I gave him what I was afraid of: 100 euros and some coins," she said, still very nervous.
This 49-year-old Galician pilgrim —who now resides in A Coruña but lived in many places outside Galicia—, once she managed to get up, she returned to Melide to go to the health center, notified the local police and details that she denounced the facts before the Civil Guard. She has extensive experience on the Camino - "I have many compostelas" -, and she pointed out that it is the first time that she has suffered a robbery. «I had already passed through here years ago and nothing had ever happened to me. Nor did I ever think that when I left town they would rob me. It could be in the middle of the Camino, but as soon as you leave Melide... », she detailed from Santa Irene (O Pino) under a wooden structure in which she had decided to take shelter to spend the night. She explained that she could see few details of the man and that was what she transferred to the Civil Guard, trusting that they would find him because she could be at any other point on the route.
The robbery, she added, she left her without money since her card did not work at ATMs that she found — "in Santiago there are my cashiers" —. She spent the night from Thursday to Friday in Arzúa, where a person she knew paid for her hostel. "I spent the night without sleep. And today when I went out into the street I was in a panic, I didn't want to get on the Camino, so I did it directly by road », she pointed out. "They tell me: 'Go home', but how am I going to do it if I can't take a taxi, or a bus, and all I can do is keep rolling?" She explained that she does not want help for it either: «I would not have accepted that they take me. It's my road and I have to roll it. [...] I was afraid to continue, but my mother and my God give me strength». She doesn't know if she will arrive in Santiago today or tomorrow. Of course, she warns people who make the pilgrimage alone to be on alert and asks that vigilance on the Jacobean route be also intense during the winter. "My dream was to spend Christmas on the Camino and they have taken it away from me," she declared.
