“I Return to Love”
17–23 April 2026 | Ávila · Medina del Campo · Fontiveros · Segovia · Alba de Tormes · Salamanca · Toledo
This page holds the story of seven days of divine wandering in the footsteps of St John of the Cross undertaken in celebration of the 300th anniversary of John’s Canonisation and the 100th anniversary of his proclamation as Doctor of the Church.
What you will find here is not a travel diary. It is something closer to what John himself practised in his poetry: an attempt to read, slowly and honestly, what God was writing in a group of pilgrims as they moved through the sacred geography of sixteenth-century Carmel. Each daily entry was written by a member of the pilgrim community — not as a reporter observing from outside, but as one who was inside the experience, still warm from it.
The places are real: the prison in Toledo; the tomb in Segovia where John rests; the chapel in Ávila where Teresa made her first foundation; the room in Alba de Tormes where she breathed her last. But the pilgrimage was never primarily about places. It was about the encounter — with the Christ these two great Carmelite saints encountered in those places, and with the question that John’s whole life poses to anyone who draws near: how much are you prepared to give, so that love may do its work in you?
Read these pages slowly. You may find, as the pilgrims did, that the meaning continues to arrive long after the journey has ended.