Dutch writer and journalist Cees Nooteboom transforms his experience of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela into a narrative testimony. One may ask: how does pilgrimage, from a lived experience, become an anthropological fact through the forms of written codification used by the pilgrim-author? This speech proposes to analyse, from a literary as well as a sociological point of view, the connections between the Nooteboom's lived experience, which in itself cannot be grasped, and his writing, with its literary style and its ability to grasp reality.