According to that tradition the tomb was found in the early ninth century, in the reign of Alfonso II (792-842), when a hermit named Pelayo reported lights over a wood and Bishop Teodomiro investigated; a church was built and pilgrims followed.
In 1878 three professors of the University of Santiago examined bones found beneath the main altar and concluded they belonged to three incomplete skeletons. On 1 November 1884 Leo XIII issued a bull, cited by the cathedral's Pilgrim's Reception Office as Deus Omnipotens, declaring the relics to be those of St. James. Historians still debate how a body could have reached Galicia from the Holy Land.
The cathedral keeps the relics in a silver reliquary in the crypt beneath the main altar, on the site of a Roman-era mausoleum. Pilgrims go there to honour an Apostle and martyr of Christ in a place where the Church has asked his prayers for more than a thousand years.