The specific location of Santiago's home village is not given in the story, but there are many clues as to the setting.

Obviously, the story is set in a location that has Spanish has the primary language. However, there are English-speaking tourists in the area. The village has a beach and access to the ocean, so it is along a coastline. Santiago fishes in the Gulf Stream, so the coastline is along the eastern side of Mexico or on one of the islands southeast of Florida. Those who catch fish in Santiago's village take their catch "to the fish house where they waited for the ice truck to carry them to the market in Havana," the largest market city in Cuba. My interpretation is that Santiago's village is located somewhere on the southern coast of the island of Cuba, in the days before American tourists were not prohibited from traveling to Cuba.

The setting of the short story "A Worn Path" is the depression era, specifically in rural, American South. The woman is overcoming obstacles on her quest to obtain medicine for her grandson, and the long journey starts in the woods of Mississippi all the way to the town of Natchez.

The focal point of the setting of the story is the actual road, which is full of a adversity, obstacles, limitations, problems, and incidents which make her path extremely difficult to complete, and her goals appear to be consistently blocked. This is allegorical to the life of black Americans in the depression era society, and in American society in the old South.

The only part of the setting that is stated in the story is "it was December--a bright frozen day in the early morning."  The time period must have been early to mid-1900's because of the cost of a nickel during this time period.  It wasn't worth a lot to most people, but to Phoenix it was.

The other half of the setting is the place.  This takes place in the south and most likely in Mississippi since this is where a lot of Welty's fiction takes place. She is out in the country as she makes her physical and "spiritual" journey.

What is the setting of "A Worn Path"?

Setting generally comprises both time and place. We learn toward the end of the text that it is the Christmas season, that there are "red and green electric lights strung" all over the streets of Natchez, a city in Mississippi. Phoenix Jackson is traveling to the city from her home in Natchez Trace, outside the city, to retrieve medicine for her grandson. The white man Phoenix encounters on her way to the city also, rudely, says something about how she must be going to town to see Santa Claus.

In terms of the year, the story would seem to be set in the Depression era, likely sometime during the 1930s, as Phoenix and her grandson are referred to as a "charity case" by the nurses at the doctor's office she visits. Further, Phoenix references "the Surrender"—presumably the fall of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery in the American South —saying that she was too old to attend school when the war ended and she was freed. If she was, say, fifteen or twenty years old then, in 1865, by 1935, Phoenix would be ninety or close to it. So, the story really couldn't realistically be set much later than this. Her evident poverty and her treatment by the man in the woods would also seem to support this.

What role does the setting play in “A Worn Path"?

The setting of the story—and everything that Phoenix Jackson must go through in order to procure the soothing medicine for her grandson's chemically-burned throat— seems to raise her journey through the forest and fields and city to the level of quest, an archetypal quest that a hero might make. Phoenix is the only person her grandson has to care for him, and she is the only person who can go and get the medicine. Her quest for the medicine has many elements of the archetypal hero's journey: Phoenix meets a monstrous man in the shape of the hunter who points his gun straight at her to frighten her, she crosses a body of water (when she closes her eyes and walks across the log, depending on her feet to know what to do), she is struggling to obtain something valuable and quite important, and she must overcome numerous setbacks and terrible scares and keep going no matter what. Phoenix does, indeed, seem to be both special and at the same time symbolic of the lengths to which one person will go for another person they love.

What role does the setting play in “A Worn Path"?

In Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path," setting plays a very important role. Welty has written a great deal about the importance of place in fiction, and her own fiction reflects this. This story's setting is the Natchez Trace area. The action takes place in Mississippi in the 1940s. The role that setting plays, then, is to provide the protagonist, Phoenix Jackson, with a place to take her journey into town. She must walk through the wilderness of the Natchez Trace, which includes brambles, trees, fallen logs, wild dogs, and hunters.

Because she is a very old and nearly blind woman, the journey is especially treacherous for her. However, she makes it every year because she must get medicine for her sick grandson (although no one is very certain whether her son is sick or dead). The role of setting, then, is to aid in character development. Because the setting is dangerous in many ways, and Phoenix remains determined to make the journey, Welty shows that she is a strong, determined woman who will overcome any obstacle.

What role does the setting play in "A Worn Path"?

In addition to the geographical location in which the story is set (the American South), the timing of the story is also quite important. These elements combine to make Phoenix Jackson's life and journey all the more difficult and the circumstances and success of her journey all the more exceptional. The story takes place near Natchez, Mississippi, sometime not too long after the end of the American Civil War, 1861–1865. We know this because, when Phoenix does make it to the doctor's office, she tells the nurse at the counter that she never went to school herself because she "was too old at the Surrender." By the "Surrender," she must mean the Confederate surrender to the Union army at the end of the war. Now, she's an old woman, she says, so this could easily be the beginning of the twentieth century, but we can safely say that racism is hardly better then than it was fifty years prior, especially in the Deep South, where Jim Crow laws weren't even abolished until the 1960s. We see Phoenix's one experience with the racist, aggressive, and frightening hunter when he aims his gun at her just because he can; what repercussions are there for him? None. Even the little boy who offers her cake and then disappears could be symbolic of the promises the US government made to freed slaves and then never kept. Phoenix's ability to survive such an incredibly harsh world—first as a slave, and then as an underdog as a result of her race and her age—in order to support her grandson is all more magical and amazing, as her name would suggest, in light of this setting.

What role does the setting play in "A Worn Path"?

The story is set in rural Mississippi. Phoenix Jackson is making the journey to Natchez to get medicine for her grandson. Note that although it is in Mississippi, a typically warm to hot climate, it is a December morning and the ground is frozen. This may be fortuitous in that it is not an extremely hot day. However, it may be more difficult for her to travel in colder weather since she is not used to it. 

The "worn path" is worn because Phoenix has consistently made this journey. But it is still a difficult one because it is made through the forest. In the interim between this and the previous trip, the forest may have grown over the path in some spots, making it more difficult each time. Just as the mythical phoenix rises again and again from its ashes, Phoenix Jackson must make the journey again and again. In this repeating cycle, she must also wear the path down again where the forest has overgrown it. 

The setting in this story is everything. Consider the title. Although it is a "worn" path, it still presents plenty of obstacles for the aging Phoenix. She must go up hills. Her dress gets caught on a bush. She must cross a log that acts as a bridge over a creek. She must get through a barbed wire fence, get out of a ditch, and negotiate a racist hunter. The setting is one extended obstacle course. It shows the lengths she must go through to get the medicine. Her destination is "shining" with bells ringing. The destination is a shining, glimmering goal. Compare this with the wooded, obstacle-filled path.