Nearly 800 kilometres across northern Spain on a route walked for a thousand years — over the Pyrenees, across the meseta and into Galicia, on a network of albergues that makes it the most accessible long walk in Europe.
Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port
Collect the credencial — the pilgrim passport that gets you into the albergues and is stamped at every stop — at the Pilgrim Office on rue de la Citadelle. Weigh your pack tonight and take things out of it. Ten per cent of body weight is the rule of thumb and almost everybody starts over it.
Over the Pyrenees to Roncesvalles
The hardest day on the route and it is the first one: 25 kilometres with 1,250 metres of climbing over the Route Napoléon, ending with a steep descent through beech forest. The Valcarlos alternative is longer and lower and is compulsory when the high route is closed for snow, roughly November to March.
Down to Pamplona
Two days through Navarran villages and beech woods into the city where Hemingway watched the bulls. The route enters through the medieval walls and passes the cathedral; the plaza is a good place to notice that your feet already hurt and to deal with hot spots before they become blisters.
Alto del Perdón and the wine country
The ridge above Pamplona carries a line of iron pilgrim silhouettes and a wind farm, and the descent is loose stone that takes concentration. Beyond it are Puente la Reina's Romanesque bridge and Estella, and at Irache a monastery fountain that dispenses free wine to pilgrims.
Logroño and La Rioja
Into wine country, with the path running between vines for days. Logroño's Calle Laurel is a street of pinchos bars where each one does a single thing well. The stages here are flat and long and this is where most people find their rhythm.
Santo Domingo and the Montes de Oca
Santo Domingo de la Calzada keeps a live cockerel and hen in the cathedral, for reasons a local will explain at length. Beyond it the path climbs into the Montes de Oca — oak and pine, exposed, and the last real climbing before Burgos.
Burgos
The cathedral is the reason to stop — Gothic on a scale that stops people in the doorway, with El Cid buried under the crossing. The approach through industrial suburbs is grim; take the river route along the Arlanzón instead, which is signposted and much better.
Onto the meseta
The high plateau begins and runs for roughly 200 kilometres — wheat, sky, villages every 10 or 15 kilometres and very little shade. Many people skip it by bus and most of those who walk it say it is the part that changed the trip. Start before dawn in summer and carry more water than feels necessary.
Frómista and Carrión
Frómista's San Martín is one of the purest Romanesque churches in Spain, restored to the point of severity. Beyond Carrión de los Condes comes the longest stretch without a village on the whole route: 17 kilometres of straight track with nothing on it.
León
The meseta ends. León's cathedral has 1,800 square metres of thirteenth-century stained glass and very little wall left holding it up, which is the point. Rest a day here if the body is asking; the Parador in the old San Marcos monastery does a pilgrim rate on some nights.
Astorga and the Maragatería
Astorga has a Gaudí bishop's palace and a chocolate museum, and marks the start of the climb back into hills. The Maragato villages beyond it are half-abandoned stone settlements with their own history and a cocido served backwards, meat first.
Cruz de Ferro and Ponferrada
At 1,505 metres, an iron cross on a pole where pilgrims have left stones carried from home for centuries; the mound underneath is made of them. The descent to Molinaseca is steep and hard on knees. Ponferrada has a Templar castle at the bottom of it.
O Cebreiro
The climb into Galicia — 700 metres in eight kilometres, the steepest sustained ascent after the Pyrenees, ending in a village of pallozas, round thatched stone houses of pre-Roman design. The weather changes here and usually for the wetter.
Sarria and the last hundred kilometres
Sarria is 111 kilometres out and is where walkers who want the Compostela certificate with the minimum distance start, so the path fills noticeably from here. Book beds ahead for these last stages in summer — the albergues that were half empty for three weeks are now full by two in the afternoon.
Portomarín and Palas de Rei
Galicia proper — eucalyptus, granite, stone crosses at the crossroads and rain that arrives without warning. Portomarín was moved uphill stone by stone when the valley was dammed in the 1960s, and the church was rebuilt with the numbers still visible on the blocks.
Arzúa and Monte do Gozo
The last two stages. Arzúa is the cheese town, and the final approach passes the airport perimeter before climbing Monte do Gozo, from which medieval pilgrims first saw the cathedral spires. It is now a hill with a large modern albergue on it, five kilometres from the end.
Santiago de Compostela
Into the Praza do Obradoiro through the old town, with bagpipes usually playing under the arch. Collect the Compostela at the Pilgrim Office — take a number, the queue is long — and go to the pilgrim mass at noon. The botafumeiro, a 53-kilogram censer swung across the transept by eight men, does not fly at every mass; check the schedule.
Dobré vedieť
The credencial, stamped twice daily in the last hundred kilometres, is what gets you into municipal albergues and what earns the Compostela at the end; buy it at Saint-Jean or any cathedral on the route. Municipal albergues cost €8–15, are first-come and cannot be booked; private ones take reservations and cost €15–25. Beds are genuinely scarce from Sarria onward in July and August. Blisters end more Caminos than anything else — walk in boots you have already broken in, treat hot spots the moment you feel them, and stop before the day's end rather than after. Baggage transfer services will move a pack between albergues for around €7 a stage, which is not cheating and is what makes the route possible for many people. Best months are May, June and September; July and August are hot on the meseta and crowded everywhere, and winter closes the Pyrenees high route and many albergues. Thirty-three days is the classic schedule; most people take between 30 and 36.
Kratšie či dlhšie?
Five or six days from Sarria still earns the Compostela and is what most first-timers with limited leave do. It is the busiest and least characteristic section of the route, but Galicia is beautiful and the arrival is the same.
A bus from Burgos to León removes about eight days of flat plateau walking. It is a common choice and a contested one; walk at least two meseta stages before deciding.
Three or four more days west to the Atlantic at Cape Finisterre, and optionally Muxía. Quieter than the main route, with a coastline at the end and a second certificate.