How to plan the Camino de Santiago

How to plan the Camino de Santiago in eight steps

Planning the Camino de Santiago is mostly a sequence of eight decisions, and they have an order. Get the order wrong and you will spend weeks researching backpacks before you have worked out whether you have two weeks or five, which is the equivalent of choosing curtains before you have bought the house.

The honest thing to say up front is that you will over-plan. I did. Most people do. Then somewhere around day four the plan meets weather, a blister, a person you want to keep walking with, or an albergue that turns out to be full, and the plan quietly becomes a rough intention. That is not a failure of planning. It is what the walk does, and the pilgrims who suffer most are usually the ones holding hardest to a spreadsheet.

So plan the things that are expensive or slow to change: your dates, your route, your flights, your feet. Leave the rest loose.

1. Decide how long you have
2. Choose a route
3. Pick your season
4. Set a realistic budget
5. Start training
6. Sort documents and the credential
7. Book flights and the first two nights
8. Pack and weigh your bag

Step one: decide how long you have

This is the constraint everything else bends around, so settle it first. Be precise, and count your travel days separately. Getting from most places to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port takes the better part of a day, and getting home from Santiago takes another. A fortnight off work is twelve walking days, not fourteen.

If you have less than five weeks and your heart is set on the full Frances, walk a section instead of rushing the whole thing. Nobody who has walked it will think less of you, and the Camino is famously indifferent to how much of it you cover. Rushing is how people get injured in the third week.

Step two: choose a route

There is no best Camino, only the one that suits what you want. That sounds like a dodge, so here is the blunt version: if this is your first Camino and you have the time, walk the Frances. The infrastructure is unmatched, you will never be lost, and the social side of it is the thing most people end up valuing most.

Camino Frances

About 780 kilometres from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Waymarking is excellent, albergues are everywhere, and you will meet the same faces repeatedly, which is how the friendships form. The trade is that in July and August it is busy, and the Meseta in the middle divides opinion sharply. I love it. Plenty of people bus across it.

Camino Portugues

From Porto it is about 260 kilometres, which fits a fortnight comfortably, and it is flatter than the Frances. The coastal variant gives you the Atlantic and boardwalks. The inland route gives you Roman cobble and quieter villages. From Lisbon it becomes a much longer walk, around 620 kilometres, and considerably more solitary in the first half.

Camino del Norte

Along the north coast, roughly 820 kilometres, and genuinely harder than the Frances. More climbing, rougher underfoot, fewer pilgrims, better food, and rain that arrives whenever it feels like it. Choose it for the solitude and the scenery, not as a first Camino.

Via Podiensis

From Le Puy-en-Velay in France, about 730 kilometres to the Spanish border. The landscape is beautiful, the demi-pension tradition at gites means you eat extremely well, and it is much quieter than anything in Spain. Some French helps. I have walked it twice and once continued all the way to Santiago.

There is a fuller comparison, organised by how much time and solitude you want, on the route chooser, and every supported route with its stages and distances is on the routes page.

Step three: pick your season

May, June and September are the months most pilgrims land on, and they are popular because they genuinely are the best compromise between weather, daylight and how many people you share a dormitory with.

If you are heat-averse, avoid July and August on the Meseta specifically. There is very little shade for days at a time, and the pilgrims who struggle most are the ones who start at nine in the morning. If you go in summer, walk from first light and be finished by early afternoon.

There is a month by month breakdown on the best time to walk.

Step four: set a realistic budget

Most pilgrims spend somewhere between 35 and 60 euros a day on the Frances, not counting getting there. That range covers real differences in how people walk rather than imprecision.

Budget separately for the things that arrive unevenly: flights, travel insurance, a rest day in a hotel when you need one, replacement shoes, and the pharmacy. Everyone visits the pharmacy.

Carry some cash. Village bars and the smaller municipal albergues are often cash only, and there are stretches where the next cash machine is a day and a half away.

Step five: start training

Start about twelve weeks out. You do not need to be an athlete, and I have walked with people well into their seventies who moved better than I did, but arriving untrained is how the first week becomes miserable.

The thing to train is not distance. It is consecutive days. Almost anyone can walk 25 kilometres once. The Camino asks you to do it again the next morning, and the morning after that, on legs that have not recovered. Two back to back fifteen kilometre days teach you more than one thirty kilometre day.

• Walk with the pack you will actually carry, loaded to the weight you will actually carry
• Wear the shoes you will actually walk in, so problems surface at home
• Build in hills, including downhill, which is what destroys quadriceps and toenails
• Do at least a few back to back days in the final month

Downhill deserves the emphasis. The descent from the Pyrenees into Roncesvalles on day one is where a lot of Caminos go wrong, and it goes wrong on the way down, not the way up.

Step six: sort documents and the credential

You need a pilgrim credential, the card that gets stamped along the way. It is what lets you stay in pilgrim albergues, and collecting stamps is how you prove you walked far enough to receive the Compostela in Santiago. Get one from a national Camino association before you leave, or pick one up at the pilgrim office in Saint-Jean or at the cathedral in your starting city.

For the Compostela you need to have walked the final 100 kilometres, or cycled 200, with at least two stamps a day over that section. Sarria is where most people start for exactly this reason, which is also why the last stretch is much busier than everything before it.

Check whether your passport requires travel authorisation for the Schengen area, since the requirements changed recently and now affect travellers who previously needed nothing. Also check that your travel insurance covers multi-week walking, because some policies quietly do not.

Step seven: book flights and the first nights

Book the ends firmly and the middle loosely. Your flights, your first two nights, and your last night in Santiago are worth locking in. Everything between them should stay flexible, because your daily distances will not match what you imagined once your body has an opinion.

The first two nights matter because arriving jet-lagged in Saint-Jean with nowhere to sleep is a bad way to begin. The last night matters because Santiago fills up, particularly around the Feast of Saint James in late July.

In the middle, book a day ahead if you are walking in July or August, or if you are in the last 100 kilometres from Sarria where beds genuinely run out. Outside those, walking up and finding a bed is normal and is part of how the days stay open to being changed.

Step eight: pack, then take things out

Target ten percent of your body weight including water. For most people that lands between seven and nine kilos. Every kilo above that is a kilo you carry up every hill for five weeks.

The reliable method is to pack what you think you need, walk 15 kilometres with it, and then remove whatever you did not use. Do that twice. The things that survive are the things you actually need. The things people most often carry the whole way without ever touching are spare shoes, too many clothes, a full first aid kit, and books.

Three of everything you wear is enough: one on you, one drying, one clean. Every albergue has a sink. There is a full route and season specific list on the packing list, and the footwear decision, which is the one most worth getting right, is covered on best shoes for the Camino.

The week before you fly

Very little of this is dramatic, and most of it is the sort of thing that is annoying to discover at an airport.

• Weigh your loaded pack on a bathroom scale and take something out
• Cut your toenails short and straight, several days ahead rather than the night before
• Check your credential is packed, along with a photo of it on your phone
• Tell your bank you are travelling and pack a backup card separately
• Download offline maps for the route, since coverage disappears in stretches
• Do one final walk in your shoes, then stop training and let your legs recover

That last one gets ignored constantly. Do not do a punishing walk three days before you fly. Arrive rested. The first week is the hardest part of the whole thing, and starting it with tired legs makes it worse.