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Top tips to safely enjoy Spain’s Camino de Santiago on foot or by bike

Many people are keen to undertake the famous pilgrimage. The Local has outlined some tips to get the most from it whether you're travelling by foot or bike.

Published: 23 February 2022 09:23 CET
Updated: 9 September 2023 16:30 CEST

Hikers walk toward the village of Conques, central southern France. The traditional Camino route starts in neighbouring France. (Photo by JOSE TORRES / AFP)

El Camino de Santiago is a pilgrimage that leads to the shrine of the apostle Saint James in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, north-western Spain, where many believe his remains are buried.

Having been a Christian pilgrimage from as early as the 10th century, it took until the end of the 15th century for Pope Alexander VI to officially declare the Camino de Santiago as one of “three great pilgrimages of Christendom” along with Jerusalem and Rome.

Nowadays many make the pilgrimage as a form of spiritual healing, as well as religious, and it has become very popular with hikers and cyclists and organised tour groups. Many people now create their own routes that end in Santiago de Compostela, but the traditional pilgrimage route runs from Saint Jean Pied de Port in France to Santiago de Compostela, is 765km long and takes most people around one month to complete on foot.

Keen to get out in the open air, enjoy some of the rugged Galician landscapes and make the pilgrimage yourself? See The Local’s top tips to make the famous camino below:

Take your time.

765km is a long way. If you’re feeling a little out of shape, or perhaps you simply don’t have the time to take a month off work, there’s no reason you have to do the whole thing in one trip. Many people even do sections of the walk and then return the following year to continue where they left off, doing it in spans of months or even years.

Pack for changeable weather.

Northern Spain, and in particular Galicia, is infamous for its rainy and unpredictable weather. Although you can’t pack too much with you, remember to have everything you need to be comfortable while walking. Think about suitable footwear too – for both the walk itself and relaxing in the evenings.

camino de santiago length

It’s up to you whether to choose a very long route or a shorter one, but make sure you walk the last 100km. Photo: Andre_Grunden/Pixabay

Get stamped.

At the start of your pilgrimage, you can buy a ‘pilgrim’s passport’ in which you can collect stamps to track where you’ve been. Stamps can be found inside hostels and guesthouses, at local cafes, and inside churches along the route. They enable you to document your journey, and they’re essential to receive your certificate at the end of the route.

Walk the last 100km to get ‘the Compostela.’

The certificate is known as ‘the Compostela’ and you get it when you arrive in the city of Santiago de Compostela. Not many people know this, but you can get your Compostela whether you walk all the way from France, or just the last 100km from the town of Sarria. Don’t forget your stamps – the authorities can be quite strict about handing out compostelas to people!

How to keep the budget low

Firstly think about how many days or stages you want to do, and budget from there.

Next, transportation – obviously you’ll be doing the camino itself by foot (or bike, see below) but you’ll have to factor in the travel costs of actually getting to the starting point. Most of the starting points for the route are fairly accessible by train from across Spain, but do think about the cost of flights if you’re travelling from further afield.

Accommodation is the cost that can vary: en-route there’s a whole host of options ranging from hostels starting at €5 a night, to private hostels, hotels, and rented rural houses – it all depends on what you’re willing to pay.

Likewise, you can save on food costs by using the kitchen facilities in your hostel, if they have them. Of course, if you’re really keen to save money you can stay en route for free: bring a tent and enjoy staying in some of northern Spain’s most spectacular landscapes.

camino de santiago tips

Average daily distances on the Camino de Santiago are 20 km to 25 km. Photo: Jorge Luis Ojeda Flota/Unsplash

Don’t forget about blisters

They’re always forgotten about, but on such a long walk they’re the main health issue on the Camino that can affect anybody regardless of age or fitness level. Blisters can ruin any trip, let alone one where you want to walk anything from 10 to 30km a day. Camino veterans recommend woollen socks, and to stop every few hours and change your socks. Wet feet are more likely to get blisters. If you do get some blisters, keep essentials like antibiotic ointment and blister plasters in your first-aid kit and remember, the best way to avoid blisters is to wear your shoes in before starting the route.

The Camino by bike

More and more people are doing the Camino de Santiago by bike these days, so see a few extra bonus tips on doing it on two wheels instead of two feet:

Maintenance. Regular cyclists already know the importance of bicycle maintenance. If you’re a newbie, however, and thought cycling sounded easier than walking the route, consider the type of roads you will travel, and the type of tires you’ll need. Most people go for a mountain bike, and you need to know how to fix a flat tire, and some basic knowledge of gears and brakes will help. Note that there are mechanics along the route and in the towns along the way if you really need a hand.

Bags. Less is more. Take the absolute essentials (shorts, helmet, shoes, raincoat, water) and forget everything else. You can always buy stuff along the way, but you won’t thank yourself if, after a few hundred kilometres in the Galician rain, you regret bringing all those extras.

The route. There are several cycle options for the Camino de Santiago, and you can choose whichever you want depending on how much time you have, where you’re starting off from, and what kind of route you’d like to take. The main ones are below, with suggested stages and destinations:

The ‘French Way’: 765km in 14 stages from Saint Jean Pied de Port.
Camino Primitivo: 330km in 7 stages starting from Oviedo.
Vía de la Plata: 965 km in 16 stages starting from Seville.
Camino del Norte: 820km in 18 stages, starting in Irún.

Member comments

Anonymous - 2 November 2023 at 18:22 CET

looking for current, specific, reliable information on “wild camping” along Camino Frances. Thinking of pulling a very light 2 wheeled trekkers cart from St John to Santiago next September.

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Good tourist, bad tourist: How to travel responsibly in Spain

Barcelona resident David Mar doesn’t travel, but he thinks about tourism every day.

Tourists crowd the buses — essential for movement in a hilly neighbourhood like his. They leave trash for residents to discover in the morning. They shout and sing at night and wander drunkenly through the residential streets, ambling into backyards and pulling down laundry on clotheslines.

“It’s a disturbance that goes from when you wake up in the morning until you go to bed at night,” he told The Local Spain. “You don’t feel welcome in your own neighbourhood.”

Mar lives in Turó de la Rovira, on a 262-metre hill that towers over the city.

A viewpoint atop the hill called Los Bunkers de Carmel has gone viral on TikTok for its sweeping city views, bringing hordes of tourists to come drink wine, watch the sunset, and sometimes party into the early morning.

But for the residents of the surrounding Carmel neighbourhood — among Barcelona’s poorest — the consequences of this tourist explosion have been severe.

Mar was involved in a physical altercation with a group of four Australians, after he confronted them for tipping over parked motorcycles.

And last June a 76 year-old man was assaulted by a group of seven English-speaking youths after he tried to stop them from jumping a fence that had been put up around the Bunkers.

Such events are commonplace in Carmel, Mar says, with the post-pandemic massification of tourism provoking an unstoppable flow of Instagram-like-hungry travellers, fuelled by an increasingly lucrative industry whose interests often conflict with those of local residents.

“It collides directly with the most basic rights of those who live here,” Mar says. “Our right to housing, our right to transportation, our right to rest peacefully.”

With some 1.3 billion international arrivals globally in 2023, more people are travelling for pleasure than ever before in human history.

But as excessive crowds stress infrastructure and locals find themselves pushed out of their own communities, prevailing attitudes towards travel must be reconsidered if global tourism is to continue growing sustainably.

“Tourism isn’t a right, it’s a decision that you make,” Mar says. “And if you do it, you must be aware of the consequences it can generate.”

A couple uses a selfie stick to take a picture next to a banner warning tourists on drought alert in Catalonia, near Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona. (Photo by PAU BARRENA / AFP)

Empathy abroad

Bartolomé Deyá Tortella, a researcher and the Dean of Tourism Faculty at the University of the Balearic Islands, says few tourists consider such consequences.

Instead, they embrace their inner hedonist and focus their vacation time on maximum pleasure for minimum price. This mindset might cause a tourist to forget their values and do things they’d never do at home.

“We all become capitalists when we practice tourism,” Deyá told The Local. “You think, ‘I paid for this, I’m on vacation, I’m having my moment of pleasure, I worked the whole year for it.”

Such thinking could explain why someone might respect quiet hours in their own neighbourhoods, but shout drunkenly in the streets late at night while on vacation.

Or why on a trip to Mallorca, where Deyá lives and works, a tourist might feel compelled to take a 10-minute shower — despite the water-stressed Mediterranean island’s near-drought conditions — while residents routinely shower in a minute or less.

Failure to consider saving water or respecting quiet hours comes down to lack of empathy, Deyá says, and our tendency to other the people whose communities we enter while traveling.

“Act as if you were in your own home,” he says. “If when you’re in your own city you don’t shout in the street because you know your neighbours are sleeping, why do it when you’re traveling?”

Social sustainability

Much has been said about environmental sustainability, but it’s easy to forget the social impacts of travel; how our interactions with local people and economies can change that society.

“When every one of us travels, it implies that the places where we came from are transformed, the places we pass through are transformed, and obviously, so are the places we arrive to,” Manuel de la Calle Vaquero, Vicedean of the Faculty of Commerce and Tourism at Complutense University of Madrid, told The Local Spain.

With this in mind, the most sustainable way to travel is by using one’s presence to positively impact the local community.

Or in other words, to leave a place better than you found it.

“When you jump on a plane, it’s important to make sure that trip counts for something positive,” says Justin Francis, founder of Responsible Travel, a holiday company that collaborates with local partners to plan socially and environmentally sustainable vacations.

“I advise people to fly less, keep short trips flight-free – and, when you do fly, stay in a place longer and travel in a way that does as much good as possible,” Francis says.

Anti-gentrification banners addressing were already hanging from balconies in Barcelona back in 2017. (Photo by Josep LAGO / AFP)

Neighbourhood colonisers

One of the most significant ways in which tourism can alter the social landscape is through accommodation.

Not long ago, tourists and residents in Spain did not typically mix, with tourists sticking near their hotels, rarely straying into residential zones, Deyá says.

But today’s tourist has matured, and now expects novelty; an “authentic” experience that they can convince themselves distinguishes them from the thousands of other tourists expecting the same.

Nowadays they live among residents, in apartments instead of hotels, utilizing short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, which has led to the dissolution of boundaries between a city’s tourist and local zones.

Vaquero describes this new kind of tourist as the “anti-tourism” tourist, in the sense that they’re not interested in the sort of tourism promoted by governments and travel agencies, but instead consider themselves the explorers of new “authentic” destinations outside the typical tourist sphere.

“The one who wants to leave the traditional tourist circuit and supposedly goes looking for ‘authentic’ neighbourhoods — that tourist is obviously the coloniser,” Vaquero says.

The boom in short-term vacation rentals has led to what’s been dubbed the “Airbnb effect” in neighbourhoods worldwide, in which residents are slowly replaced by a constant flux of tourists. For landlords, vacation rentals can be far more lucrative than renting to residents, thus incentivizing them to evict long-term tenants in order to list their properties on Airbnb.

This is exactly what happened to Emanuele Dal Carlo. His landlord didn’t want to renew the lease on his small Venice apartment because they could make more renting it out on Airbnb. Like so many other Venetians, Dal Carlo had to move to the mainland.

To better understand the cultural erosion he saw happening to his city as a result of Airbnb, Dal Carlo enlisted the help of researchers to conduct a study, through which he discovered only 2,000 of the 3,300 Airbnbs in the city were registered with the government, and many were rented by foreign hosts with zero connection to Venice.

This means that much of the money tourists spend on accommodation never lands on the ground, thus eliminating any potential benefit to the local economy.

“What’s wrong is that the money available from tourism is not fairly distributed between workers and residents,” Dal Carlo says.

Dal Carlo now runs Fairbnb, an ethical Airbnb alternative which promotes “community-powered tourism.” Hosts are certified local, and the platform fees are put directly towards a social project in the local community, like food redistribution or sustainable energy initiatives.

As a tourist, the best way to avoid feeding the problem is by avoiding short term rentals when possible, Dal Carlo says, and instead booking accommodations with local businesses, like small independent hotels or traditional bed and breakfasts.

And if you absolutely must use Airbnb, Dal Carlo suggests booking with local hosts.

“If you’re traveling to Venice and your host is from Finland, ask yourself some questions,” he says.

An elderly local man on crutches waits to cross as a group of tourists using Segways squeeze by and into the narrow streets of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. (Photo by PAU BARRENA / AFP)

Whose fault?

In Spain, anti-tourism protests have crescendoed in recent weeks. The travel industry, it seems, has grown beyond its means, and locals are taking note.

To some degree, the problem can be traced to poor planning on the part of local governments and the unchecked expansion of algorithmic platforms like Airbnb.

Deyá points out that many government entities in Spain have welcomed tourist money, pursuing marketing campaigns without investing in adequate preparation.

“Tourism is the typical sector where many governments say, ‘ok, let’s leave it, because this works. Don’t touch it,’” Deyá says. “But there’s been no planning, there’s been no strategy.”

Back in Barcelona, the city’s public transport authority was involved in the promotion of the Carmel bunkers through its Bus Turistic webpage, encouraging tourists to come see the “spectacular views over Barcelona.”

The promotion was taken down on April 16th after continued anti-tourism protests from the Turó de la Rovira neighbourhood council, of which Mar is a member.

But as is the case with so many industries in a crowded world full of contradictions, the individual cannot be absolved of all responsibility, as one’s choice to participate in harmful systems enables their continuation.

No law or tourist tax will compel tourists to act with empathy, and the absence of such regulations should not be used to justify one’s bad behaviour abroad.

“The problem is that we’re hypocrites, and we think that it’s someone else who has to solve the problem,” Deyá says.

Mar, who’s never been much of a traveller himself, is no longer interested in traveling internationally after seeing what tourism has done to his city.

“So much of my city has become inhospitable for residents,” he says. “Because we’re truly suffering from it here in Barcelona, the concept of tourism disgusts me more and more.”

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