Way of Saint James

Overview

The Camino de Santiago is a network of medieval pilgrim routes across western Europe that all finish at the same place, the tomb of Saint James the Great under the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. Nobody sells tickets to it. There is no gate, no season and no permit, and the only thing you have to buy is a credencial to get stamped along the way, which is why it draws more people now than at any point since the Middle Ages.

The Pilgrim’s Reception Office issued 530,987 Compostela certificates in 2025, a 6% rise on the 499,239 of 2024 and the third record year in a row. That figure counts only people who walked far enough to qualify and then queued for the paperwork. Plenty of others walk a week of a route and go home without asking for anything.

One route dominates. The Camino Francés carried 242,179 pilgrims in 2025, 46% of the total, running 738 km through five autonomous communities and 166 towns and villages, from the Pyrenees across Castile and León to Galicia. The two Portuguese routes together took another 190,344 between them, the central inland version with 100,835 and the coastal one with 89,509.

Most people do not walk a whole route. Sarria was the single most popular starting point in 2025 with 162,076 pilgrims, 30.5% of everyone who finished, because it sits 115 km from Santiago and just clears the 100 km minimum for a certificate. Porto followed with 51,572, then Tui with 41,644, Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port with 30,345 and Ferrol with 28,885. Four of those five sit almost exactly at the 100 km mark of their route, which tells you what the modern Camino mostly is: a five to seven day walk, not a two-month one.

The crowd is more mixed than the word pilgrimage suggests. Walking accounted for 492,087 of the 2025 arrivals, about 93%, with roughly 4% by bicycle and a few hundred on horseback, in wheelchairs or by sailboat. Women were 53% of arrivals. Spaniards were the largest single nationality at 228,527, roughly 42%, and Americans the largest foreign group at 43,980, ahead of Italians and Germans.

Timing has shifted too. September overtook August as the busiest arrival month in 2025 at around 15% of the year’s total, and May to October accounts for roughly 79% of all arrivals, leaving November to February with under 7% between them. Walk in winter and you will have long stretches of trail alone, along with a lot of shuttered bars.

History

The routes exist because of a grave. Records of visits to the shrine at Santiago start in the 9th century, in the time of the Kingdom of Asturias and Galicia, after the relics of Saint James were said to have been found in the Galician countryside. Legend has the discovery made by a hermit who saw a star shining over a hillside, which gave the place its name: campus stellae, the field of the star, worn down over time into Compostela.

Foreign traffic built slowly. The earliest recorded pilgrims from beyond the Pyrenees arrived in the middle of the 11th century, and it took another hundred years before large numbers were coming regularly, by which point the pilgrimage had become a well organised operation. Pope Callixtus II, one of its great promoters in the 12th century, started the Compostelan Holy Years, still the reason a Camino year with 25 July falling on a Sunday draws heavier crowds than the ones either side of it.

The route got its guidebook around 1140. Book V of the Codex Calixtinus is still the source most modern guides ultimately lean on, and it maps four routes originating in France that converge at Puente la Reina before a single well-defined line crosses northern Spain by way of Burgos, Carrión de los Condes, Sahagún, León and Astorga. Walk the Francés today and you are following a line somebody wrote down nearly nine centuries ago.

Not everyone came willingly. Long pilgrimages were imposed as penance for serious sins, and the registers of the Inquisition at Carcassonne list Compostela alongside Rome, Canterbury and Cologne as destinations handed down for the graver crimes. A tradition in Flanders still pardons one prisoner a year on condition that he walks to Santiago with a guard and a heavy pack.

Proving you had actually arrived was the other problem, and the answer became the reason everyone now wears a shell. Badges shaped like scallops were sold only in Santiago at first, and were so easy to forge that counterfeit versions were being hawked at the entrance to the city, which pushed the Compostelan prelates and the Pope into decreeing excommunication for the forgers. Harder-to-fake cartas probatorias, evidentiary letters, were being issued by the 13th century, and those letters are the direct ancestor of the Compostela handed over today.

The Black Death, the Reformation and 16th-century political unrest emptied the routes, and the collapse lasted centuries. Few modern pilgrimages predate 1957, when the Irish Hispanist Walter Starkie published The Road to Santiago and gave the walk a second life as something other than an act of penance. The real recovery came in the 1990s.

Three things happened in quick succession to make the modern Camino. The Council of Europe named it the first European Cultural Route in 1987. The Xunta de Galicia opened its public hostel network in 1993, taking the medieval hospitals as the model, and it now runs 76 hostels with more than 3,000 beds. UNESCO inscribed the Camino Francés in the same year, then extended and renamed the property in 2015 to cover five routes across northern Spain plus sixteen individual buildings, with the French routes listed separately in 1998.

Walk any stage of the Francés now and the medieval infrastructure is the thing you keep tripping over. Stone bridges far larger than the villages beside them need, hospital churches in settlements of forty people, a Romanesque font in Redecilla del Camino carved as a walled city, a Templar castle above the river at Ponferrada. The towns were built for a traffic volume that vanished for four hundred years and then came back.

Visiting

Everything starts with the credencial, the pilgrim’s passport, and it is the one piece of admin the Camino genuinely requires. You get one in person at the Pilgrim’s Reception Office in Santiago or from institutions the cathedral authorises to hand them out, meaning parish churches, confraternities, Associations of Friends of the Way and pilgrim hostels. The official version is printed on card and folds out into sixteen concertina pages, most of them empty boxes for stamps. There is also a digital credential app for Android and iOS, and stamping points can generate a digital version of their stamp for it.

Two things the credencial buys you: a bed in the hostels run by the Christian hospitality of the Way, and the evidence you need to claim the Compostela at the end. It confers no other rights, and organised groups travelling with a support car are asked to find accommodation elsewhere and leave the hostel beds for people carrying their own gear.

The distance rules are precise and worth reading before you book flights. On foot or on horseback you need at least 100 continuous kilometres on one recognised route, and the final stage must be the one leading into the cathedral. By bicycle it is 200 km on the same terms. If you start on foot outside Spain on a recognised route, the required distance inside Spain drops to 70 km.

On the trail the day runs to a fixed shape whichever route you pick. Waymarking is the yellow arrow and the scallop shell, painted on kerbs, walls, fence posts and the backs of road signs. Most people cover 20 to 30 km, stopping in villages for coffee and to collect a stamp, and aim to be indoors by early afternoon because that is when beds go.

Galicia’s public hostels set the standard the rest of the network is measured against, and their rules are published. A bed costs €10 per person per night, doors open at 13:00 and close at 22:00, lights go out at 22:30 outside the common areas, and you must be out by 08:00 the next morning. No reservations are taken at all. Beds are allocated in the order people arrive, and where there is competition the priority runs pilgrims with physical limitations first, then walkers, then riders, then cyclists, then anyone travelling with a support car. One night only, unless you are ill.

Private hostels along the route do take bookings and cost more, and a few of the old religious houses still run their own, including the monastery at Samos on the Francés where the monks keep the hostel. On the last hundred kilometres from Sarria in high summer, showing up at four in the afternoon without a reservation is a gamble.

The finish is Praza do Obradoiro and the cathedral. Tradition has pilgrims laying a hand on the pillar just inside the doorway, worn visibly into the stone by the number of people who have done it. The Pilgrim’s Mass runs daily at 12:00 and 19:30, and pilgrims who collected their Compostela the day before hear their country and starting point read out. The Botafumeiro, one of the largest censers anywhere, is swung on certain solemnities and every Friday except Good Friday at 19:30.

Paperwork happens a few minutes away at Rúa Carretas 33, open every day from 09:00 to 19:00 and closed only on 25 December and 1 January. You take a ticket with a QR code that lets you watch the queue in real time rather than standing in it, and in the busiest weeks the office states plainly that it cannot guarantee you will be seen the same day. The Compostela itself is free. A Certificate of Distance, printed on parchment and recording your start point, dates, kilometres and route, costs €3.

If you want the plenary indulgence rather than the certificate, the requirements are separate: visit the cathedral, say the Apostles’ Creed, the Our Father and a prayer for the Pope’s intentions, and go to confession and communion within fifteen days either side of the visit. Attending Mass is recommended rather than required. The next Holy Year is 2027, when 25 July falls on a Sunday.

Plenty of people carry on walking. The routes to Finisterre and Muxía leave from Santiago and head for the Atlantic, following the old Roman road that the main pilgrim route was laid over in the first place, and ending at the cape the Romans called Finisterrae because they thought it was where the land stopped.

Tips

• Get the credencial before you leave home if you can. Associations of Friends of the Way in Spain and abroad are authorised to issue it, and the Pilgrim’s Office publishes maps of distribution points country by country. Arriving in Sarria or Tui on a July morning and hunting for one is the wrong way to start.

• Count your qualifying distance from the right place. Sarria is 115 km out, so it clears 100 km with margin, but any shortcut, taxi hop or bus around a boring industrial stretch inside the final 100 km breaks the “continuous” requirement.

• Two stamps a day in the last stretch is the working habit, and bars, churches, town halls, hotels and monasteries all keep one. Over a hundred Correos post offices on the routes will stamp a credencial too, many with a Camino-specific design.

• Aim for the hostel doors opening at 13:00 rather than a leisurely lunch. Galicia’s public network takes no reservations of any kind, allocates strictly on arrival and gives walkers priority over cyclists, so a bike rolling in at 15:00 in September can be turned away from a hostel that still has beds.

• Pack for a 08:00 eviction. Public hostels want everyone out and the space tidy by then, lights go off at 22:30, and there is nowhere to linger over coffee. Sort your bag the night before rather than rummaging in the dark.

• Correos will move your pack for you, stage by stage, on every major route. Book by 20:00 the day before, leave the bag at reception before 08:00 with the label they email you, and it reaches the next accommodation before 14:30. Limit is 15 kg and 60 km per stage, and cancellation is free up to the day before you start.

• Walk in April, October or March if you can. September is now the single busiest arrival month at around 15% of the year, ahead of August, and roughly 79% of everyone arrives between May and October. November to February gives you empty trails and a thin scattering of open services.

• Skip Santiago entirely if you arrive on a Friday evening and only want to sleep. The Botafumeiro swings at the 19:30 Mass every Friday except Good Friday, so the cathedral and the square around it are at their fullest exactly then. Come Tuesday if you want the building rather than the crowd.

• Do not plan around the free bed at the Parador on Praza do Obradoiro, because it is not a bed. The Hostal dos Reis Católicos became a hotel in 1954 and keeps its hospitality tradition by giving free meals to the first few pilgrims who turn up each day, and you have to show your Compostela or a photocopy of it to get one.

• Book anything at all for 2027 early. The next Holy Year opens the cathedral’s Puerta Santa and the jubilee indulgence to arriving pilgrims, and Holy Years have consistently pushed numbers well above the years around them.

• Break the walk across several years if a fortnight is impossible, but keep the stages in chronological and geographical order and get the extra start-of-stage stamp each time. The office is explicit that it wants to see you restarted where you stopped.

• Use the official Xunta portal for the Galician stretch rather than a guidebook. It lists every public hostel by route and municipality with location, contact and photographs, which is the only reliable way to know what has closed for refurbishment.

• Pick the route for the terrain, not the mileage. The Camino del Norte is more than 930 km along the Bay of Biscay with the elevation to match and cooler summers, while the Primitivo is 311 km out of Oviedo and steeper again. The Francés is flat by comparison, which is a large part of why it is crowded.

• If you are walking the Francés in stages, Logroño, Nájera, Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Belorado, Burgos, León and Ponferrada all have rail or bus links good enough to start or stop a trip at, which matters more than trail scenery when you are booking a flight home. Smaller waypoints like Viloria de Rioja and Redecilla del Camino do not.