Bedbugs on the Camino: what works and what doesn't

Bedbugs on the Camino get discussed in two registers: denial ('you're exaggerating, I walked the Francés and had none') and panic. Both leave you without the only thing that helps, which is a protocol. So instead of offering an opinion we counted: 80 threads on r/CaminoDeSantiago since 2023 with 'bedbug' or 'chinche' in the title, and the 1,387 comments hanging off them. The full count is below; first, the three things that change a decision.

What actually kills bedbugs, from the source rather than the forum

The US EPA, which publishes the most cited domestic protocol, boils it down to three statements: a hot dryer for 30 minutes kills bedbugs and their eggs; cold works below −18 °C for four days, with the warning that many home freezers never get that low; and washing alone is not enough — the step that kills is the heat of the drying cycle or sustained cold, not the detergent.

That distinction, washing versus drying, is exactly the one the forum skips. Twenty-five comments recommend a 60 °C wash and a hundred and thirty talk about the dryer, but plenty of people use the two as synonyms. They are not, and on the Camino it has a practical consequence: if your albergue only has a washing machine, you have not solved anything. One trick repeated by people who have been through it, which also saves time: put the clothes in the dryer dry — less shrinkage, same hot cycle.

Permethrin: what the forum repeats, and what you can actually buy in Spain

Ninety-one comments recommend treating clothing and pack with permethrin before you leave. The most upvoted thread on the subject — 90 points — goes as far as naming brands to buy it in Spanish pharmacies: Sarcop, Lyclear, Perme-Cure. That is wrong and worth saying plainly: Sarcop is a 5 % permethrin cream authorised by Spain's medicines agency as a medicine to treat scabies on skin. It is not something you spray on a backpack, and anyone walking into a pharmacy in Sarria asking for it will walk out with a tube of antiparasitic cream.

The underlying issue is regulatory. An information note from Spain's Ministry of Health to the medical and pharmaceutical colleges spells it out: permethrin is approved as a biocidal active substance for product type 8 (wood preservatives) and type 18 (insecticides), but it is not approved for type 19, repellents — and treating textiles and mosquito nets falls there. The note exists precisely because prescribing compounded permethrin formulas 'indicated as a repellent for textiles and mosquito nets' had become common practice, and it warns that those formulas need an authorisation they do not have.

In practice: if you want to treat fabric in Spain, what legally exists are insecticides registered for textiles and surfaces for domestic use, bought at a hardware or household shop rather than a pharmacy, applied to the fabric and never to skin. And if you are arriving from abroad with your own hiking permethrin, note what the thread itself points out: it lasts six washes. On a month-long Camino that is one or two weeks of protection, not five.

The full count

A mention is a comment naming the method, not a vote in favour. The ranking measures what gets talked about, not what works best — which is why the third column exists.

Why you take them home without noticing

This is the fact that shows up most often as an unpleasant surprise: bites take days to appear, and some people never react at all. The threads contain several accounts of pilgrims who spotted a bug on their last morning in Santiago and whose welts came up five days later, already at home. That is why the advice most repeated by people who have lived through it is not 'check the bed' but 'go home as though you have them': undress at the door, everything into sealed bags, everything through a dryer before anything reaches the bedroom.

And one thing that gets said too rarely, which reframes the whole conversation: pilgrims move bedbugs, albergues don't. An albergue is simply where forty packs that slept in forty different places end up in one room. Which makes the single most useful gesture for the people behind you also the least rewarded: telling the hospitalero even when it is awkward — something only nine of those 1,387 comments mention.

What to do the day you reach Santiago

This is where a guide can offer something a forum cannot: where to dry. If you have seen a bedbug, been bitten, or simply want to close your Camino without carrying anything home, Santiago before your train or flight is the place to do it. There are self-service laundries with dryers in the centre and just outside it:

• Rúa de San Roque, 11, five minutes from the Cathedral: a 12 kg wash runs around €5 and drying another €3, with cycles of a little over half an hour.
• Waterproof, two branches further from the old town: Vite (Avenida de Castelao, 34), open daily until 23:00, and Meixonfrío (Avenida de Lugo, 215).

Indicative prices as of August 2026. The order matters more than the place: dryer first, wash afterwards if needed, and the pack too — emptied, opened out, every pocket unzipped. Thirty minutes on high. Anything that cannot take the heat goes into a sealed bag until you get home and can freeze it for four days. The same laundries, with opening hours, are listed in the city's practical information alongside the rest of the arrival services.

If your flight leaves the next day and there is time for one thing only, prioritise the sleeping bag and the pack itself over clothing: the clothes will be washed at home anyway, and it is the seams of the pack that travel with you into the wardrobe. When you work out how many nights to stay in Santiago, count that afternoon in if you are arriving from an albergue you had doubts about.

And the background, which is not new

Some perspective takes the drama out of it: the Spanish Federation of Camino Associations already agreed a bedbug protocol after Galician refuges had to close in the summer of 2008, and the Galician association of Friends of the Camino called it insufficient at the time because 'the rational thing would be to close the albergues and treat them all at once'. Seventeen years on, the Xunta's public network carries out preventive pest control twice a year in the albergues it runs directly, according to the Xunta's own statements, and acts correctively when there is an incident: close and treat, which is what is happening in Ferrol. This is not a solved problem, nor a new plague; it is a coexistence that gets managed.

With that in mind, deciding where to sleep stops being a moral lottery and goes back to being what it was: a question of availability and pace, which is broken down in where you run out of beds.

How this was made. The count comes from 80 threads and 1,387 comments on r/CaminoDeSantiago posted between January 2023 and 25 August 2026. It carries three biases worth stating: it is a mostly English-language forum, the people who answer are disproportionately those who had a problem, and a mention is not a clinical sample. That is why every method is checked against the EPA, Spain's medicines agency or the Ministry of Health note — and why we do not publish the names of accommodations named in the threads: an accusation on a forum is not a verdict, and the same pilgrim who listed them asked not to throw shade. The Ferrol details are from 25 and 26 August 2026 and date quickly.