Clothes and laundry on the Camino: sets, fabrics and drying

Of everything argued about before setting off, clothing burns the most ink and is the worst explained. In the r/CaminoDeSantiago archive we used for this guide —16,110 threads, 2012 to today— there are 708 threads and 12,719 comments about clothes, socks and underwear, plus another 129 threads and 2,085 comments devoted to laundry alone. Almost all of them answer the wrong question. The question is not which T-shirt to buy: it is how often you will be able to wash and how long it will take to dry, because everything else follows from that, including how many sets you need. What to put in the pack and how much it should weigh is a separate guide, the packing list; this page is the cycle of keeping it clean.

How many sets, and the reasoning behind the number

The short answer doing the rounds on every forum is «two of everything: one on, one drying», and it is right, but the number comes from arithmetic rather than doctrine. With two sets you have to wash every single afternoon and you depend on the laundry being dry by seven the next morning. With three you can miss a day —arrive wrecked, arrive after dark, have it rain without a break— and still have clean clothes. The third set weighs between 250 and 400 g. That is the whole decision.

Which gives our recommendation, which is a rule rather than a number: two sets from May to September and three from October to April. In summer, on the Meseta or on the Portuguese, clothes hung at five in the afternoon are dry by nine at night and the third set is dead weight. In a Galician autumn or winter that margin disappears, and people carrying two end up walking in yesterday's damp shirt or sleeping in it to dry it with body heat. Watch the opposite trap too: plenty of people carry five sets «just in case» and wash exactly as often, because the spare three never leave the pack.

Two things the rule does not cover. Socks are separate and are the one exception to all the weight-saving: three or four pairs, because they are what gets wettest, dries worst and decides whether you get blisters. One pilgrim who walked Galicia in autumn put it plainly: «I brought four pairs and was very glad, because it rained almost every day and sometimes my laundry did not dry, but I always had clean socks». And sleepwear does not count as a set: it is what you wear while everything else is on the line, so if you walk in it you are back to two.

Merino, synthetic or cotton: smell settles it

This is the longest-running argument of the lot and it is nearly always framed wrongly, as if it were about quality. It is not. Merino and synthetic dry and insulate comparably; the only thing that really separates them is how many days they last before they smell, and that only matters if you plan not to wash daily. The archive has 95 threads and 1,901 comments about smell, and the conclusion repeated by people who have walked several Caminos is as dull as it is useful: if you wash every afternoon, merino buys you nothing; if you intend to wash every two or three days, it is the only thing making that socially viable.

The single most upvoted comment in the whole corpus on this subject defends no material at all: it points out that gear obsession belongs to a tiny minority and that most people are out there walking in whatever they already owned. Its author described spending real money on expensive technical underwear, hating it, and finishing the Camino in her ordinary cotton pairs, washed every night. It is a good antidote to shopping lists: the fabric matters less than the routine. That said, there is one consensus worth following, and it is socks: merino, checking the real percentage on the label. They are counted brand by brand in the footwear and socks guide.

The daily cycle, step by step

The order is not a detail: it is what decides whether your clothes are dry in the morning. The sequence repeated by the pilgrims with the most kilometres behind them goes like this, and the key part is that washing is the first thing you do on arrival, not the last thing before dinner.

1. Arrive and wash, before the nap. This is the most repeated advice and the one most people get backwards. At three in the afternoon there are four or five hours of sun left; by eight, after the shower, the beer and the introductions, there are none.
2. Wash in the shower, with you in it. The biggest time-saver we read: step in dressed, undress under the water, let the soap running off your body fall onto the clothes on the floor, tread on them a little and rinse. One bar of multi-purpose soap covers both jobs and is one bottle fewer.
3. Wring properly, then wring again with the towel.This is where drying is won, not on the line. Lay the garment flat on your microfibre towel, roll it up, twist the whole roll and —if needed— stand on it barefoot. The towel dries itself in an hour and the shirt comes out with half the water. One pilgrim says it flatly: «I didn't wring my clothes out enough and had to carry them wet».
4. Hang in the right spot, not the first one you see. Direct sun if there is any; if not, moving air. A shaded line with a breeze beats a sunny one without, and in a full albergue the good spots are gone in twenty minutes. Carry safety pins: pegs are the most-stolen object on the Camino and half the albergues have none.
5. Bring it in before dinner, not in the morning. From dusk onwards relative humidity climbs and an outdoor line starts putting water back into your clothes instead of taking it out. What was nearly dry at nine can be damper at dawn. Bringing it in and finishing the job indoors, near a radiator or strung on a cord under your bunk, is what separates a dry shirt from a wet one.

How long clothes take to dry in Galicia, and the plan B when they don't

This is where a guide written in Santiago can say something a forum cannot. Galicia gets around 140 days of rain a year and between 1,400 and 1,900 mm of precipitation, and what really matters for laundry is not the rain but what comes with it: high, sustained relative humidity. With the air at 85 or 90 %, a hung garment barely dries at all, rain or no rain, because the air will not take any more water. That is why the last 100 km feel so different from the Meseta, and why many people discover the problem in their final week, when it is too late to change strategy.

Indicative numbers, for an albergue with no heating and no dryer: a well-wrung synthetic T-shirt takes 4–6 hours in July and 12–24 in October; merino somewhere between a third and twice as long again; cotton may simply not dry. Put practically and honestly: in a Galician albergue in October, the synthetic shirt you hang out at nine at night stands a fair chance of being damp in the morning. Not soaked; damp, which is worse than it sounds when you have to put it on at seven. It is one of the lines that repeat most in autumn accounts: «I arrived in Galicia sopping. My clothes weren't dry the next morning».

There are four ways out, and they are worth knowing in this order:

• The coin dryer, wherever there is one. It is the only solution that always works, and in Galicia in autumn it stops being a luxury and becomes the sensible expense every two or three days. Prices below.
• Indoors with air, not outdoors in the rain. The two-metre cord that weighs 20 g and ties between two bunks is, according to several pilgrims, the best weight-to-usefulness item in the whole pack. Near a radiator if there is one; never on top of it, since technical fabrics melt and plenty of hospitaleros ban it for good reason.
• Pinned to the pack the next day. The classic: safety pin, garment on the outside, let it finish drying as you walk. It works well for socks and underwear and only moderately for a shirt. And it does not work at all if it rains again, which in Galicia is precisely the scenario in which you need it.
• Worn. Sleeping in the nearly-dry shirt so body heat finishes the job. Plenty of pilgrims report doing it and it works, but it is incompatible with having clean sleepwear, so it is an emergency measure, not a method.

Washer and dryer on the way: what it costs

Almost every private albergue has a washing machine and a fair number have a dryer; the public Xunta ones tend to have hand-washing sinks and a line, and not always a machine. The prices that repeat in accounts from 2024 to 2026, indicative and for a rough idea, not for budgeting to the cent:

• Albergue washing machine: €3–5 a load, often with detergent dispensed by the machine.
• Albergue dryer: €3–4 a cycle.
• Self-service laundrette in a town or city: €8–10 to wash and dry, with big machines.

And the custom that changes those numbers completely: you share the load. The machines take 8 to 12 kg and one pilgrim's laundry is barely two, so combining three or four people's washing is normal and nobody finds it odd. Several pilgrims report paying «a euro or less» for their share that way. If you are walking alone, the phrase to learn is simple: ask out loud in the albergue kitchen who wants to add clothes.

If you slept where there were bedbugs, washing is a different job

Two things get mixed up constantly and are worth separating: washing to get clothes clean, and washing to disinfect them. For the second, this is the fact to get right. A 60 °C wash does kill bedbugs and their eggs —the study cited everywhere, Naylor and Boase, 2010, measured it with bedbugs, nymphs and eggs in pouches inside the laundry— and a 40 °C one does not. So the washing machine would do the job; the problem is that the short programmes in albergues and self-service laundrettes run at 30 or 40 °C, and those do not. Which is why, in Camino practice, the reliable step is still 30 minutes in a dryer on high heat: you can count on the hot cycle and you cannot count on the washer reaching 60 °C. The full protocol, including what to do with the pack and the sleeping bag, is in the bedbugs guide.

How we put this page together

The counts come from a local copy of the r/CaminoDeSantiago archive —16,110 threads and 197,564 comments, 2012 to August 2026— on which we counted threads and comments by topic: with the search terms in plain sight so anyone can repeat the count: 708 threads and 12,719 comments for clothes, clothing, socks, underwear; 215 and 3,901 formerino, synthetic, quick dry, polyester; 129 and 2,085 for laundry, washing machine, detergent; 95 and 1,901 for smell, stink, odour; 65 and 995 fordrying, dry overnight. Change one word and the count changes, which is exactly why they are written down. The drying times are orders of magnitude drawn from what pilgrims report and from Galician relative humidity, not laboratory measurements: they are for deciding how many sets to carry, not for timing anything to the hour. Prices come from accounts between 2024 and 2026 and from our own check in Santiago in August 2026, and they change. The limits are the usual ones: it is a mostly English-speaking forum, and the people who post tend to be those who had a problem or those who found their method and champion it.