How to reach the start of the Camino

Hardly any Camino starting point is a city. Sarria has about thirteen thousand people, Tui fewer, O Cebreiro is a stone hamlet on top of a ridge and Roncesvalles is a monastery. The network covering those last kilometres was not designed for pilgrims: these are county concessions sized for schoolchildren and commuters, so they shrink at weekends, on public holidays and in August, exactly when most people set off. That is almost always the only part of the journey worth studying.

The five traps of the last leg

1. The line that only runs Monday to Friday. The most expensive of them all, because you find out on arrival. Before buying, look for the days-of-operation column in the timetable: weekdays, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. If the connection you were sold depends on a service that isn't listed for your day, it does not exist.
2. The search engine that invents connections. Travel aggregators add a train from one day to a bus from another and show you a total nobody can actually travel. Always check on the operator's own site —Renfe, Monbus, ALSA, SNCF— with your exact date entered.
3. The single frequency. Just one Alvia a day reaches Sarria from Madrid. In May and September, which are the Camino's two waves, that train sells out weeks ahead and the fallback is always worse: a change, more hours, arriving after dark.
4. Arriving at night somewhere with nothing. Sarria, Ferrol and León are alive at ten at night. O Cebreiro, Roncesvalles and Pedrafita are not: if your last connection runs late there is no open bar, no waiting taxi and no reception desk. For those starts, sleep in the nearest town the night before and go up in the morning.
5. The airport that wasn't. Landing at the "nearest" airport in a straight line does not mean arriving sooner. Starting in Sarria from Santiago airport means coming down into the city and going back up again, and from Bilbao towards inland Lugo there is nothing resembling a direct link. Always compare door-to-door time, not distance.

How to check it properly, in four steps

• The operator's website, with your date in it. Monbus for most of Galicia, ALSA for long-distance lines, Renfe for trains, SNCF if you start in France. A two-year-old PDF timetable is worthless, least of all off season.
• Phone your accommodation. The most underrated trick of all. The hospitalero in Sarria or O Cebreiro knows by heart which bus stops there, at what time and on which days, because they are asked every afternoon. They usually have the local taxi driver's number too.
• Keep a taxi as plan B, with a price. For the final ten or fifteen kilometres —Pedrafita to O Cebreiro, Guillarei to Tui— a taxi is often the difference between starting that afternoon and losing a day. Ask the fare by phone first, and split it if there are several of you.
• Always book the first night. It is the only night of the Camino where you arrive on somebody else's timetable, with a full pack and no idea how the town works. The rest can wait: where beds actually run out has the detail by route and month.

If you pass through Santiago first

Plenty of people land in Santiago, sleep here and travel up to the start the next day: it is the norm on the Camino Inglés and for anyone starting in Sarria from outside Spain. If that's you, getting to Santiago covers the flights, trains and long-distance coaches, and getting around Santiago explains how to reach the centre and the intermodal station, which is where the coaches for Ferrol, Lugo and Sarria leave from. If you plan to leave luggage here while you walk, the storage and forwarding options are in the luggage transfer guide.