The Madrid Way: 323 km to Sahagún and the Fuenfría pass

Updated 8 September 2026.

The Camino de Madrid, or Madrid Way, is the pilgrim route that starts in the Spanish capital, climbs into the Sierra de Guadarrama, crosses it at the Fuenfría pass along the line of a Roman road, and drops onto the Castilian plateau through Segovia, Valladolid and Tierra de Campos until it meets the Camino Francés at Sahagún. It does not reach Santiago on its own: from Sahagún onwards you are on the French Way, with everything that means for albergues, waymarking and company.

The short answer

It is 323 km from Madrid to Sahagún over 13 stages, according to gronze.com, the reference we use across this guide so that routes can be compared on the same basis. From Sahagún there are around 360 km left to Santiago on the French Way. The whole thing, Madrid to the cathedral, is 676 km according to the guide published by the Asociación de Amigos de los Caminos de Santiago de Madrid, the association that waymarks the route: five to six weeks, more than half of them already on the Francés. Most people who walk it do not do that. They split it, or they finish at Sahagún and come back another year.

How many people walk it: around 650 a year, and where that number comes from matters.The Pilgrim's Office dashboard breaks out nine routes and the Madrid Way is not one of them: it falls into the «other routes» bucket, which in 2025 came to 1,677 pilgrims, 0.32% of the dashboard's 530,844, shared with every minor route the office does not separate. That bucket is a ceiling, not a measurement. We set out the full split in our Camino figures.

The only published estimate comes from Medina de Rioseco town council, which in February 2026 put it at around 650 pilgrims in 2025, almost identical to 2024. These are not Compostelas or credentials: they are overnight stays in the albergues of Valladolid province, so people counted halfway along the route. That is why the two numbers cannot be added or compared: the office counts who reaches Santiago, Rioseco counts who passes kilometre 200. Two figures from that profile are genuinely surprising: 77.7% are men, a gender split no other route comes close to, and 75.8% start in Madrid, so almost nobody joins this route partway.

And one figure you will see published that does not mean what it looks like: the parish of Santiago y San Juan Bautista hands out «more than 10,000 credentials a year». Those are not Madrid Way pilgrims. It is the Camino parish of the capital, and most of those people are heading to Sarria or Saint-Jean.

The thirteen stages, Madrid to Sahagún

Distances from gronze.com. The mountains are crossed on stage 4, and from stage 5 onwards the route is plateau: flat, long and with very little shade.

Where the water is between Cercedilla and Segovia

This question came from a pilgrim about to cross the sierra with his dog, and he could not find an answer anywhere. He was right not to find one: no Camino guide publishes a water inventory for this stage. Gronze deals with it in a single line — you need to carry enough water and some food, because you will walk some 30 km without passing through a single settlement — and the Federation names two fountains without saying where they are or whether they run.

It is the hard stage of the route: 30.2 km, 662 m of climb and 861 m of descent according to Gronze, eight hours of walking and a difficulty rating of 4 out of 5. With an animal along, knowing where you can drink stops being a convenience. So we reconstructed it ourselves, and the first thing to say is where it comes from, because that matters.

Kilometre 0 is Cercedilla station. «Detour» is how far off the path you have to go to reach the fountain and come back to the same point.

If you only read one thing

The fountain that matters is at the pass, and almost nobody sees it. The Fuente de la Fuenfría sits about 170 metres off route, up the track that branches right as you face the descent, near the plaque to José Antonio Cimadevila Covelo, who founded the Madrid association. It is the only point on the stage with all three things at once: declared drinkable, no seasonality flag, and two pilgrims who wrote in May 2026 that they used it. If you do not know it is there, you walk straight past. That is where to fill everything before dropping down.

And the famous fountain is precisely the one that fails. The Fuente de la Reina, the one named by the Federation, the association and the sierra walking guides, is flagged as dry from early August to mid-October other than in very wet years. Anyone crossing the sierra in September, which is now, is inside that window. A fountain appearing in every guide does not mean it has water on the day you pass; sometimes it only means it has a nice name.

Watch the names, which overlap.Several local sources say the Fuente de la Reina «is also called the Fuenfría fountain». On the map they are two different fountains nearly three kilometres apart, one up at the pass and one down on the descent, and the two forum accounts also describe two. And there is another Fuente de la Reina on stage 3, between Colmenar Viejo and Manzanares el Real. Not the same one.

The real trap is not the water: you pass through no village at all

Gronze lists Valsaín, La Pradera de Navalhorno and La Granja de San Ildefonso among the settlements of the stage, and it is easy to read that as walking through them. You do not. They sit around two kilometres off the path at kilometre 19.4, and you have to drop down and climb back. The same goes for Revenga, about two kilometres off at kilometre 23.7, which is the last escape before Segovia and has a bar.

Between kilometre 5.3 and kilometre 25.4 there is not a single bar within a kilometre of the path. Thirty kilometres of mountain with no settlement on the line itself: that is what has to be planned for, and it is also why this stage is so hard to split.

Waymarking and where you sleep

The waymarking is good for a route of this size: painted yellow arrows, ceramic tiles and several designs of stone marker, with the marks starting inside Madrid from Plaza de Castilla onwards. Gronze, which describes it that way, recommends reading the route notes for each stage before setting off, which is the standard advice for any Camino with few pilgrims ahead of you: when there is nobody to follow, a faded arrow costs you half an hour. The worst waymarked stretch, and every source agrees on this, is getting out of Madrid: the first half-day is a string of streets and avenues where it is easy to go wrong. Out in open country the problem disappears, except on the meadow before the Venta de Santillana, where the line blurs and several paths run together.

One detail that says a lot about this route: on the Segovian side of the pass the Camino markers were put up by the national parks agency, and they cover exactly the stretch between the Fuenfría pass and the Fuente de San Pedro. So the section that crosses the national park is waymarked by the park, not by a volunteer association.

On accommodation the route is better served than its reputation suggests: 18 public albergues, 4 private ones and 4 refugesby Gronze's 2025 count. The public network is run by town councils and associations, not by the Xunta, so nothing we say about the Galician stretch applies here. And there is one warning that every guide to this route repeats and that is worth taking seriously: in low season you have to phone ahead, because many small villages in Tierra de Campos do not even have a bar open, and a municipal albergue shut at seven in the evening in November is a real problem. Where people actually run out of beds, route by route, is in where you run out of a bed.

One detail about Segovia that catches tired walkers out: the municipal pilgrim albergue is not in the city but in Zamarramala, two or three kilometres past the aqueduct along the route. It has 40 beds at €8, opens 1 April to 31 October from 14:00 to 21:00, has to be phoned in advance and requires a credential, according to Segovia tourist board. Outside those months, Segovia means private accommodation.

And the warning that actually changes the plan: the obvious way to split the mountain stage is to sleep in La Granja or Valsaín, and their 32-bed municipal albergue was listed as closed in April 2026 in the last status report published by the Madrid association. If that still holds, the mountain day cannot be split: it is the full 30 km, or the train. Before counting on it, check the albergue status report the association publishes, which is the only source that goes through them one by one with phone number, beds and price. We deliberately do not copy that table here: the latest is from April, and freezing it would mean publishing an albergue as open when it may not be.

When to walk it, and when not to

Spring and autumn.That is Gronze's recommendation and it is the one that makes sense looking at the profile: this route has a problem at each end of the year. In winter the Fuenfría pass can be under snow and the Castilian plateau is one of the coldest parts of Spain. In summer the risk is not the mountains but what comes after: nine plateau days with stages of up to 33.2 km, no shade, and heatstroke as the declared enemy.

That leaves a narrow window, and it is the same one everybody else is using. What closes and what opens month by month, route by route, is in when the Camino opens and closes.

If snow or ice catches you at the pass, the way out is written down and worth knowing in advance: Cercedilla is on the Madrid commuter network and there is a regional train to Segovia on the historic line, about three quarters of an hour. Gronze recommends it explicitly when the path is impassable, and warns about what not to do: walking up the Navacerrada pass road, the M-601, which it describes as dangerous both on foot and by bike. We are not publishing timetables here because we have not checked them against Renfe.

On a bike the sierra is crossed somewhere else. At the Peñalara chalet the route forks: on foot you follow the Roman road, cobbled and broken, while cyclists have to take the so-called Carretera de la República, a 1930s dirt track left unfinished by the civil war, which adds about five kilometres. On the descent the two lines run parallel again.

Where it starts and how it ends

It starts at the church of Santiago y San Juan Bautista, on Calle Santiago in central Madrid, next to Plaza de la Villa. That is where you pick up the route's own credential and the first stamp. The logistical advantage is obvious and is probably the best reason to choose this Camino: you do not have to travel to the start. For every other route, how to reach each starting point is in getting to the start of the Camino.

At the far end, in Sahagún, the Madrid Way ends and the French Way begins. Sahagún is on the León railway line, so anyone finishing there gets home without trouble. Anyone carrying on has León, Astorga and El Bierzo ahead, which we cover in the Camino Francés guide. If you want to split the days differently, the planner works out the Galician stretch.

Who it suits, and who it does not

Choose it if you live in Madrid or land in Madrid and would rather not spend a day travelling to a start point. If you genuinely want to walk alone: there is no Sarria wave here, no competition for beds outside August, and whole days without meeting another pilgrim. If the history interests you, because few routes have such a literal stretch of Roman road with its bridges intact. And if you have exactly two weeks to reach Sahagún and get back.

Think twice if this is your first Camino and you want company: the infrastructure exists, but it is built for small numbers and you have to phone. If long days do not suit you, because five of the thirteen are over 25 km and one reaches 33.2. If the certificate is the point and you only have a week, because finishing at Sahagún does not earn the Compostela: that needs the last 100 km into Santiago, and we explain it in the Compostela guide. And if you want the Camino of the photographs, with the sea or the mountains every day: here the mountains are two days and the rest is Castile.