How many pilgrims arrive in Santiago today

Last closed day

How many pilgrims arrived on 17 September

There is no figure for today, and nobody has one. The Pilgrim’s Office dashboard closes the previous day. Right now there is no figure for yesterday either: the dashboard has not loaded a new day since 17 September, 21 days ago, and the Pilgrim’s Office has not said why. The number above is the latest it publishes, not yesterday’s. This page reads that dashboard directly and refreshes every six hours. One thing worth knowing before you use these numbers: the date is the day the Compostela was issued in Santiago, not the day anyone set out. For arrivals that is exactly right; for «how many started in Sarria in October» it is not, because from Saint-Jean the gap is about five weeks.

2025, a record year

By route

Almost half walk the Camino Francés

The split by route comes from the Pilgrim's Reception Office dashboard, read on 25 August 2026, and the percentages are worked out against that same dashboard's total: 530,844. There is a discrepancy here worth saying out loud: the office's January 2026 press release gave 530,987, the headline figure at the top of this page and the one everyone quotes, while the dashboard adds up to 530,844 — 143 fewer pilgrims. Nobody has made a mistake: the office keeps cleaning up records for months after the year closes, so the exact figure moves depending on the day you read the dashboard. The nine routes in the table add up to 525,945; the remaining 4,899are not a nameless remainder, and from today we spell them out: the dashboard splits them into nine smaller buckets, led by «other routes» (1,677), followed by 892 pilgrims who did not state a route, Geira e Arrieiros (757), Camino del Barbanza (755), Muros-Noia (572), Camino del Mar (179), Miñoto Ribeiro (30), San Rosendo (24) and Vía Céltica (13). That «other routes» bucket is where the Camino de Madrid lands, among other historic routes: 323 km of waymarked trail with its own albergues that the dashboard has never broken out, so nobody knows how many people walk it.

Trend

One more year of growth

The year under way

2026 is heading for another record

With the Holy Door opening on 31 December, 2026 is working as the run-up to the Holy Year: 395,963 Compostelas were issued between January and August, 6% more than the same period of 2025. August alone accounted for 84,861, the second busiest month in the whole series: only August 2022, a Holy Year, is ahead, and by 980 Compostelas.

There is a far fresher figure than the ones in this table, and it does not come from the panel: on 4 October 2026the Cathedral announced that the Pilgrim’s Office had issued the 500,000th Compostela of this year, handed over by the archbishop to a Mexican pilgrim who had walked from Sarria on the Camino Francés. Read it for what it is: not a cleaned-up monthly close like the ones above, but the Office’s own live count on the day it crossed the round number. It is useful for placing the pace — the panel is still stuck on the 444,255 of 17 September, so right now this is the most recent figure that exists — not as a replacement for the series. Cathedral announcement.

You will also run into another, much larger figure, and it measures something else. On 22 September 2026 the Xunta announced that «the sensors installed at various points along the Camino put the number of pilgrims this year at 736,000», while the Compostelas in that same release stood at 454,000. The two do not contradict each other: one counts people who collect the Compostela in Santiago, the other estimates footfall along the routes, which includes anyone walking a single stretch, anyone short of the 100 km, anyone who arrives and never asks for the certificate, and anyone carrying on to Finisterre or Muxía. The release says so itself: «not everyone who walks the route collects the accreditation at the end». The ratio the Xunta works with is about 1.6 to 1.7 pilgrims per Compostela— in total, not «extra» — so that larger number is largely the Compostelas multiplied by that factor, not a head count. Two honest caveats you will not find elsewhere: the Xunta has published that factor with three different values between 2025 and 2026, and it has never published the methodology, so there is no public record of whether the sensors count passes, distinct people or footfall. That is why the figure this page leads with is the Compostela, which can be counted one by one.

Pilgrim's Reception Office figures as of 31 August 2026.

Per day

How many pilgrims arrive in Santiago today

The last closed day is at the very top of this page: 3,160 pilgrims on 17 September. What follows is the context that figure cannot give on its own, because a daily number without a season beside it cannot be read. Across the whole of 2025 the totals give 1,450 Compostelas a day on average, but the average misleads: the Camino is seasonal and the gap between February and August is enormous. The most recent closed month, August 2026, works out at around 2,740 a day — against 2,490in the same month of 2025 — and at the height of summer there are days well above that average. It is the order of magnitude worth having if you are going to queue at the Pilgrim's Office or look for a bed without booking in summer.

The daily averages are our own calculation from the official totals, not a figure the office publishes: they are indicative. The month-by-month breakdown and the figure for today are published by the office itself on its statistics dashboard.

Route and month

How many people you will actually meet, by route and month

The two tables above each answer half the question: one says how many people walk each route over a whole year, the other how many arrive each month across all routes. What almost nobody publishes is the cross-tab, which is exactly what you want before booking a flight. Here it is, for the five months when the Camino empties out.

The pattern is the same on all seven routes, and it is sharper than it feels from the inside: October to November drops between 74% and 87%, depending on the route. There is no gradual slide from summer into winter, there is a step, and it always falls in the same place. If what you want is to walk without queuing for a bunk, the first week of November is already a different Camino; if what worries you is finding things open, that is precisely when they stop being open. What closes and when is in the season guide.

Computed by us from the official dashboard, not transcribed. These are dates of Compostela issue in Santiago, that is of arrival rather than departure: someone leaving Sarria in late October counts in November, and so does someone leaving Saint-Jean in late September. The Winter Way and Muxía-Fisterra are left out, their monthly figures being too small for the month to mean anything.

Starting point

Where people started walking in 2025

This is the figure that most reassures anyone setting off afraid of the crowds, because it says where the crowd is and where it is not. 161,901 people started in Sarria: 30.5%of all the year's Compostelas and 66.89% of those on the Camino Francés. Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the start you see in the films, contributed 30,344. Put the other way round: whoever starts in Saint-Jean walks three weeks almost without a queue and meets it in the last quarter of the trip; whoever starts in Tui or Ferrol never sees it.

Official Pilgrim's Office dashboard, read on 2 September 2026; percentages over the dashboard total that day (530,844). The dashboard labels the two departures from the city «Oporto» and «Oporto Costa», by the Central and the Coastal route. A further 31,624 Compostelas on the Portuguese Coastal have no recorded starting town and are left out.

Who walks

Who actually walks the Camino: age, sex and means of travel

Three cuts of the dashboard that rarely get published, each of which corrects an expectation. The first: the Camino is not a trip for twenty-somethings. In 2025 the over-65s numbered 60,664, a little more than one pilgrim in nine (11.43%), and putting the two top bands together — 46 to 65 and over 65 — takes you past half the year: 267,430 people, 50.38%. At the other end there are more than you notice on the path: 46,722 under-18s, 8.8% of the year.

The second: there are more women than men, and not by a hair. 284,902 women against 245,942 men, that is 53.67% against 46.33%. It is not a one-year blip either: women are the majority in all four years the dashboard breaks down, from 2023 on.

And the third, the one that changes most plans: cycling is a narrow minority. 21,083 pilgrims arrived by bike in 2025, 3.97%, against 494,743 on foot (93.2%). And it is not only small: it is fewer bikes than in 2023 (23,694) even though the dashboard has added 84,751 Compostelas over those two years. Fewer people arrive by bike every year while the Camino grows. The rest of the split is small in number and not for that reason irrelevant: 725 on horseback, 310 by sail and 257 by wheelchair.

2026 is still running, so it is not compared with a closed year: the dashboard stood at 395,963 Compostelas from January to August when we read it. On that basis the split barely moves — 53.7% women, 3.75% by bike — and the one visible change is that the under-18s (41,315, 10.43%) have moved ahead of the over-65s (40,675, 10.27%), which in 2025 was the larger of the two bands. With autumn uncounted that does not mean anything yet.

Official Pilgrim's Office dashboard, read on 2 September 2026. All the Camino de Santiago statistics on this page are worked out from that dashboard, not transcribed, and the percentages in these three tables are our own arithmetic, not a figure the office publishes: they are taken over the dashboard total for each year (530,844 in 2025 and 395,963 in 2026, January to August), and every cut adds up to exactly that total, so nobody is left over or missing. Two caveats. One: the means-of-travel split has 13,726 Compostelas from 2025 with no means recorded, and they stay in the table as "not stated" rather than being spread across the other rows. Two: the dashboard's split by sex gives 53.67% women, two tenths above the 53.45% in the January 2026 press release quoted elsewhere on this page, for the same reason as the total: the office keeps cleaning up records months after the year closes.