How many pilgrims arrive in Santiago today

What these numbers actually say

The striking part is not the record itself — every year has beaten the one before since 2012, apart from the pandemic pause — but who is doing the walking. For the first time in a settled way, most pilgrims are not Spanish: 228,527 were Spanish, 43% of the total, which leaves the other 302,460— 57% — arriving from abroad. That second number is our own subtraction, not a published figure: the press coverage of the report says "more than 297,000 foreigners", correct as a floor but it does not add up to the total. We use the subtraction because it is the only one that reaches 530,987. The gender balance has flipped too: women are now 53.45% of pilgrims against 46.55% of men, unthinkable two decades ago, when the Camino was overwhelmingly male.

The stated motivation does not quite match the cliché of the purely religious pilgrim either. Around 44% say they walk for strictly religious reasons and 32% combine faith and culture, but the rest — close to one in four — come for cultural or sporting reasons alone. The Camino is a Christian pilgrimage in origin, and it stopped being only that a long time ago.

The split by route holds few surprises at the top: the Camino Francés takes 45.6% of pilgrims, almost one in two, on the strength of its infrastructure and its reputation. Fourth place does say something: the Camino Inglés, which leaves from Ferrol and is walked in five stages, drew 30,205 pilgrims, 5.7%, ahead of both the Primitivo and the Norte despite being the shortest route that still earns the Compostela. Further down there is a surprise. The Camino Primitivo is the fifth busiest route with 27,873 pilgrims, 5.25%, and the Camino del Norte the sixth with 21,521, 4.05%: a gap of 6,352 pilgrims, 29.5% more for the Primitivo. They are not level, though in 2023 they very nearly were, 20,715 against 20,583. The Norte was the larger of the two every year from 2003 to 2020; the Primitivo overtook it in 2021 and has been pulling away since. And the Norte is not having one bad year: its share has fallen for nine straight years, from 6.22% in 2016 to 3.81% so far in 2026, and between January and July it is down 2.1% while the routes as a whole are up 5.5%. All of this has a very concrete effect on the ground. The final stretch from Sarria, where most people join to cover the minimum 100 km the Compostela asks for, carries a crowding you do not feel at all over the first 600 km, where you can walk for hours without meeting anyone. July and August concentrate the heaviest traffic, with a particularly sharp peak around 25 July, the feast of the Apostle; anyone after quiet does well to look at May, June or September, or at less travelled routes such as the Primitivo or the Vía de la Plata.

The other figure worth carrying if you are planning a trip: 2027 is a Holy Year, the first since the extraordinary 2021-2022 cycle and the nearest one after this 2025 record. Previous jubilee years point to heavier traffic still, with more pressure on albergues and accommodation over the summer months, above all on the final stretch from Sarria. If the plan is to walk in a Holy Year, booking ahead — outside the public albergues, which take no reservations — stops being optional.

Where these figures come from, and where they do not

Everything on this page comes from the Pilgrim's Reception Office (Oficina de Acogida al Peregrino, Archdiocese of Santiago), which counts every Compostela it issues and publishes a detailed annual report with the breakdown by route, nationality, age and motivation. Two things are worth knowing before you quote any of it:

• There is no documented public API.The office's own dashboard is an embedded Power BI, and we used to say here that it refused non-browser clients. It does not: its backend answers a plain request and returns the full breakdown by route, year, month, age, sex and reason for walking. The route figures on this page were read from it on 25 August 2026. The 2026 monthly figures still come from the office's statements to the Galician press in August 2026, and we are moving the rest off hand-transcription, because copying numbers by hand is how we published the Camino del Norte's total as if it were the Primitivo's.
• The daily averages are ours, not the office's. The office publishes totals; dividing a monthly or annual total by its number of days is our arithmetic, rounded to the nearest ten. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not as an official count — the real spread between a February day and an August day is wide enough that no single average describes both.

Everything else — annual totals, the split by route, the gender and nationality shares — is the office's own published figure, and we say so each time rather than round it into something tidier.