When the Camino de Santiago opens and closes

"Can you walk the Camino in March?" has no yes-or-no answer. You can walk any day of the year, but in March one specific stretch is closed by administrative order, the mountain refuges have not opened, luggage transfer only runs on two sections and the bus that gets you to the start is on its winter timetable. None of those four things is published together anywhere, so here they are with their dates and their sources.

1 April is the date that matters

At the start of the Camino Francés, the real calendar is set by the mountain accommodation. Refuge Orisson opens on 1 April and closes between the 18th and the 31st of October depending on the year; Auberge Borda, a few metres away, runs from 1 April to 21 October. Between them they hold a few dozen beds, reservation only, and they are the only accommodation between Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and Roncesvalles.

That explains something that looks odd from outside: why almost nobody sets off from Saint-Jean in February or March. It is not superstition or tradition — it is that most accommodation in the area does not open until 1 April and the mountain route is closed. Jean-Philippe Rigaud, secretary of the Association Les Amis du chemin de St Jacques Pyrénées-Atlantiques, confirmed it to us by email with the statistics from the association's annual review, Le Petit Bourdon.

The Napoleon route closes from 1 November to 31 March

It is the only stretch of the Camino with a genuine administrative closure. Every winter the Government of Navarre shuts the variant crossing the Lepoeder pass between Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and Roncesvalles — the Napoleon route — on safety grounds: it is fog and snow country where rescues are expensive and dangerous. For those five months you must take the Valcarlos and Ibañeta variant, which stays closer to the road and climbs less. The rule has teeth: fines of up to €12,000 are on the books.

One odd consequence of that closure: the pilgrim office in Saint-Jean warns all year round that the mountain route "is more dangerous", and people who hear it in August assume something is wrong that particular day. Nothing is: the warning comes from the same reason as the winter closure, and the real summer risk is not the climb, it is the fog. What is worth knowing in any month is that between Orisson and Roncesvalles there are some 17 kilometres with no shop, no bar and nowhere to stop.

What shuts down out of season

• Luggage transfer. Correos' Paq Mochila runs from Easter to 31 October on nine routes. Outside those dates only Sarria–Santiago and Tui–Santiago remain; the Francés from Somport and the Camino de Invierno are handled on request. The detail, with prices and companies, is in the luggage transfer guide.
• The buses that get you to the start. County lines run winter timetables, and many do not operate on Saturdays or Sundays at any time of year. It is the single most common planning failure, and it has its own page: how to reach the start.
• Private albergues in small villages. Many close from November to March, and they don't always announce it. The floor of the network is still the public albergue — €10 in Galicia, no booking, first come first served — which means that in winter there are fewer beds and they are more concentrated: where beds run out explains how that network behaves.
• What doesn't close: the Pilgrim's Reception Office in Santiago, at Rúa das Carretas 33, opens every day from 9:00 to 19:00 all year, except 25 December and 1 January. Whenever you get here, your Compostela is waiting.

The two waves: early May and early September

If we had to sum up the Camino year in one sentence, it would be this: there is no high season, there are two waves. The first fortnight of May and the first fortnight of September concentrate the departures of everyone with flexible holidays who wants to avoid the heat, and those people stay bunched together stage after stage for weeks. The Pyrénées-Atlantiques association confirms it from the French side, and it fits what came out of our own August 2026 survey: May shows up more often than August in accounts from pilgrims who could not find a bed.

Which produces the most practical piece of advice on this page, and it is Rigaud's: don't start on the 1st of the month, and don't start at a weekend. An ordinary Wednesday or Thursday sees far fewer departures, and that difference travels with you all the way to Santiago — because what fills the albergues is not the month, it is how many people set off the same day you did.

Like anything that depends on small businesses, this expires: the opening dates of any given albergue shift from year to year and are worth confirming before you count on them. What does not shift so fast are the two underlying rules: the winter closure of the Napoleon route, which is administrative, and 1 April as the real gateway to the season on the French stretch.

And 2027, which changes the maths

The Holy Year pushes all of this upward: more people in the same months, and accommodation opening its bookings later than usual because prices are being redone. If your Camino falls in 2027, choosing when to come is no longer just a weather decision — we go into it in the Xacobeo guide, with the months likely to saturate and the ones still worth taking.