Sleeping bag or liner? What 1,586 pilgrims actually say

The short answer is that it depends on the month, and almost nobody frames it that way. Someone who walked in June answers «a liner, the bag is overkill» and is right; someone who walked in April answers «I was cold» and is right too. So we stopped giving opinions and counted: 128 threads from r/CaminoDeSantiago since 2023 with sleeping bag, liner or quilt in the title, and the 1,586 comments hanging off them. The full tally is below.

What gets recommended in each season

Counted by hand over the dumped threads, sorted by the date each one is actually about, the curve comes out clean: no debate in summer, none in winter, and autumn split down the middle. Spring is where the argument happens, and there the breaking point isn't the month but the route: asking about the Norte in April gets different answers from asking about the Francés.

The months with only one or two threads — February, July, August, November and December — give a direction rather than a figure, and we treat them as such. The sharpest month is June: more than three liner mentions for every bag. The most deceptive is October, because its first half behaves like September and its second half like November. If your dates fall there, look at the month-by-month temperatures: what decides is not the daytime high but the overnight low, and in Santiago that drops from 13 °C in September to 11 °C in October and 8 °C in November.

What albergues actually give you

Here is the biggest contradiction in the corpus, and it's worth showing rather than papering over: twenty-four comments say every albergue they slept in had blankets and twenty-five say the opposite, all of them first-hand. It's a dead heat between people who aren't lying.

What resolves it is the minority who draw a distinction: of the twenty-three comments that separate public from private albergues, around ten say exactly the same thing— municipal ones don't give blankets, private ones do. And three warn that «private» guarantees nothing either, because it doesn't mean a made bed, only that an individual runs it instead of a council or a parish. With that, the contradiction stops being one: it depended on which network each person slept in.

Fifteen more comments add the detail that wrecks any temperature calculation: some albergues switch the heating off overnight. That matters more than the month does.

The full tally

A mention is a comment that names the method, not a vote in favour. The right-hand column is the one to read.

What each option weighs

From the comments that give an actual weight rather than an impression. It answers the only thing that matters when you decide: how many grams the peace of mind costs.

The gap between a silk liner and a cheap light bag is half a kilo or more, which in a well-built pack is a lot. You can see it for your own load in the pack calculator, and the rest of the list is in what to put in your pack.

What we don't know, and won't pretend to

Four separate accounts claim that the Xunta's public albergues in Galicia don't give blankets, and one adds that they're banned under health regulations. None cites a source, so we give it for what it is: what the forum says, pending confirmation from the Xunta. If you're walking the last 100 km, plan on carrying something of your own.

We also don't know whether silk is warmer than cotton, or how many people actually carry each thing: the archive measures what gets talked about, not what gets done. And we don't publish prices: the forty-nine comments that quote one are spread across 2023 to 2026 and three currencies, so they'd mislead.

The short answer, if you only want one

June to September, a liner, and a light one. December to March, a bag. In April, May, October and November, look at where you're sleeping before you look at the month: if you're going to string together public albergues, especially on the Norte or inland, a light bag earns its four hundred extra grams. And if you get it wrong, there's a Decathlon in Pamplona, Burgos, León and Ponferrada, which is exactly what several of the people telling their story ended up doing.

How this was done.The tally comes from 128 threads and 1,586 comments in r/CaminoDeSantiago published between 2023 and 25 August 2026, where our archive cuts off. The search starts from 142 threads with «sleeping bag», «liner» or «quilt» in the title; seven about socks are removed — liner socks, which match the word and not the subject — and four more that matched by accident. Three biases worth stating out loud: it's a mostly English-speaking forum, the people who answer tend to be the ones with a memorable experience, and a mention is not a survey. That's why the figures are mentions rather than percentages of pilgrims, and why there's a whole section on what we don't know.