Which Camino to walk, based on the days you have

This isn't a catalogue of routes — we already have that in our comparison of every route, with the distance and the character of each one. This page starts at the other end, which is where the real problem starts: the days. Every distance you'll read here comes from adding up our own stage tables, route by route, and each section tells you which one. They are indicative figures — no Camino has an official measurement, only the sum of the guidebooks — but at least you can check them.

The right question isn't which route, it's how many days you'll actually walk

The most common mistake is easy to describe: someone has ten days off, finds a route with ten stages and books it. But ten days off are not ten days of walking. You have to subtract the day you fly or take the train, the transfer from where you land to the starting point, and the day you travel home, which almost never starts in Santiago at seven in the morning.

The transfer to the start is not a detail. Santiago to Ferrol has a direct Monbus coach, 1h20 to 1h30 and an indicative 8-9 €, so it fits into the same morning. O Cebreiro, on the other hand, has no public transport at all: the stop is Pedrafita do Cebreiro, and from there it's about 4 km uphill on the LU-633, 180 to 230 metres of climb, close to an hour on foot or a taxi. We break it down start by start in how to reach the start of the Camino, and the advice that comes out of it is always the same: sleep the night before in the nearest town and go up in the morning, rather than chaining connections on the same day.

Then there's the slack. Thirteen stages in fourteen days — the León case, which is the most used intermediate start on the Francés — leaves no room for a blister or a day of rain. The rule of thumb we use throughout this guide: from your total days, subtract two for travel and leave at least one spare. What's left is your number of stages, and that's the number to read everything below with.

With 4 or 5 days of walking

This is where the decision is tightest, because the 100 continuous kilometres that the Compostela requires rule almost everything out. There are three honest answers, and all three fit comfortably.

The English Way from Ferrol, 111.5 km across five stages by our own table. It's the standard split, and of the routes with easy access to the Compostela it's the quietest: around 30,200 pilgrims walked it in all of 2025, against the 161,901 who set out from Sarria alone. It can be done in four days too, but that means back-to-back 28 km days in exactly the stretches with the fewest bars and albergues, so it isn't the place to try long days for the first time. It's covered stage by stage in our English Way guide, and the same split worked out stop by stop is in the plan from Ferrol in 5 stages.

The Francés from Sarria, 114.2 km across five stages. It has the most infrastructure and also the most people: two out of every three pilgrims on the Francés start there. The five days are in the Sarria to Santiago stages.

The Primitivo from Lugo, which is that route's Sarria: in 2022 the Xunta installed an official 100 km marker there, and from Lugo it's four or five days to Santiago — here are the five, worked out stop by stop. One warning that catches people out at the counter: it doesn't work by bike, because the minimum there is 200 km and Lugo is 100.

Tui is tight, but not on distance. The 116 km of the Portuguese Central from Tui are comfortably over the minimum; what doesn't fit into five days are its six stages. Either you merge two days — the same stretch split into 5 leaves one day over 25 km — or you count six walking days and read the next section.

With 6 to 8 days of walking

This is where the tight arithmetic ends and the slack begins. The same three short routes now fit without chaining long days: Sarria in 6 or 7 stages, Tui in 7 or 8 — where no day goes over 21 km — and Ferrol in six or seven days, splitting the long first stage at Neda, 14.6-15 km from the start and with a Xunta albergue.

With seven days O Cebreiro also comes into play: 152.6 km across seven stages, which is the whole Galician section of the Francés plus a bit more margin than Sarria. It's the prettiest option in this bracket and the worst connected, for the reason above — there's no transport stop in the village. Even so, 6,267 pilgrims set out from there in 2025.

Why Sarria in August isn't the obvious answer

Sarria is everyone's default start, and for good reasons: five stages, plenty of services, easy transport. But it's worth having the numbers in front of you first. In 2025, 161,901 pilgrims set out from Sarria, 66.9% of the 242,040 who walked the Francés. August is by some distance the busiest month on the whole Camino — in a normal year it draws around 70,000 pilgrims, more than 16% of the annual total — and Sarria behaves the opposite way to Saint-Jean: August and September together account for 31.6% of its departures. In other words, the fullest month of the year on the fullest stretch of the fullest route.

That doesn't mean starting in Sarria is a mistake, and what genuinely changes there — the complaints and the rebuttals both — is covered without varnish in the last 100 km. It means that if your days fall in August, the same bracket has two alternatives almost nobody looks at: the English Way from Ferrol, the quietest of the routes with easy access to the Compostela, and the Camino de Invierno, if you have the days for its ten stages. The full calendar of waves and months is in when the Camino opens and closes.

With 10 to 12 days: the first bracket where character decides

Up to here arithmetic was in charge. From ten days on, several answers fit equally well, so for the first time the question stops being "which one will fit?" and becomes "which one do I want?".

The Portuguese Central from Porto is 241.4 km across ten stages by the Gronze table — the figure is in our Coastal variant guide, which compares the two. It's the flat answer: little climbing, a town every few days, and a final stretch shared with everybody else from Tui onward.

The Camino de Invierno from Ponferrada, 260 to 263 km across roughly ten stages, according to the sources we've been able to check. It's the route that avoids the climb to O Cebreiro by dropping down the Sil valley, entering Galicia through Las Médulas and the Ribeira Sacra, and it is so minor that it doesn't even appear broken out in the official statistics. If crowds are what puts you off and you have ten days, this is the serious answer; it's covered in full in our Camino de Invierno guide.

And the Francés from Ponferrada or Astorga: 203.6 km across nine stages, or 256.2 across eleven. Ponferrada has its own railway station and the whole Bierzo ahead of it; Astorga adds two days and the Cruz de Ferro. Both figures come from the Francés starting-point table, the only one on this page with the real pilgrim split alongside.

One piece of honesty about the Primitivo: from Lugo it's four or five days, not ten, and from Oviedo in full it's fourteen. To start somewhere in the middle you'd have to count backwards in its stage table, because for that route we don't publish the running total from each intermediate start the way we do for the Francés. If you'd rather not do that sum by hand, the Invierno does the same job in this bracket.

With two weeks

Fourteen or fifteen days off are, after the subtraction above, eleven or twelve of walking. It's the most asked-about bracket of all and it has its own page, with what people who have already done it recommend and why: the Camino in two weeks. What follows is only the summary of what fits, with the distances.

• León to Santiago on the Francés: 304.5 km across 13 stages. It's the most used intermediate start — 7,604 pilgrims in 2025 — because it fits into two weeks and there's a high-speed train from Madrid. It skips the meseta and keeps the Cruz de Ferro, El Bierzo, O Cebreiro and the whole of Galicia.
• The full Primitivo: 306-311 km across 14 stages from Oviedo. Almost the same distance as León and considerably harder, as the mistakes section explains.
• The full Portuguese Coastal: 271 km across 13 stages from Porto, including the boat across the Minho to A Guarda.
• Saint-Jean to Burgos, the rest another year: about 280 km, eleven or twelve stages. It gives you the Pyrenees; it doesn't give you the Compostela on this trip.

With thirteen stages in fourteen days, León leaves no slack at all. If your calendar is rigid, Astorga (256.2 km, 11 stages) or Ponferrada (203.6 km, 9 stages) do the same job with two and four spare days.

With three weeks or more

Twenty-one days are about eighteen of walking, and the Francés still doesn't fit in full: from Burgos it's 482.4 km across 21 stages, so even three clean weeks don't cover it without eating the spare days. From Logroño it's 603.3 km across 26 stages and from Pamplona 697.7 across 30, so on this route there's no comfortable step between three weeks and five.

What does fit well into three weeks are two combinations almost nobody suggests. The first: the full Primitivo plus Finisterre and Muxía — 14 stages from Oviedo and another 3 to 6 days out to the coast, depending on whether you go to one of the two or string both together. The second: León to Santiago and then on to the sea, 13 stages plus Finisterre and Muxía, which are 87 to 118 km by our own stages. That stretch doesn't earn the Compostela — it's walked the other way, out of Santiago — but it does earn the Fisterrana, and it's the only way to finish a Camino facing the Atlantic.

Four weeks opens up the full Portuguese Central from Lisbon: 613-621 km in 25 or 26 days by our route comparison. It's the long Camino with the most services per kilometre and the least cold in spring.

With five weeks or more: the full routes

This is the sabbatical bracket, not the holiday one, and it's worth saying out loud before somebody books their August leave on the wrong arithmetic.

• The full Francés: 763.7 km across 33 stages from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, adding up the Gronze table day by day. Via Samos rather than San Xil it's 770.9, so the range an actual sum supports is 763 to 771 km. From Roncesvalles it's 739.5 km across 32 stages: you save exactly one day, but it's the Pyrenean one, 24.2 km with 1,419 metres of climb.
• Camino del Norte: 820-831 km across 36 stages from Irún.
• Vía de la Plata: roughly 960-1,000 km across 36-38 stages from Seville, between 38 and 45 days. Summer is ruled out outright by the extreme heat in Extremadura.

The table: from days to route

The days in the first column are walking days, not holiday days: do the subtraction above before looking for your row. The distances come from adding up our own stage tables — Gronze as the common reference, so routes can be compared on the same terms — and are indicative. The last column always refers to the Compostela on foot; by bike the minimum is 200 km and everything changes.

Two readings of the table that aren't obvious at a glance. First: between Tui's 116 km and Ponferrada's 203.6 there's a three-day gap almost nobody fills, and O Cebreiro (152.6 km) is the start that fills it. Second: past 300 km everything starts being measured in weeks, and from there the deciding factor stops being distance and becomes climb.

The four mistakes that keep repeating

They come up again and again on the forums, and all four are avoidable before you book anything.

1. Chopping up the Francés with buses in between

It's the first idea anyone has when they want "the whole Camino" with two weeks: walk some stretches and skip others by bus. It can work — plenty of people have done it and are happy they did — but it has a cost most people don't count: you lose the group you're walking with every time you jump. And if the certificate matters, there's a rule that complicates it: the stage that completes your 100 continuous kilometres has to be the one that walks into the Cathedral, not a stretch somewhere in the middle with a bus afterwards. The whole debate, with both sides, is in the Camino in two weeks, and the requirements are in the Compostela guide.

2. Starting somewhere public transport doesn't reach

O Cebreiro is the textbook case and we covered it above: there's no stop in the village, the stop is Pedrafita and there are 4 km of climbing left. Roncesvalles and Pedrafita itself share the other problem: if your last connection runs late, there's no bar open and no taxi available. Sarria, Ferrol and León do have late services. We have it start by start, with the timetable traps, in how to reach the start of the Camino.

3. Counting arrival day as a walking day

If you land in Santiago at midday, catch the coach to Ferrol and get in at five in the afternoon, that isn't your first day on the Camino: it's day zero. The same at the other end, with the added detail that arriving in Santiago doesn't end at the Cathedral door but at the Pilgrim's Office, queue included. How many nights are worth staying afterwards, and why, is in how many nights to stay in Santiago.

4. Choosing on distance and ignoring the climb

This is the most expensive of the four because you don't pay for it when you book, you pay on day three. The full Primitivo is 306-311 km, almost the same as León's 304.5, and they have nothing in common: of the five stages from Sarria to Santiago the hardest is Portomarín to Palas de Rei, with 519 metres of climb, and the Primitivo has seven days that beat that figure and three that nearly double it. Measured by intensity, the Primitivo accumulates 27.4 metres of climb per kilometre between Oviedo and Melide, against the Camino del Norte's 19.8. The honest summary is that the Primitivo is harder per day and the Norte is harder in total: 16,239 metres of accumulated climb over its 820.3 km. Before choosing on the distance figure, look at the profile — and while you're at it, at the training guide.

And if it doesn't fit: what you lose less of

There comes a point when the subtraction doesn't work out: you want the Francés and you have six days. There are two ways to go, and it's worth saying which one we prefer and why.

A short Camino walked in full — Ferrol, Tui, Lugo — gives you something a piece of the Francés doesn't: the sense of having started and finished something, and a group of people who set out with you on day one and arrive with you on the last. It's the argument repeated most often by people who have already done it, and it's hard to argue against with six days on the table.

A piece of the Francés — Sarria, O Cebreiro — gives you the Camino you had in your head, the one from the photographs, and leaves the rest of the route recognisable for a return trip. Since 2025 the Pilgrim's Office explicitly allows a route to be completed in phases and across different trips, so starting at the end no longer closes any doors, as long as the stage that closes your 100 km is the one that walks into Santiago.

What we don't recommend, and it's the only flat recommendation on this page, is the third option: booking thirteen stages for eleven days and trusting your legs to square the arithmetic. That's the one that ends in an improvised bus, and with the worse half of both options above.