Winter Pilgrimage to Santiago

I just got back from backpacking a portion of the Camino de Santiago in Spain a few weeks ago. In the summer, thousands reach the final destination, the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, daily. My husband and I saw 12 pilgrims total in the course of the whole week. Some days we saw more cows and chickens than humans—that’s counting the farmers and village inhabitants.

We knew that making the pilgrimage in January would present challenges—the cold, the extra rain in the already rainy province of Galicia, the lack of services—and we would still recommend it, though I would venture to say that the summer pilgrimage is a very different experience.

Should you decide to brave the winter months, a few words of advice:

Pre-book your rooms. Don’t chance it on just stopping in a town when you’re tired and expecting to find accommodations. We stayed in the loveliest places—no pilgrim albergues, but rooms we booked on Booking.com and Airbnb. Contact me should you want to stay in Vega de Valcarce, Triacastela, Portomarin, Arzúa, or Santiago; fantastic accommodations with wonderful hosts. I also have amazing recommendations for 2 places in Barcelona (not on the Camino but part of our trip).

Be realistic about rain and snow. You will get wet. Luckily we loved our gear (ponchos, packs, quick drying pants, LOTS of gallon ziploc bags) and they got the job done. Surprisingly, all of the places we stayed overnight had hairdryers which, along with radiators, I put to good use in drying wet items, because let’s face it, when you’re outside for 12 hours in the rain you’re going to get a little wet even with the best gear.

Be prepared that you might not have hot food. After our longest day, in fact, we were so exhausted that we didn’t even eat dinner; going to bed a little hungry was preferable to finding the only open bar in town. We ate lots of croissants and bread and cheese and pork (in all of its wonderful Spanish varieties). We went 3 days without eating any warm food just because we could only find basic services.

If you care about stamps in your credencial (the pilgrim’s passport), just be aware that you aren’t going to get as many in January as you will in June. You might really care about this; luckily we got over it pretty fast. The issue is that so many businesses are closed at this time of the year.

The sun doesn’t come up until 8:30 in the morning. It’s dark outside. Seriously dark. Spaniards are my kind of people—not morning people—and this probably has a lot to do with it. Every time we tried to leave even as early as 8, the locals would definitely try to talk us out of it. The first day we started at 6:00am and walked and walked with no light; it was particularly challenging as we were just getting accustomed to looking for the yellow arrows and shell markers that show the Camino path. The sun goes down at about 7:30pm. We definitely put our headlamps to good use. It also meant that sometimes we didn’t get fabulous photos of some pretty fabulous places.

PS: We traveled the most-traveled Camino Francés; we’d love to go back and walk one of the other Camino routes, but probably closer to the regular pilgrim season.

My photos of the Camino and the countryside hardly capture the beauty of the region, which resembled pictures of Ireland and Scotland far more than I could have ever imagined. This post includes just a few views from the path.