People ask why you would walk the same road five times. It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is that it isn’t the same road — because you aren’t the same pilgrim. The Camino Francés hasn’t moved. The Alto de Perdón still waits above Pamplona, the bridge at Puente la Reina still crosses the Arga, the meseta still tests your patience somewhere after Burgos. What changed, walk over walk, was me.
The first highlights never wear out
On my first Camino, in the spring of 2016, I climbed out of Pamplona to the Alto de Perdón and stood among the iron pilgrims in the wind. Fantastic 360° views of the Navarran countryside, the Camino villages laid out below, and a downhill so steep and rocky that it punished anyone who’d spent too long admiring them. I wrote at the time that it was one of the first highlights of the Francés. Five walks later, it still is. That’s the first thing the Camino teaches a repeat pilgrim: the landmarks don’t fade with familiarity. The Romanesque bridge leaving Agés, the halfway chapel of the Virgen del Puente, the first sight of Castrojeriz under its castle — they greet you like people you know.
Where you sleep shapes the walk
Every first-time pilgrim worries about the bed. I did. In Castrojeriz, in May 2016, I ended up at the Hostal Iacobus because there were simply no beds left anywhere else in town — and it was good, clean, with a large room, hot showers, and comfortable beds. That’s the Camino in miniature: the plan fails, and the road provides anyway.
Over five walks I’ve slept in most of what’s out there. A donativo albergue where pilgrims sleep on floor mats, eat a communal meal together, and gather for pilgrim mass and candlelit confessionals — the most interesting night of any Camino I’ve walked, and it asks nothing but a donation. A restored house in Puente la Reina with a garden, in October, with hot showers and a breakfast I still remember. A hotel in Burgos I liked so much in October that I stayed there twice on the same walk. And yes — a fifty-bed overflow dorm in Estella with rusty iron bunks and the loudest symphony of snoring I have ever heard. I wrote “Avoid room 5!” in my notes, and I meant it, and I’d still trade a quiet hotel corridor for that dorm’s stories.
The lesson isn’t that albergues are better than hotels or the reverse. It’s that the bed is part of the pilgrimage, not an interruption of it — and that the communal table and the shared dorm give you something a private room can’t: the other pilgrims.
The table is half the Camino
Ask me about 2016 and I’ll tell you about a bar in León — Camarote Madrid — packed on a Saturday afternoon with local families, three generations deep, and the best paella I ate in Spain served as a tapa. Or a plate in Burgos at Cervecería Morito: blood sausage, mushrooms, red peppers, fries, a fried egg, and gulas over the top. Typical Burgos eating. Mighty tasty.
The Camino feeds you if you let it. Eat where the locals eat. Stop at the wine fountain at Irache — free wine, though be prepared for a trickle and have some patience; everyone’s taking photos. End the day on Calle Laurel in Logroño, mushroom by mushroom. My rule, written after a dinner in Burgos and never revised: always drink Ribera in Spain. Nothing compares.
The people are the point
In Los Arcos, in the spring of 2016, I stayed in a quirky little place with small shared rooms and a patio, and there I met several Camino friends with whom I walked all the way to Santiago. So it just goes to show. You don’t choose your Camino family; you bunk near them.
That’s what changes by the fifth walk. The first time, you’re measuring yourself against the road — the climbs, the distances, whether your feet will hold. Later, you measure the walk by who’s at the table. A hard-working woman and her son running the albergue in Cardeñuela Riopico. A server in Roncesvalles who sent me to a restaurant in Pamplona I still recommend. The hospitaleros who keep the whole fragile, wonderful system running on donations and goodwill. The Camino is a machine for meeting people, disguised as a long walk.
What I’d tell a first-timer
- Don’t race for beds, but respect the day. Arrive tired in a full town once, as I did in Castrojeriz, and you’ll learn to start earlier or book the busy stages. Both are fine. Panic is the only wrong option.
- Stay in a donativo albergue at least once. Floor mats and all. It’s the Camino at its oldest and best.
- Mix your nights. An albergue for the fellowship, a good hotel when your body asks for it. The Monasterio San Zoilo in Carrión de los Condes remains one of my favourite places to stay anywhere on the Camino Francés — a treat is also part of the tradition.
- Eat the local thing in the local place, even if you can’t pronounce it. Especially then.
- Leave room for the unplanned. The best meal, the best bed, and the best friends of my first Camino were none of them planned.
Why I built My Camino Bed
Somewhere along those walks I started doing what pilgrims do: keeping notes on every place I passed, slept, and ate — hundreds of them, as it turned out. When I built My Camino Bed, I gave it one rule, and it hasn’t changed: list all the lodgings. Not just the ones that earn a commission — the municipal albergue, the donativo, the four-room pensión — because pilgrims are attached to the albergue experience in a way no booking engine understands, and a directory that only lists what pays betrays the spirit of the road it serves.
Five times I’ve walked it. The road hasn’t changed. I have — and that’s rather the point of going.