Camino de Santiago stages and daily distances

Stage lengths on the Camino Francés are set by where the villages fall, not by the terrain. Albergues, bars and fountains appear every few kilometres across most of the route, so a day can end almost anywhere, and the standard splits are really just the places with enough beds. The exceptions sit at either end of the spectrum: the Pyrenean crossing, where the only accommodation between Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and Roncesvalles is a few hours up at Orisson, and parts of the meseta, where villages thin out and shade disappears for hours at a time.

Twelve thousand metres of ascent over 790 km sounds like a mountain route and walks like a flat one for most of its length. The climbing is concentrated rather than spread out. The first day out of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port gains around 1,200 m in 25 km, and the pull up to O Cebreiro on the Galician border does something similar late in the walk, when legs are already worn. On the days in between, kilometres and hard surfaces decide how you feel at four in the afternoon, not gradient.

In practice the route reads as four blocks. Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Roncesvalles and on through Pamplona and Puente la Reina is the mountain-and-wine opening, roughly a week of walking. Navarre and La Rioja then give way to the meseta, long open stages where 24 km passes quickly if you start early. The hills before Ponferrada and the Cruz de Ferro at 1,505 m form the third block. Finally Galicia: Sarria to Portomarín at 22 km, Arzúa to O Pedrouzo at 19 km, and the last 20 km into Santiago de Compostela.

The common error is treating the first week as a fitness test. Walkers who arrive straight from a desk job and push 30 km days out of Roncesvalles tend to meet their tendons somewhere around Logroño. The second mistake is booking every night in advance across a month, which removes the option of stopping short when a foot goes wrong. The third is underestimating Galicia: daily distances shrink but the ground rolls constantly, and beds between Sarria and Santiago fill by mid-afternoon in summer.