The Camino de Santiago in 7 days: where to start on every route

By August Frederik Kramer, who has walked the Camino twice · Last updated 11 September 2026

Know these words before your Camino. Spanish is preparation, the same as boots and stages. Try the free topic

Ask how to walk the Camino de Santiago in a week and you will be told Sarria, every time, by everybody. It is not wrong. It is one answer, about one route out of 10, and it is the answer given most often because it is the one with a package attached to it.

There are 10 routes. A week is enough to walk one of them from beginning to end, and enough to walk the final stretch of any of the others. Which stretch, how far, and whether it still earns you a Compostela are all arithmetic, and we hold every stage of every route, so here is the arithmetic.

What fits end to end

Before working out where to join a long route, it is worth knowing that you may not have to. Walking a whole Camino, arriving on foot at the place it was always heading, is a different experience from walking the last fifth of a longer one, and on the short routes it fits in the time most people actually get off work.

The Camino Inglés is the one to notice. It is 110.1 km over 6 walking days, it ends at the cathedral like the famous ones do, and it is long enough to earn a Compostela on its own. It almost never appears in an article about walking the Camino in a week, and the reason is not that it is a bad walk. It is that nobody needs to sell you a transfer to the start of it.

3 of the 10 routes do not finish in Santiago at all: Camino Finisterre, Camino Mozárabe, Camino Lebaniego. They are short, they are walked as pilgrimages, and they are the right answer for some people with a week. They are also the wrong answer if the cathedral is the point, so the table says where each one actually ends.

Seven days, on every route

If you want to arrive in Santiago and the route you want does not fit, you join it partway. 7 routes end at the cathedral and 6 of them are longer than a week, so counting back 7 stages through our own stage plan gives this. The Camino Inglés is not in the table because seven days is more than it needs.

Two columns there are doing work that the usual version of this article leaves out. Longest day is the number that decides whether a week is a walk or a forced march, and it is not the same on every route. And climb is measured over exactly those 7 days rather than quoted for the whole route, so it is the climb you would actually do.

Five days, and the line where the Compostela stops

Under a week the arithmetic turns, and it turns on the Cathedral’s rule rather than on your legs. The Pilgrim’s Office issues the Compostela to anyone who walks the last 100 km into Santiago with a stamped credencial. Fewer days means a closer start, and a closer start eventually falls inside that line.

There is Sarria, in its place: 5 walking days from Santiago in our stage plan, not seven. Anyone selling a week from Sarria is counting the arrival day and the day you travel home, which is fair enough, but it is worth knowing which of the two counts you are being given.

At 4 days it is down to Camino del Norte and nothing else, and at 3 days no route into Santiago still clears 100 km from its stage boundary. 4 walking days is the first point at which the certificate is possible at all, and only then on the routes whose stages happen to fall the right way.

That is a measurement of our stage plan rather than a ruling. The Pilgrim’s Office does not read your GPS; it counts stamps from a recognised starting point, and a figure within a couple of kilometres of 100 is inside our own margin of error rather than a verdict. Where the last 100 km starts on every route works that boundary out properly, town by town.

Ten days, and what the extra three buy

Ten days is the other end of this family, and the jump is bigger than it sounds. On the Camino Francés it moves the start from La Laguna de Castilla to Molinaseca, from 155.9 km to 211.8 km.

What a day means here, and what these towns are

A day on this page is one of our own stages, not a guidebook’s and not a tour company’s. They are days of walking with no travel days at either end, so a seven-day plan here needs eight or nine days away from home once you have added getting there and getting back.

The join towns are stage boundaries, not recommendations. That distinction matters. A stage has to end somewhere, and on some routes it ends in a hamlet with a bar and eight beds. Those places are perfectly good to walk out of and can be awkward to arrive in from an airport. Read the table as “this is the point on the route that is 7 days out”, then look at the nearest real town to it, which is often a stage or two further back and makes the walk slightly longer rather than shorter.

We have deliberately not printed bus and train times. They change every season, a page full of them is wrong within a year, and wrong is worse than absent.

Which route, rather than how long

If the day count is flexible and the route is not yet decided, the question turns around, and the tables above are the wrong shape for it. Which Camino route should you walk compares all ten on steepness, longest day and total time, with the same measurements behind it. If you already know the route and want the distance from a particular town, how long the Camino is has that. And how many kilometres a day is the one to read if you suspect our stage split is faster or slower than you walk, because every number on this page moves if you change that assumption.

How these figures were measured

Every distance, day count and climb figure here is measured along the same GPS tracks the Caminantes app navigates by, sampled against elevation data rather than copied from a guidebook. Nothing on this page is typed in by hand: the day counts come from the stage tables on the route pages, so a figure here cannot disagree with the route page it links to.

They are honest to about a kilometre. A variant, a detour around a closed bridge or a different guidebook’s line will move any of them. What they are good for is comparison between routes, because all 10 were measured the same way, and that is the thing a table assembled from ten different sources cannot give you.

Common questions

Can you walk the Camino de Santiago in 7 days?

Part of one, yes, and one route in full. The Camino Inglés is 110.1 km over 6 walking days, so a week covers it end to end with a day spare. On the Camino Francés a week takes you the last 155.9 km, joining at La Laguna de Castilla. What you cannot do in seven days is walk a long route from its own beginning: the shortest of those is 13 days.

How many days do you need to walk the Camino de Santiago?

It depends entirely which one, and the honest range across the ten routes is 3 days to 47. The Vía de la Plata is 994.6 km and takes 47 walking days in our stage plan. The Camino Inglés takes 6. Both are the Camino de Santiago.

Which Camino route can you walk in a week?

The Camino Inglés: 110.1 km over 6 days, ending at the cathedral and long enough for a Compostela on its own. Two more routes fit in a week but finish somewhere other than the cathedral, which is worth knowing before you book: Camino Finisterre, Camino Mozárabe, Camino Lebaniego.

Do you get the Compostela if you only walk for a week?

On most routes yes, if you join far enough out. The Pilgrim’s Office asks for the last 100 km on foot, and after 7 days of walking every route that needs joining clears it comfortably. Below that it gets tight fast: at 4 days it is down to Camino del Norte and nothing else, and at 3 days none do.

Where do you start the Camino for 5 days?

On the Camino Francés the stage boundary five days out is Sarria, 114.7 km from the cathedral, which is the well-known short walk. Every other route has its own equivalent and they are not all 100 km: the table on this page has all 7 of them.

How were these figures measured?

Along our own GPS tracks, sampled against elevation data, the same tracks the app navigates by. They are honest to about a kilometre, and a variant or a detour moves them. Because all ten routes were measured the same way, the gaps between them are real, which is not true of a table assembled from ten different sources.

Keep reading

Take it with you

Caminantes is free, works offline, and plans your stages around your own legs rather than a guidebook's.

All guides · Compare all 10 Camino de Santiago routes