Camino elevation profiles

Ten routes, measured from their own GPS tracks against the SRTM 30 m elevation dataset, with the ascent worked out for every stage. Free, no account, and the method is written down so you can check it.

This exists because the published numbers were not trustworthy. Nearly every ascent figure quoted for these routes traces back to nobody in particular, ours included until August 2026, when measuring them showed all ten were wrong. The Camino Invierno was being published at 1,188 m against a real 4,948 m.

Measuring was not the end of it. A figure is only as good as the line it was measured along, so every route's GPS track was then checked against the waymarked Camino as mapped in OpenStreetMap. That caught a real problem: the Vía de la Plata's track left the route twice in Galicia, once over the Padornelo pass and once for 34 km around Laza, missing Laza itself by 6.6 km. Both stretches have been replaced with the waymarked route and the whole thing remeasured.

The check it now passes is the one worth stating: the Vía de la Plata tops out at 1,352 m, which is the Alto de Padornelo, and the Francés at 1,505 m, which is Cruz de Ferro. Numbers that land on named places are numbers you can argue with.Nothing on these pages is under review.

Sorted by total climbing, which is not the same order as distance. The Lebaniego is the steepest of the ten per kilometre, at 32 m of climb for every kilometre walked, against 22 on the Primitivo and 14 on the Francés.

How these were made

Each route's GPS track was sampled every 100 m and each sample looked up against SRTM 30 m. The result is smoothed over 500 m and climbs under 3 m are discarded, because raw satellite elevation is noisy enough that summing it unsmoothed turns jitter into kilometres of imaginary climbing.

Ascent is method-dependent and honest sources say so, which is why the sampling interval, the smoothing window and the noise floor are all written above rather than buried. Change any of them and the totals move; quote a single authoritative figure without saying which you used and you are hiding a choice.

The tracks themselves were checked against the mapped Camino, not just the elevations against the terrain. Nine of the ten needed no change. The tenth did, and this page says which and what changed rather than quietly restating a corrected number.