Caminantes

Camino Finisterre elevation profile

84.2 km and 1,433 m of ascent,between 3 m and 475 m. Measured from the route's own GPS track rather than copied from anywhere, which matters more than it should: almost every ascent figure published for these routes, including ours until August 2026, was an estimate nobody could source.

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Metres up the side, kilometres along the bottom. Ticks are stage boundaries. Sampled every 100 m against SRTM 30m, smoothed over 500 m, climbs under 3 m discarded as noise.

Move across the profile to read any point, or drag to measure a stretch. With the keyboard: focus the profile, then arrow keys to move, shift for finer steps, Enter to start and end a measurement, Escape to clear. Each stage in the table below can also be measured directly.

What the profile shows

The Camino Finisterre climbs 17.0 m per kilometre on average, which makes it the fifth steepest of the 10 routes measured here. A total on its own mostly measures how long a route is; per kilometre is what decides whether your days feel hilly.

The climbing is not spread evenly. The first third of the route carries 44% of the total ascent (44%, 30% and 26% across the three thirds), so pace yourself for that section rather than for the average.

The longest sustained climb runs from km 12 to km 14, gaining 225 m over 2.4 km, an average grade of 9.4%. The high point, 475 m, comes at km 46, 55% of the way in.

The hardest days

Ranked by climbing rather than distance, which is a different list and the one that decides how the evening feels.

  • Day 1, Santiago de Compostela to Negreira — 429 m over 21.3 km
  • Day 2, Negreira to A Corna — 363 m over 15.1 km
  • Day 5, Cee to Finisterre — 221 m over 11.8 km
  • Day 3, A Corna to Mollón — 209 m over 16 km
  • Day 4, Mollón to Cee — 209 m over 20.3 km

Every stage

Measured ascent for every stage of the Camino Finisterre
DayFromTokmAscentHigh point
1Santiago de CompostelaNegreira21.3429 m277 m
2NegreiraA Corna15.1363 m427 m
3A CornaMollón16209 m475 m
4MollónCee20.3209 m372 m
5CeeFinisterre11.8221 m109 m

Stages are a suggested split, not a rule. Most people walk their own.

Where the numbers come from

The GPS track carries position but no height, so the altitude was measured rather than read off: 843 points along the route, one every 100 m, each looked up against the SRTM 30 m elevation dataset.

One check worth stating, because it is the difference between plausible and correct. Total ascent minus total descent comes to -217 m. The profile's own start and finish differ by -211 m, so the two agree to within 6 m over 84.2 km.

They do not match exactly, and the reason is the noise floor: climbs under 3 m are discarded as sensor jitter, which removes a little real height along with a lot of imaginary height. A tool claiming these two numbers agree perfectly would be hiding that.

Ascent depends on method. Sample more finely and you measure noise as climbing; smooth harder and you flatten real hills. Anyone quoting a single authoritative number for a route this long is hiding that choice, so the settings used here are stated above and you can compare like with like.

The Camino Finisterre page says 90 km and this track measures 84.2 km, a difference of 6.4%. Both are right. The quoted distance is the conventional one every guide and waymarking sign uses; the measured one is the length of this particular GPS trace, and any two traces of the same route differ by roughly this much depending on which variant they take through each town. The ascent above is computed along the track shown here, so it belongs with 84.2 km rather than with the quoted figure.

Route facts, stages and the full description are on the Camino Finisterre route page. Every route's profile is on the tools page.

Compare with another route

All measured the same way, so the numbers are comparable. Ordered by total ascent, hardest first.