Caminantes

Camino Primitivo elevation profile

306.5 km and 6,776 m of ascent,between 39 m and 1,214 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.

040080012000501001502002503001,214 m

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 Primitivo climbs 22.1 m per kilometre on average, which makes it the second 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 spread fairly evenly: 40%, 36% and 24% of the total ascent falls in the first, middle and final third. There is no one section that decides the route.

The longest sustained climb runs from km 39 to km 58, gaining 676 m over 18.9 km, an average grade of 3.6%. The high point, 1,214 m, comes at km 92, 30% 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 7, El Campín de Segundo Plano to A Fonsagrada — 1020 m over 31.5 km
  • Day 5, Borres to Montefurado — 744 m over 16.7 km
  • Day 3, Salas to Tinéu — 720 m over 19.6 km
  • Day 8, A Fonsagrada to O Cádavo — 696 m over 24.4 km
  • Day 2, Grau / Grado to Salas — 535 m over 19.9 km

Every stage

Measured ascent for every stage of the Camino Primitivo
DayFromTokmAscentHigh point
1OviedoGrau / Grado25.3333 m249 m
2Grau / GradoSalas19.9535 m349 m
3SalasTinéu19.6720 m783 m
4TinéuBorres15.6285 m910 m
5BorresMontefurado16.7744 m1214 m
6MontefuradoEl Campín de Segundo Plano21.6437 m1175 m
7El Campín de Segundo PlanoA Fonsagrada31.51020 m1110 m
8A FonsagradaO Cádavo24.4696 m1016 m
9O CádavoLugo30.1381 m870 m
10LugoCarricova15.2297 m580 m
11CarricovaMelide31.8515 m700 m
12MelideSeixas15.1251 m463 m
13SeixasO Pedrouzo18.4258 m413 m
14O PedrouzoSantiago de Compostela19.5297 m390 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: 3,066 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 +13 m. The profile's own start and finish differ by +19 m, so the two agree to within 6 m over 306.5 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 Primitivo page says 320 km and this track measures 306.5 km, a difference of 4.2%. 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 306.5 km rather than with the quoted figure.

Route facts, stages and the full description are on the Camino Primitivo 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.