The Camino de Santiago, a medieval pilgrimage in northern Spain, has a way of making things seem normal that, elsewhere, might make a reasonable person wonder if you’re OK.
Things like: Walking 25 miles in freezing rain. Discussing blister drainage protocols with strangers. Sleeping with 60 people in a damp basement that proves snoring is an international language. Asking four nuns to lead a room full of pilgrims in “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
That last one was partially my fault.
The various routes that converge in the city of Santiago de Compostela began as pilgrimages a millennium ago, when the Catholic Church offered indulgences to those who visited what the church believes is the tomb of St. James the Apostle. (The Camino de Santiago translates to the Way of St. James.) The treks flourished throughout the Middle Ages, faded, then rebounded from a niche spiritual journey to a global escape hatch; in 2025, the pilgrim office handed out 530,000 certificates of completion, or compostelas.
I’d come to Spain hoping several hundred miles of walking might tell me where my life was headed. A month before I arrived, I’d been a business reporter. Then, my job vanished. The night I got the news, TikTok served up a video of someone walking the Camino. My Washington, D.C., apartment lease was ending the same day as my job, so this seemed like a better plan than refreshing LinkedIn until my soul left my body.
The whole experience
One of the best things about the Camino is that people can join it at different points—walking a weekend here, a week there. I chose the Camino Francés (the French Way), the best known of the routes, and assigned myself the full medieval-body experience: 500 miles, carrying a 16-pound backpack.
I trained as best I could, walking four or five hours a day on a walking pad in my parents’ basement, wearing a weighted vest—preparing for a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage by cosplaying as a hamster. I packed meticulously. Medieval pilgrims may have had faith; I had lightweight REI clothing, moleskin, Hokas and retinol.
I hit the trail in late April, where I quickly learned “walking across Spain” begins with walking up the Pyrenees. I kept stopping to take photos, partly because the Pyrenees were beautiful—spider webs hung with dew, bucolic stone farmhouses, horses stepping out of the fog—and partly so I could pause without making it obvious I was reconsidering my life choices. Then the fog broke, the clouds pooled below me, and I thought: Oh. I can do this.
The Camino isn’t wilderness, and it isn’t tourism in the usual sense. It’s a mix of woodland trails and roads following a chain of yellow arrows on stone walls or sidewalks. It’s church bells; bunk beds in 15-euro hostels; and some grand cities but also lots of tiny towns that exist because people with backpacks keep arriving.
Every morning, my watch buzzed at 6 a.m., and I’d step outside into the soft dark, find the first arrow and start walking. I’d become used to a life where momentum meant deadlines and notifications. On the Camino, momentum means one foot, then the other. Repeat until you run out of Spain.
At first, the Camino’s silence felt like withdrawal. Part of the appeal of the Camino is that no one can put a meeting on your calendar. But the road wasn’t silent—trekking poles clicking against stone, rain snapping against my poncho, the slide of rocks under my shoes and the chorus of “buen camino.”
The phrase translates to “good road,” but on the Camino, it means so much more. It’s hello, goodbye, good luck, Godspeed, please stop blocking my path, you got this. After a while, it felt like the road’s official policy: Whatever strange, painful, beautiful thing was happening to you is part of the journey. Buen camino!
From all walks
I started by following the stages as laid out in the guidebook—there are about 33 of them, which meant walking 15 or so miles a day—but I kept arriving too early. So I began pushing farther: 20-mile days, then 24, then, one day, over a marathon. The Camino is a choose-your-own-adventure: Sleep in public dorms or private rooms, walk solo or in informal groups, carry everything or send your bag ahead.
The Camino had room for all of us: veterans on their umpteenth Camino, first-timers, and pilgrims carrying very 2026 reasons—burnout, career panic, grief, retirement, faith, escape.
People often appeared, walked beside me for a while and then disappeared back into the road; I walked for 40 minutes with an 82-year-old on his 17th Camino, who then left me in his dust. But some people aren’t temporary. A Swedish woman and I are planning a European adventure next summer. Our only rule: No walking.
I preferred the big cities—Pamplona, Logroño, Burgos, León—where I could limp into the town square and reward myself with museums, cathedrals, mushroom pinxtos or paella that could feed 35 people. The food alone made the day’s mileage seem like a bargain: octopus in Galicia, Arzúa-Ulloa cheese from a farmers market or milk-fed lamb that made me forgive every hill in Castilla y León.
But the small towns had their texture, too, places with populations smaller than the number of pilgrims who might sit around a table at dinner. One such town was Carrion de los Condes, where the local celebrities were four singing nuns. When the sisters asked the dozens of us crowded into a small room what we wanted for our final song, I piped up: “How about ‘Country Roads’?” With two nuns on guitar, one with a tambourine and one on drums, a roomful of pilgrims started singing about West Virginia in a pileup of accents.
In this tiny town, I saw what the Camino offered every day: something old and strange and communal and meaningful, remade every night by whoever happened to arrive before the 10 p.m. curfew.
Ah, the rain
For all the Camino’s magic, it didn’t exempt anyone from the mileage—or the weather. For a close-to-summer in Spain, I imagined needing to stop every two hours to reapply sunscreen. But the rain in Spain didn’t stay mainly in the plain. It was mainly on me.
One day, the weather and my feet ganged up on me. The downpour turned the path—uphill, then downhill, then uphill again—into a slick mess of red clay and rock; every step had my blisters screaming in a new language. As I headed into what I thought was the last mile of the day, there was no town in sight. My phone had no internet. I had no reservation for a bed. I called my sister, sobbing. She told me my day was actually 22 miles, not 20. So I limped. I slipped. I cursed.
Eventually, impossibly, San Juan de Ortega appeared. I got the last bed. I celebrated with a mountain of bread and a 2-euro glass of wine. That night, I dreamed I told my family I was quitting and coming home. The next morning, I started walking again.
The days stacked up, as did the moments. Outside Estella, where the path passed a fountain that dispensed wine. Pamplona’s Alto del Perdón—the Hill of Forgiveness—where metal pilgrim figures stand against the sky, leaning permanently into the wind. León, where the night ended at 2 a.m. with this American and an Italian singing karaoke in Spanish. The Cruz de Ferro, where pilgrims leave stones they’ve carried from home, a mountain of burdens surrendered under an iron cross.
Then, at the end of May, after 26 days and 500 miles of walking, I reached Santiago de Compostela. I thought I would cry when I saw the cathedral. That seemed narratively appropriate. My body was wrecked. My bones still felt cold. But I laughed—either joy or disbelief or my body’s last available response to finally being allowed to stop.
Now what?
I went to the pilgrim Mass and saw the famous thurible swing through the cathedral. I collected my certificate. I checked into a real, live hotel. I ate sea barnacles and saw the tomb of St. James. I showered, collapsed on a bed that didn’t require earplugs or a ladder, then went shopping for non-REI clothing. That night, I had dinner in a garden and walked back past the cathedral, enormous and silent in the dark. This time, I sat there for 20 minutes and let the whole absurd, painful, ridiculous, wonderful journey wash over me.
I never got a grand revelation. No career plan descended from the Botafumeiro when I arrived in Santiago. No saintly voice told me what to do next. But the Camino handed me a few thousand yellow arrows that were enough to get me home. Somewhere between the Pyrenees and Santiago, I learned that when life steals your momentum, maybe the answer is to just keep walking.
This article first appeared here.
