Spain

May 15, 2026

I’ve been in Spain now since the 1st of May and arrived in Santiago this Thursday, the 13th. I am taking a 2-day break here before I set off for Bordeaux.

Cycling the Camino has been fun. I’ve met lots of fun and interesting people. Going over the border from France to Spain has been quite difficult because, up until Spain, I had mostly stayed at municipal campsites. They are cheap and are everywhere in France. But in Spain, on my route, there have been way fewer campsites. The ones that do exist are mostly big resort-style campsites and are thus more expensive. Because the weather has been shit thus far in Spain, I was simply not going to wild camp, which was originally my plan. So I stayed at albergues all the way through to Santiago. This was quite a difficult switch to make because it screwed up my routine. I also needed to find out how the albergues work, and this took a couple of days.

On one particular day, all the albergues I knocked on the door of were full, and so at the end of the day I cycled 130 km and arrived at a hostel in Burgos at 8 pm. I decided to book after no success in finding an albergue that had places left. After that day, I’ve mostly booked my stays in advance, and this solved the stress around finding a place to sleep.

The route itself has been a blast. On the first crossing into Spain, I cycled over the Pyrenees, which took about 2 hours of constant climbing to get to the top. After that, there has been lots of climbing, but nothing like the Pyrenees.

One night about a week ago, I was having a communal dinner at an albergue when a Dutch girl came looking for a guy named Liam. She was also cycling the Camino and was staying at another hostel. She had heard that there was another Dutch cyclist in town and had come looking for me. She asked me if I wanted to cycle together the next day, and so we did. It was fun company, and the route that day was nice.

I’ve met many more people here in Spain and had a great time.

Because of the switch to albergues, my routine got screwed up, and because of this, I’ve found little time to post some updates here. I am going to try to keep it weekly again if I can, and for sure will when I’m out of Spain. I’m not planning on taking many breaks until I’m out of Spain. I enjoyed my time here, but have a big desire to get back to the routine I had before Spain and get back to camping again.