Spain’s Popular Camino Tours Suited To Walkers Of All Ages, Budgets

For more than 1,000 years, travelers from across Europe have walked Spain’s 500-mile Camino de Santiago, taking part in a religious pilgrimage whose modern-day, largely secular equivalent attracts hundreds of thousands of travelers a year. 

Traditionalists or purists go it alone, lugging their backpacks across the width of Spain, while nursing their blistered feet and taking their chances on dormitory-style lodgings whose hazards range from snoring bunkmates to bedbug infestations.

In 2015, I was one of those traditionalists, so I know firsthand the challenges and enduring rewards of making one’s way on foot from the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain (where the bones of St. James the Apostle are said to be buried) and on to Finisterre to dip one’s toes in the Atlantic.

Photo: Marilee Crocker

But this modest and physically demanding travel style is not for everyone. Fortunately, in the years since Martin Sheen’s 2010 movie “The Way” popularized the Camino among North American travelers, the options for would-be Camino walkers have expanded dramatically. That’s good news for travelers and travel agents alike.

Camino walking tours
A do-it-yourselfer like me typically spends as little as $30 to $60 a day to walk the Camino, but travel agency clients can dish out upwards of $700 a day for a cushier, and usually abbreviated, experience.

North American tour companies such as Wilderness Travel, Country Walkers, Butterfield & Robinson and Mountain Travel Sobek offer 7- to 10-night walking trips, with land prices ranging from $475 to $713 a day.

For clients whose ambitions and/or budgets lie somewhere in between, Petrabax of Long Island City, NY, offers another option. The firm, which specializes in the Iberian Peninsula and generates 90% of its sales from travel agents, has been offering independent and small group Camino trips for years.

Petrabax’ Camino de Santiago trips are unescorted itineraries, which means travelers walk at their own pace along the well-marked pathways and roads that stretch from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Finisterre, Spain. (Petrabax will arrange local guides for an additional fee.)

Accommodations, luggage transfers and breakfasts are included on set itineraries ranging from 6 to 34 nights, though Petrabax will orchestrate Camino trips along any portion of the walk at any time of year.

Lodgings are in best-available one- to three-star hotels, guest houses or rural tourism manor houses with private bath; prices start at $86 per night, or $99 in the peak months of May, September and October. Accommodations in the popular Paradores of Spain are offered, where available, for a supplemental fee.

Walkers of all ages
The market for Camino trips is wide, including repeaters, said Ceni Batista, a longtime Petrabax travel consultant who hopes someday to walk the full Camino herself. “We have honeymooners doing the Camino and people who just went through a divorce. You find every type of person. We have people in their 80s, in their 20s and 30s. It’s a mix.

Photo: Marilee Crocker

“We have families where one person will take the full Camino, the French Way, from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Finisterre, and other family members who don’t have as much vacation time will meet up with them in Leon to walk part of the Camino.”

The Camino is also popular among religious or church groups, as well as high school and university groups.

Batista advised agents to tell interested clients not to be afraid of making the Camino pilgrimage on their own. “They are not going to a third-world country. You pass by beautiful towns and churches. You’ll find people from everywhere, and they may walk with you. It’s beautiful. It doesn’t have to be religious. As long as you can walk, you can do it.”

As they say in Spain, “Buen Camino!”

Photo: Marilee Crocker