5 Guides to the Camino de Santiago
Five guidebooks by women who write about various routes of the Camino de Santiago.
A guidebook provides a traveler the practical information to follow in the writer’s footsteps, whether that’s Rick Steves guides for the less experienced traveler, the far-reaching Lonely Planet guides for the youthful, educated wanderer, Frommer’s guides to mainstream destinations with a focus on comfort, Rough Guides for travel off the beaten track, or so many other options.
What if you prefer to create some footprints of your own? What if you choose your destinations by word of mouth or based on the scene in a well-loved book like Under the Tuscan Sun, The Motorcycle Diaries, The Caliph’s House, or The Kite Runner? That was how I imagined I would travel, until I ordered a book off the internet in 2013 called A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Camino de Santiago by John Brierley.
For all of the guidebook empires created by men from the 19th century to the 21st, with some notable exceptions in the Lonely Planet and Bradt guides, the first guidebook is usually credited to English poet and playwright Mariana Starke. Her 2-volume set called Travels in Italy Between 1792 and 1798 was recognized as ground breaking and mocked for its attention to details such as the cost of washing petticoats in Venice and how to prepare goods to ship safely from Rome to England. Starke even invented a rating system from 1 – 5 exclamation points.
Curious about what makes a good guidebook, given my suspicion of them in general (too much planning?), I decided to explore guidebooks for a pilgrimage route that I know rather well. I chose five Camino guidebooks by woman authors to see what they made of the nonfiction guidebook.
The traditional guidebook
Anna Dintaman’s Camino de Santiago (Village to Village Guide): Camino Frances: St Jean - Santiago - Finisterre (Kindle Edition) is a thorough, traditional guidebook with broad reach. Published in 2017, the guide includes topics from Camino history, albergues (pilgrim dormitories), hotels, hostels, eating, and restaurants to phones & internet, medical care, safety, the Camino by bicycle, and families with children. You’ll find detailed packing lists, and recommendations for footwear, clothing, and blister prevention. The bulk of the book is devoted to daily stage profiles that outline distances between villages, hour estimates for walking each stage, percentage of the route that is paved and unpaved, and a difficulty level for the day from 1 - 3, as well as other pertinent information.
Spain has been hard hit by the coronavirus and there are no guarantees Americans will walk the Camino Frances in 2021, but Dintaman’s Camino Frances guidebook is about as up-to-date as you’ll find and includes a website and free GPS files available online.
If you’re looking for a road less traveled, you might consider one of the three Spanish Camino routes that make up the Northern Caminos: the Camino Inglés, the Camino Primitivo, and the Camino del Norte. Fewer travelers mean fewer amenities along the routes, so a good guide is arguably an essential asset to pilgrims who choose one of these routes.
Forty percent, or roughly 16K pilgrims each year (before COVID-19), choose the most physically challenging Camino route, the Camino Primitivo. Stacey Wittig’s A Pilgrim Guide to the Camino Primitivo (Kindle edition 2017) is packed with intriguing history of the original 9th century pilgrimage route from Oviedo in Asturias to Santiago de Compostela, a walk of about 320 kilometers over roughly 14 days. No homage to packing lists and backpack transport, Wittig’s guide is a charming cultural reference as well as a solid guide to route and accommodations.
Susan Jagannath’s The Camino Inglés: 6 days (or less) to Santiago (Kindle edition updated for 2020) is a detailed tour of one of the shortest pilgrimage routes to Santiago on the Camino Inglés from Ferrol or A Coruña to Santiago de Compostela. Just 119 kilometers, Jagannath touts the Camino Inglés as the perfect adventure for a traveler with limited time and resources and a desire to walk a shorter route with beautiful views. Her descriptions of stopping points in the day’s walk followed by evening eating and sleeping recommendations, as well as Jagannath’s friendly and engaging voice, make this short guide to a short Camino a great value.
The guidebook less traveled
Two guidebooks in my list fall outside the traditional definition and character of the typical walking or hiking guidebook. One of them, subtitled “a curious guide to the Camino del Norte,” is about a walk along the Northern Camino route from Irun along Spain’s Basque and Asturian coastlines to Santiago. The Camino Provides (Kindle edition 2020) by Cassie Childers and James Ryle is a delightful travel memoir best read before or after your pilgrimage on the 835-kilometre Camino del Norte. Exceptionally written by two natural storytellers, their 40-day Camino with its surprising climax is well worth including in your reading list. Planning, info, and guide sections at the end of each week’s storytelling chapters are more of an afterthought, but a list of regional food and their descriptions was particularly detailed and intriguing.
You might know Annie O’Neill as one of the pilgrims in the 2013 film Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago. O’Neill, who is a film maker and producer herself, is also an author. Everyday Camino with Annie, copyright 2014, is less guidebook and more 40-day guided meditation with the Camino as its theme. This small tome designed to fit into a back pocket could become a dog-eared favorite on a European Camino adventure or on a virtual Camino at home. As O’Neill reminds us, yellow arrows pop up everywhere in our lives to show us “the way.”
Looking for the Via Francigena
John Brierley’s Camino guidebook wasn’t the only one on the market in 2013, but I’m confident many more are available now. The route I’m walking through England from Shrewsbury to Canterbury is probably not documented in a guidebook at all, but British foot paths are popularly preserved. I’ll be researching and writing more about the planned first part of my walk in upcoming posts.
Canterbury to Rome isn’t as well traveled as the Camino de Santiago, but the Via Francigena was a popular pilgrimage route through France and Switzerland over St Bernardino Pass in the Alps and through Northern Italy to Rome. I read Timothy Egan’s A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith, but his thoughtful travel narrative is clearly not meant as a guide to the Via Francigena.
A guidebook I ordered from England, The via Francigena. 1000 kilometres on foot from the Gran San Bernardo to Rome by Roberta Ferraris, has been delayed and might never show up. Another promising guide to the Via Francigena hadn’t been updated in some time and I read recently that the author, Alison Raju, died in November. The Lightfoot Guides to the Via Francigena are next on my list but I’ll have to purchase two pricey volumes.
Whether traditional step-by-step guide, memoir, or meditation, a traveler’s choice of guidebook is personal and depends so much on goals and preferences. If I can’t find the perfect guidebook to my walk, maybe I’ll have to write one. It takes an extraordinary commitment to make a guidebook worthy of a long walk, though. Have you read a wonderful guidebook that takes the art of describing the path to another level? Tell us about it.