Overall Trail Report

In May 2025, we set out to walk and link together the Ruta do Mar and the Camino dos Faros. By completing this link up, I would have walked the entire northern coast of Spain from Irun at the French border all the way to Fisterra on the west coast of Galicia. The following is a report on each section.

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Ruta Do Mar
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Route: https://www.komoot.com/tour/2305021677

Navigation & Terrain
The trail is mostly well marked though we used GaiaGPS with GPX tracks to ensure we stayed on path along the way. There is some potential for confusion as there are 2 trails that generally follow the coast: the Ruta do Mar and the Ruta del Cantabrico. The guidebook recommends which trail to follow on a stage by stage basis. The coastal extension through and beyond Santo André de Teixido is not as well marked.

There is a fair amount of walking on some form of pavement (58% according to a Komoot analysis of our actual track). Most of it is on smaller roads. But we did walk along a major windy (and dangerous) road with a minimal shoulder at times for some 10km on the stage from Cedeira to Valdoviño.

Infrastructure
There is no real "pilgrim" infrastructure to speak of on the Ruta Do Mar. We stayed in small hotels and apartments along the way -- all booked in advance through Booking.com. We paid an average of $78 US per night for 2 people over 13 days (range of $56 to $130 US per night). Some stage ends such as Santo André de Teixido and Covas only had one option for booking. We could have kept our costs a bit lower by booking cheaper places and by booking directly with the accommodation provider. There is also a hostel in Viveiro which is apparently very welcoming of pilgrims though we did not stay there as we chose not to carry a sleeping sack to save weight.

Most stage ends have at least one restaurant and/or one grocery store - but not all! This was particularly true on the coastal extension going through Santo André de Teixido. Sundays are also difficult for hikers as neither restaurants nor grocery stores may be open or may have dramatically reduced hours that don't align with a walking schedule. Google is also very unreliable for restaurant hours in the off season… As such, food planning one or two days ahead is essential and we carried up to 5 meals at a time (3 lunches, a dinner and a breakfast).

Getting credenciál stamps every day was not always easy but we managed on nearly every stage.

Difficulty
The Camino do Mar is certainly harder than the Camino Frances and closer in difficulty to the Camino del Norte. There were 2 days over 30km and 2 days with more than 800m of gain.

Weather
The guidebook recommends walking the Ruta do Mar is the summer season. We knew that by walking the trail in the first half of May rain was likely. And we did encounter some form of rain, from drizzle to major downpour, on most but not all days. But the rain typically didn't last very long and could often be avoided by finding temporary cover, most often bus shelters. The path was often shadeless and temperatures were higher than we expected. Most afternoon felt surprisingly hot in part because the relative humidity was often high. I would recommend some quality rain gear to walk this trail in May.

Guidebook
We used Dave Whitson's guidebook for this part of our trek. We found it to be helpful, easy to scan and accurate despite being a few years old. The distances and elevation gain generally matched what we measured on our Apple watches. The guidebook also provided helpful cultural context for the journey.

Social
We didn't come across a single thru hiker on this trail and very few day hikers in the month of May. Overall this isn't the trail for you if you expect to meet people.

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Link Up
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Route: https://www.komoot.com/tour/2305046165

We wanted to link together the Ruta do Mar and the Camino dos Faros while mostly following the coast's edge. But there is no formal trail between Ferrol, the end of the Ruta do Mar and Malpica, the start of the Camino dos Faros.

I first tried to see if others had already made this link up and found that Following Your Feet (http://followingyourfeet.com) had walked between Malpica and Ferrol. Steven took a fairly direct route across the A Coruña peninsula and followed major roads for long stretches. I wanted to find an alternative route that would avoid major roads and still provide a scenic experience. I poured over GaiaGPS, AllTrails and Komoot and devised the following 6-day route: Ferrol --> Pontedeume --> Sada --> O Porto de Santa Cruz --> A Coruña --> Playa de Barrañan --> Malpica.

The first "stage" of the linkup followed the Camino Inglès and was both mostly flat and very straightforward. There was an abundance of signage and even donativo water stations! But our linkup left the Camino Inglès shortly after Pontedeume to cross over the Río Mandeo. We walked onward to the town of Sada. The stage avoided any major roads (beside the walk across the river on a narrow sidewalk).

From Sada, I strung together a series of popular day hikes on AllTrails that contoured the peninsula all the way to the town of O Porto de Santa Cruz. This was a lovely day with the exception of an hour-long section on the east flank of the peninsula that turned out to be a barely defined and very overgrown trail. The northern part of the peninsula is the Monumento Natural Costa Dexo Serantes - a beautiful stretch of coastline that could very well have been part of the Camino do Mar!

From O Porto de Santa Cruz, the path was again straightforward and mostly on pavement all the way to A Coruña. We made sure to walk the path around the A Coruña peninsula including the gorgeous Parque Escultórico da Torre Hércules. From A Coruña, we continued on to Playa de Barrañan and finally Malpica. Caion would have been a better choice than Playa de Barrañan to better distribute the distance walked each day but I was unfortunately unable to find us accommodation there. The stretch of coast immediately after A Coruña is surprisingly industrial with waste processing plants, a garbage dump, an oil refinery and more! Thankfully, the path follows the coast, provides beautiful views and the industrial section is over after an hour or two.

Navigation & Terrain
After creating a GPX track for the link up in GaiaGPS, we used Gaia and Komoot to navigate in real time the best path forward. We tweaked our planned route on the fly to accommodate choices that were not optimal in the moment. We were pleased that our route avoided any stretch of major road walking. With the exception of the brushy section north of Sada and the industrial stretch west of A Coruña, this felt like it could have been part of the Ruta do Mar.

Infrastructure
Despite not being part of any formal routes, we found it easy enough to find accommodation and food along the way. The exception was Caion where I could not find a place to stay on Booking.com. Average prices were slightly higher than on the Camino do Mar or dos Faros at $87 US per night.

Getting credenciál stamps was very hit and miss on the link up. Only Ferrol, Pontedeume, A Coruña, and Playa de Barrañan had stamps.

Difficulty
The link up felt a bit harder than the Camino do Mar and had more paved surfaces (65% vs 58%). Average distances were longer (28.2km vs 21.9km) and there was slightly more elevation gain daily (469m vs 406m).

Weather
We managed to avoid rain on this section but days were still hotter and muggier than we would have liked. The path was often shadeless.

Social
Not surprisingly, we didn't encounter anyone on this path except on the section that overlapped the Camino Inglès.

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Camino dos Faros
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Route: https://www.komoot.com/tour/2305053226

Navigation & Terrain
The Camino dos Faros was substantially harder to navigate and to walk than the Ruta do Mar or our link up. The average distance was higher than on the Camino do Mar (29.4km vs 21.9km) as was the elevation gain (587m vs 406m). Only 33% of the path was on paved surfaces. We also had our only stream crossing of the trip here with a knee deep ford. Despite feeling fairly strong after having walked for 3 weeks, our average walking speed on those technical sections dropped by half and our longest day was nearly 11 hours.

The trail was often very narrow, steep, overgrown, brushy, and technical. The vegetation could be shoulder-high, thick and prickly with bracken and gorse. Morning walking would leave your shoes and clothes soaked with the bracken-covered dew. It was unclear to us if the vegetation is always so unruly or if this was the result of walking the trail early in the season. I would not have wanted to walk some of those sections in bad weather and I would not tackle this trail without hiking poles, long pants and long sleeves! Also keep in mind that the prickly vegetation will easily damage fabrics such as merino wool. Ticks can be found in Spain and are apparently most prevalent in Galicia. Despite regularly walking against brush and grass up to our neck, we only found one tick.

Most people we came across chose to split stages, take shortcuts and/or have their luggage transported to their accommodation to reduce the overall difficulty. One of our hosts told us that the Galician government forbids advertising the trail as too many hikers underestimate the trail's difficulty and get in trouble.

Signage on the trail was plentiful -- but was often no more than a green dot painted on a rock AFTER the junction! This is definitely a trail where you have to look closely for signage... I would also strongly recommend using a GPX track for this trail.

Infrastructure
Accommodation and food options was limited at the end of several stages - especially in Praia de Niñons, Arou and Praia de Nemiña. I managed to book accommodation at the end of each stage a couple of months ahead of our walk using Booking.com. But our Niñons accommodation required a 2.5km detour each way. We did meet some hikers who were only booking one or two nights ahead of time and would call hosts directly. Something to consider if your language skills are strong enough to do so and you don’t mind the uncertainty of not having pre-booked. Accommodation prices were roughly in line with those on the Camino do Mar and averaged $80 US per night. Many of the hikers we met were also relying on taxis to overcome the limited accommodation availability.

The Camino dos Faros tries to set itself apart from the other famous Spanish Caminos and explicitly spurns the idea of the credenciál.

Difficulty
The Camino dos Faros was easily the hardest part of our trip. Of the 8 official stages described in the guidebook, 2 were over 30km and 5 had more than 800m of gain. But the numbers don't really tell the story of why this trail was more difficult -- the terrain and trail conditions described above really explain why the trail could be so challenging at times.

Weather
We only had a sprinkle of rain on the trail which we walked at the end of May. The path was often shadeless and temperatures were higher than we expected. Most afternoons felt surprisingly hot in part because the relative humidity was often high.

Guidebook
We used the John Hayes Cicerone guidebook for this part of our trek. We did not found it to be as helpful or as easy to scan as the Ruta do Mar guidebook. Accuracy, especially as it pertained to elevation gain, was often well off. The elevation gain was underestimated by the guidebook between 150m and 570m on each and every one of the 8 stages! The second stage, the hardest one for us, reported 383m of gain vs the 953m we measured!

Social
This part of our walk was the most social. We met other thru hikers every day on the trail and in town. There were a number of larger groups of 6 to 8 hikers on the trail at the same time. Every hiker we met was European with Ireland, the UK and Germany as the most common nationalities.Read more