The Long Camino
After last year’s short, sharp Camino Primitivo, we’re already planning for what I am calling “the long Camino” in the spring of 2024. Like our original 2013 Camino, Francine is planning to only walk part of the route, most likely the first ten or so days and the last week or two.
I’m planning to begin in the French city of Le Puy-en-Velay and to walk all the way to Santiago de Compostela. This route, known as the Via Podiensis, covers something like 740km before arriving in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, where it becomes the Camino Francés. Then it’s 800km in Spain. This adventure is about 65 days of walking, give or take.
Francine will most likely join me as far as Conques, and then the last 100 or 200 km in Spain. We’ve discussed where might be the best place for us to meet up, and we’re waffling between O Cebreiro, Astorga, and León. She’s hoping to spend the intermediary weeks visiting relatives and serving as an hospitalera.
We started walking a virtual version of this route in Tacoma in January, but with the weather, schedules, and various injuries – not to mention being a bit out of shape and practice – we haven’t gotten very far yet. We will have to do better in scheduling our training walks.
This virtual Via is a sequel to our previous virtual Caminos, where we walked the length of the Camino Francés in 2020 to 2021 and the Camino del Norte in 2021 to 2022.
The research has begun, as you can see from the books photographed above. I have a new (much lighter) version of my favourite Camino backpack that I’m training with, with all my old equipment stuffed in. It’s amazing the advances they’ve made in gear over the last ten years.
The guidebooks generally compare the first two weeks or so of the Via Podiensis to the Camino Primitivo in terms of difficulty. There are a lot of elevation changes, as you’re basically walking out of a massive ancient volcanic caldera – up, up, up, and then steeply down. After that, it gets a lot flatter until you’re up the Pyrenees and into Spain after Saint-Jean. That part is wicked steep.
That first section, the nine or ten days from Le Puy to Conques, is often described as the most beautiful trail in France. This is the section that Francine is planning to walk with me. This section is often walked by French hikers, and in the summer it can be quite crowded.
After Conques, both the crowds and difficult terrain thin out. The later, flatter sections of the route have been compared to a cross between the Shire and the Meseta in Spain, and like the Meseta it seems to be a place where it’s possible to do big kilometers a day. Although my initial plan budgets 22 days from Conques to Saint-Jean, I’m hoping to cut that down to 20 days, which would give me the option of taking a rest day in Cahors and/or Moissac, both of which have been recommended to me.
I realize that this might sound like we’ve got all the details worked out, but in truth these are very early and tentative plans. It’s difficult to find good information on the rhythm and phases of the Via Podiensis in English. In Spain, the Camino Francés is broken into roughly three major phases, each with its own terrain, culture, and effect on the pilgrim: Navarra/La Rioja (where you’re breaking your body walking down the trailing edge of the Pyrenees through forest and vineyard), the Meseta (where you’re breaking your brain walking through horizon-to-horizon emptiness), and Galicia (where everything is integrating spiritually and you’re slowly re-entering the world in the forests and meadows and crowds of those last hundred or two hundred kilometers).
Clearly, the Via Podiensis changes after Conques as you leave the highlands of the Aubrac plateau in the Massif Central. But then what? Well, to start with, a lot more research!
