Camino Portugues: Coastal or Central

1. What Is the Camino Portugues?

The Camino Portugues, called the Caminho Portugues in Portuguese, is the network of waymarked pilgrim roads that run north through Portugal into Galicia and end at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where a tomb venerated since the ninth century is honoured as that of the apostle James the Greater. Two starting points dominate. Lisbon gives the full road, about 610 kilometres. Porto gives the practical road, roughly 240 kilometres by the central variant and roughly 280 by the coastal, walkable inside a fortnight.

The Portuguese Way is the second most walked of the roads to Compostela. The Pilgrim's Office of the Cathedral of Santiago publishes annual figures on arriving pilgrims by route, and in those figures the Portuguese Way sits consistently behind the Camino Frances and ahead of the rest.

Source: the annual pilgrim statistics published by the Oficina del Peregrino of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Figures move year to year, so the ranking is given here rather than a count.

What sets this road apart from the other Caminos is that it crosses a national border in the middle. You begin in Portugal, on Portuguese waymarking, with Portuguese food, Portuguese Mass and Portuguese hospitality, and somewhere around the halfway mark you walk across the Minho into Spain and everything changes register at once. The yellow arrow keeps pointing the same way. Nothing else does.

Where the Splits Happen

The road from Lisbon to Porto runs as a single line, with minor local variants. The branching begins at Porto:

• The central route leaves Porto inland through Rates, Barcelos, Ponte de Lima and Rubiaes, crosses to Spain at Valenca and Tui, and continues by O Porrino to Redondela.
• The coastal route, the Caminho Portugues da Costa, leaves Porto along the Atlantic through Vila do Conde, Esposende, Viana do Castelo and Caminha, crosses the Minho estuary to A Guarda, and continues by Baiona and Vigo to Redondela.
• The Senda Litoral is a shoreline path of boardwalks and promenades running parallel to the coastal route, closer to the sand, crossing it often.
• The Variante Espiritual leaves the central route at Pontevedra, goes by the monastery of Armenteira to Vilanova de Arousa, and includes a boat stage up the ria to Pontecesures near Padron.

From Redondela north, everyone is on the same road: Arcade, Pontevedra, Caldas de Reis, Padron, Santiago. The last hundred kilometres of the Portuguese Way are shared, whichever variant carried you into Galicia.

2. Coastal or Central: How to Choose

The choice between the coastal and the central Camino Portugues comes down to four things: the churches, the ground under your feet, the weather, and the company. Both routes are fully waymarked, both are well supplied with pilgrim hostels, and both end at the same cathedral. The differences are real and they are consistent.

What the Central Route Gives You

The central route is the historic road. It follows, in long stretches, the line of the Roman road that ran north from Bracara Augusta, now Braga, through Tude, now Tui, and on into Galicia, and medieval pilgrims used the same crossings. That history is visible: the Romanesque church at Rates, the medieval bridge and the riverside arcade at Ponte de Lima, the granite fortress cathedral at Tui, and a string of village churches, wayside crosses and stone cruceiros that the coastal route simply does not have.

It also gives you a proper hill. Between Ponte de Lima and Rubiaes the road climbs the Alto da Portela Grande, a rocky ascent of a few hundred metres that is the hardest single stretch of the whole Portuguese Way. Walkers who want their pilgrimage to cost them something physical usually find it there.

The central route is busier. It carries more walkers, especially from Tui north, which means more open albergues, more parish Masses with a pilgrim blessing at the end, and more people to walk with. It also means booking pressure in the high months.

What the Coastal Route Gives You

The coastal route gives you the Atlantic for the better part of a week. From Porto to Caminha the sea is on your left almost the whole way, and long sections run on timber boardwalk laid across the dunes. The ground is flat, the surface is even, and the climbing is negligible until Galicia. For walkers with knees that complain, or for a first long walk, that matters more than anything else on this page.

It is cooler. The sea breeze on the Portuguese coast makes summer walking bearable in a way that the inland valleys are not, and heat is a common reason walkers cut a summer Camino short. It is also more exposed: in wind and rain there is nothing between you and the weather for hours at a time.

The coastal route has fewer churches and younger ones. The towns are fishing towns and resort towns rather than pilgrim towns, and the great sight of the stretch, the hilltop basilica of Santa Luzia above Viana do Castelo, is a building of the last century. The one crossing that everyone remembers is the boat over the Minho estuary from Caminha to A Guarda, where you leave Portugal by water.

The Honest Comparison

You Do Not Have to Choose Once

Many pilgrims walk both. The two routes are close enough in the Portuguese half that linking stages exist, and the common combination is to leave Porto on the coast, enjoy the flat boardwalk days to Esposende or Viana do Castelo, then cut inland to pick up the central route around Barcelos or Ponte de Lima for the historic stretch and the climb. Going the other way works too. The waymarking on the connectors is thinner than on the main lines, so this is the part of the route worth reading a map for.

3. The Central Route from Porto, Stage by Stage

The central route from Porto to Santiago runs about 240 kilometres and is normally walked in eleven to fourteen days. The description below follows the common stage pattern; walkers split it differently according to their legs and the hostels they find.

Porto to Vilarinho and Rates

The road begins at the cathedral of Porto, the Se, a fortified Romanesque building above the Douro where pilgrims collect their first stamp. The first day out of Porto is honest work: the city takes a long time to end, and the exit through the northern suburbs and industrial edges is the least attractive walking on the route. Many pilgrims skip it by taking local transport to the edge of the city, which is a decision each walker makes for themselves.

Beyond the sprawl the country opens into the vine terraces and maize fields of the Minho region. Sao Pedro de Rates is worth the stop: the Romanesque church there is one of the oldest on the route, and local tradition names Pedro de Rates as a disciple sent by the apostle James and the first bishop of Braga. The tradition is medieval rather than documented, and it is told here as tradition.

Barcelos

Barcelos sits on the River Cavado behind a fourteenth-century bridge, and it is the first town on the route that feels built for pilgrims. The ruined palace of the Counts of Barcelos stands open to the sky above the river, and inside it is the stone cross that carries the town's famous legend.

The legend of the Barcelos cock is a Camino story. A Galician pilgrim on his way to Santiago was accused of theft in Barcelos and condemned to hang. Brought before the judge who had sentenced him, he pointed to the roast cock on the table and said that it would stand and crow to prove his innocence. It did, and the man was cut down alive. The painted cock became the souvenir emblem of Portugal, and its origin on the pilgrim road is rarely mentioned on the shelf it is sold from.

Ponte de Lima

Ponte de Lima is the set piece of the central route. Its long medieval bridge crosses the River Lima on Roman foundations, and a stone-paved avenue of plane trees runs beside the water. Roman soldiers, according to a story told by classical writers, refused at first to cross the Lima, believing it was the Lethe of myth and would erase their memories; their commander crossed alone and called them over by name from the far bank to prove it would not.

The town claims to be the oldest in Portugal by charter, and the church of Santo Antonio da Torre Velha and the parish church give pilgrims their stamp. Most walkers arrive early and stop here, because the next stage is the hard one.

The Climb to Rubiaes

Out of Ponte de Lima the road climbs the Alto da Portela Grande, a rocky path through eucalyptus and granite that rises a few hundred metres over a handful of kilometres. It is short by mountain standards and it is the crux of this Camino. At the top there is a wayside cross and a view back over the Lima valley, and the descent to Rubiaes is on loose stone that asks for care. Pilgrims who trained for nothing else should train for this.

Valenca and the Crossing into Spain

Valenca do Minho is a walled fortress town facing Spain across the river, its ramparts laid out in the star pattern of seventeenth-century military engineering. You walk through the gates, through the old town, and out onto the iron bridge over the Minho. Halfway across, the pavement changes and you are in Galicia.

Tui on the Spanish bank is the pilgrimage town proper. Its cathedral of Santa Maria was built from the twelfth century as a fortress as much as a church, with battlements and towers commanding the river, and its west portal is among the earliest Gothic sculpture in the Iberian peninsula. Tui is also the practical starting point for pilgrims who want the Compostela without a fortnight of walking, since the cathedral is a little over 100 kilometres from Santiago.

O Porrino, Redondela and Arcade

The stage from Tui to O Porrino runs partly beside industry and partly on a pleasant riverside variant along the Louro. Redondela is the junction where the coastal route rejoins, and from there the road climbs and drops over wooded hills to Arcade on the Ria de Vigo, with the medieval bridge at Pontesampaio just beyond, a bridge that saw fighting in the Peninsular War.

Pontevedra, Caldas de Reis and Padron

Pontevedra has the most distinctive church on the route, the Santuario da Virxe Peregrina, an eighteenth-century chapel built on a plan shaped like a scallop shell, the pilgrim badge of Saint James, dedicated to Our Lady under the title of the Pilgrim. The old town around it is stone-arcaded and easy to walk. Caldas de Reis, the next stop, is a spa town on hot springs the Romans used, with a fountain of hot water in the street where pilgrims soak their feet.

Padron is where the road becomes explicitly apostolic. Under the high altar of the church of Santiago in the town lies the pedron, a Roman-era stone which tradition says was the mooring post to which the boat carrying the body of the apostle was tied when it came up the Ulla. Above the town, on the hill of Santiaguino do Monte, a chapel and a spring mark the place where tradition says James preached. The stone is real and old, and the identification of it as the mooring post is tradition rather than fact; that distinction belongs in the telling.

Into Santiago

The last day, about 25 kilometres from Padron, runs through eucalyptus woods and villages and then into the city, entering by the Rua do Franco to the Praza do Obradoiro. Every road to Compostela ends in the same square, in front of the Baroque west front of the cathedral. What waits inside, the Portico da Gloria, the botafumeiro and the tomb in the crypt, is described in our guide to Santiago de Compostela Cathedral.

4. The Coastal Route and the Senda Litoral

The Caminho Portugues da Costa leaves Porto northward along the Atlantic and runs about 280 kilometres to Santiago. It is the newer of the two waymarked lines in its present form, though the coast itself carried pilgrims and traders for as long as the inland road did, and the fishing towns along it have Saint James chapels to prove it.

Two Parallel Paths

Walkers are often confused by finding two sets of arrows on the coast, and the distinction is simple. The Caminho Portugues da Costa is the official pilgrim route, which stays near the sea but turns inland through the towns and villages where the historic road went, past their churches. The Senda Litoral is a shoreline path of boardwalks, promenades and beach tracks that hugs the dunes for long stretches. The two are usually within a kilometre or two of each other and cross repeatedly, so pilgrims switch between them at will.

The Senda Litoral is flatter, more scenic and more exposed. It passes fewer churches and fewer stamps. The boardwalks are hard on the feet after several hours because the surface never varies. Most walkers mix them: shore in the morning, inland when the wind gets up or when a church is worth the detour.

Porto to Vila do Conde and Povoa de Varzim

The coastal start is the pleasanter exit from Porto. The route runs down the Douro to its mouth at Foz, turns north along the promenade past Matosinhos and Leca, and continues on boardwalk through the dune fields. Vila do Conde has a long aqueduct striding across the town on hundreds of arches, built to serve the Convento de Santa Clara above the river. Povoa de Varzim beyond it is a working fishing port with a long beach.

Esposende and Viana do Castelo

Esposende sits at the mouth of the Cavado, the same river that runs through Barcelos on the central route, and the walk in crosses the estuary. North of it the coast is protected dune landscape and the walking is quiet.

Viana do Castelo is the largest town on the Portuguese coastal stretch. It is set on the Lima estuary with a Renaissance square at its heart, and above it, on the hill of Santa Luzia, stands the Basilica of Santa Luzia, a Sacred Heart church of the twentieth century in a Romanesque-Byzantine revival style with a dome, a rose window and a wide view over the river mouth and the coast. The climb up to it is steep and optional; the pilgrim road goes round the hill.

Caminha and the Boat to Spain

North of Viana the coast runs through Vila Praia de Ancora to Caminha at the mouth of the Minho, the last town in Portugal. Here the coastal route crosses the estuary by water to A Guarda in Galicia. Crossing the border by boat, with the Portuguese bank going grey behind you and the Galician hills coming up ahead, is the single moment on this variant that walkers describe most often. Pilgrims who prefer not to depend on a crossing walk upstream and use the bridge at Valenca instead, which puts them onto the central route at Tui.

A Guarda, Oia and Baiona

A Guarda stands under Monte Santa Trega, a hill crowned with the excavated remains of an Iron Age hill fort and a chapel at the summit. North of the town the road runs on the open Atlantic shore, wilder than anything in Portugal, past the Cistercian monastery of Santa Maria de Oia, a twelfth-century foundation standing right on the rocks with the sea breaking below its walls. Its setting, hard against the Atlantic, is unlike anything else on either variant.

Baiona is a harbour town with a walled peninsula, Monterreal, jutting into the bay. One of the caravels of the first Columbus voyage, the Pinta, made landfall here in March 1493 with the news of the crossing, and a replica sits in the harbour. Baiona is also a common starting point for pilgrims who want a hundred kilometres on the coastal line.

Vigo and Redondela

From Baiona the road climbs over the hills and drops into Vigo, the largest city in Galicia and a hard-edged working port. The route through it is urban and long, and it improves at the top of the town where the path enters the Senda da Auga, a level watercourse path above the city with the ria spread out below. From Vigo it is a short stage to Redondela, where the coastal route ends by joining the central. Everything from Redondela north is described in the section above.

5. The Variante Espiritual and the Traslatio

The Variante Espiritual is a waymarked three-stage alternative that leaves the central route at Pontevedra and rejoins it at Pontecesures, just short of Padron. It adds roughly a day to the walk and it is, for many pilgrims, the part of the Portuguese Way they remember longest, because it ends on the water.

Pontevedra to Armenteira

The first stage climbs out of Pontevedra past the monastery of San Xoan de Poio and through vineyards and woods to the monastery of Santa Maria de Armenteira, a Cistercian house founded in the twelfth century and today a community of Cistercian nuns. The Romanesque church there is plain and cool and the community sings the Office; pilgrims who time their arrival can pray it with them.

Armenteira carries a medieval legend that suits the road. Its founder, the knight Ero, is said to have prayed to be shown eternity, and to have fallen asleep in the woods listening to a bird. When he returned to the monastery, three hundred years had passed and nobody knew him. The story is a legend of the kind told about several houses in Europe, and it is told here as one.

The Ruta da Pedra e da Auga

The second stage descends the Ruta da Pedra e da Auga, the route of stone and water, a path that follows the River Armenteira down its valley past a series of restored watermills, weirs and pools under heavy tree cover. It is quiet, shaded, green walking, and it is the reason many pilgrims choose this detour even before they hear about the boat. The stage ends at Vilanova de Arousa on the estuary.

The Boat Stage and the Traslatio

The third stage crosses the Ria de Arousa and goes up the River Ulla by boat to Pontecesures, and it is the maritime stage of the Portuguese Way. It follows the line of the Traslatio, the tradition that the body of the apostle James was carried by sea from Jerusalem and brought up this estuary to be buried inland at the place that became Compostela.

Along the ria stand a line of stone crosses set in the water, placed in the twentieth century, which make the passage a maritime way of the cross. The Pilgrim's Office recognises the stage, and pilgrims who take it can have their credencial stamped for it. The route is walkable on land beside the estuary for anyone who would rather not go by water.

6. Walking from Lisbon

The full Camino Portugues from Lisbon to Santiago runs about 610 kilometres and takes most walkers around a month. Far fewer people walk it than start at Porto, and that shapes the experience: fewer pilgrim hostels, longer gaps between them, more road walking, and days when you meet nobody else on the route at all.

The Line of the Route

The road leaves Lisbon from the cathedral, the Se, and runs north-east through the flat country of the Tagus valley by Alverca and Vila Franca de Xira to Santarem, then north through Golega to Tomar. From Tomar it climbs into the hills of central Portugal through Alvaiazere and Ansiao and down to Coimbra on the Mondego, then continues by Mealhada, Agueda, Albergaria-a-Velha, Sao Joao da Madeira and Grijo into Porto.

What You See That Porto Walkers Do Not

Three places on the Lisbon stretch are worth the whole month between them.

Santarem holds a Eucharistic miracle venerated since the thirteenth century, kept in the church of Santo Estevao and known as the Church of the Holy Miracle. The account tells of a consecrated host taken by a woman to a sorceress, which began to bleed. It is one of the Eucharistic miracles the Church has permitted public devotion to over many centuries.

Tomar is the seat of the Convent of Christ, built by the Knights Templar and, after their suppression, held by the Order of Christ. Its round church, the charola, was modelled on the round churches of Jerusalem, and the Manueline window on the chapter house is one of the most famous carvings in Portugal. A pilgrim road that runs past a Templar mother house is telling you something about how the crusading orders and the pilgrim roads grew up together.

Coimbra has the old cathedral, the Se Velha, a Romanesque fortress church that survives almost unaltered, and across the Mondego the convent of Santa Clara-a-Nova, where Saint Elizabeth of Portugal is buried. She is the patron of this road in a real sense: as queen she made the pilgrimage to Compostela herself in the fourteenth century, and the traditional accounts have her leaving her pilgrim staff and scrip at the shrine.

The Fatima Question

Fatima is not on the main line of the Camino Portugues. It lies roughly two days west of the route between Santarem and Tomar, and waymarked links connect the two, so pilgrims walking from Lisbon commonly plan the detour and put the Marian shrine inside their journey. Pilgrims starting from Porto are well north of it. What happened at the Cova da Iria in 1917, and how the shrine works for a visiting pilgrim, are covered in our guides to Fatima and to visiting the Fatima shrine.

Should You Start at Lisbon?

Start at Lisbon if you have a month, if solitude is what you are after, and if long stretches of asphalt and cobbled national road do not put you off. Start at Porto if you have two weeks, if you want the pilgrim community around you, and if you would rather spend your walking days on tracks than on shoulders. Both are the Camino Portugues. Nobody at the Pilgrim's Office in Santiago will ask you which.

7. The Shrines and Churches on the Way

The Camino Portugues passes several churches and shrines that are destinations in their own right, and knowing what they are before you reach them changes what the walk is. What follows is the short list, in the order a pilgrim walking north meets them.

On the Lisbon Stretch

• Se de Lisboa, the cathedral of Lisbon, a twelfth-century Romanesque building which tradition associates with the relics of Saint Vincent, brought to the city in the twelfth century, where southern pilgrims take their first stamp.
• Santo Estevao, Santarem, the Church of the Holy Miracle, home of the thirteenth-century Eucharistic miracle of Santarem.
• Convento de Cristo, Tomar, the Templar round church and the Order of Christ complex above the town.
• Se Velha, Coimbra, the old cathedral, and Santa Clara-a-Nova across the river with the tomb of Saint Elizabeth of Portugal.

On the Central Route

• Se do Porto, the fortified cathedral above the Douro, where the northern pilgrimage begins.
• Sao Pedro de Rates, one of the oldest Romanesque churches on the route.
• Igreja Matriz and the Senhor do Galo cross, Barcelos, with the pilgrim legend of the cock.
• Ponte de Lima, the medieval bridge and the riverside churches.
• Catedral de Santa Maria, Tui, the fortress cathedral on the Spanish bank of the Minho.
• Santuario da Virxe Peregrina, Pontevedra, the scallop-shaped shrine of Our Lady the Pilgrim.
• Igrexa de Santiago, Padron, with the pedron stone beneath the altar, and the chapel of Santiaguino do Monte above the town.

On the Coastal Route

• Convento de Santa Clara, Vila do Conde, above the Ave, with the aqueduct running to it.
• Basilica de Santa Luzia, Viana do Castelo, the Sacred Heart basilica on the hill over the Lima estuary.
• Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Oia, the Cistercian monastery on the Atlantic rocks north of A Guarda.
• Santa Trega, A Guarda, the summit chapel above the Iron Age hill fort.

On the Variante Espiritual

• Mosteiro de San Xoan de Poio, above Pontevedra.
• Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Armenteira, the Cistercian house where the Office is still sung.
• The stone crosses of the Ria de Arousa, the maritime way of the cross on the Traslatio route.

Where It Ends

All of them end in one place. The cathedral of Santiago de Compostela holds, beneath the high altar, the silver reliquary honoured as containing the remains of the apostle James, and the pilgrim Mass with its blessing of arriving pilgrims is what the whole road is pointed at. For a wider survey of the shrines of the peninsula either side of this route, see our guide to pilgrimage sites in Spain and Portugal.

8. The History of the Portuguese Way

The Portuguese Way is as old as the Portuguese kingdom, and older in its ground. Pilgrims from the south were walking north to the tomb at Compostela from at least the twelfth century, and the roads they used were Roman before they were pilgrim roads.

The Roman Foundation

Rome laid a network of roads across the north-west of the peninsula, and the one that matters here ran north from Bracara Augusta, now Braga, by Limia, now Ponte de Lima, and Tude, now Tui, toward Lucus Augusti, now Lugo. The central route of the Camino Portugues follows the line of that road for long stretches, and the bridges at Ponte de Lima and Pontesampaio stand on Roman foundations. The stone under a pilgrim's boots between Ponte de Lima and Valenca has been a road for two thousand years.

The Discovery of the Tomb and the Rise of the Pilgrimage

The pilgrimage itself begins in the ninth century, when a tomb in a wood in Galicia was identified as that of the apostle James and a church was raised over it by order of King Alfonso II of Asturias. The shrine grew through the tenth and eleventh centuries and became, by the twelfth, one of the three great pilgrimage goals of Latin Christendom alongside Rome and Jerusalem. The story of that discovery and of the cathedral built over it is told in our guide to Santiago de Compostela Cathedral.

Portuguese Kings and a Portuguese Queen

Portugal became a kingdom in the twelfth century, and its rulers took the pilgrimage seriously. The best documented royal pilgrim on this road is Saint Elizabeth of Portugal, Isabel, queen consort of King Denis, who walked to Compostela in the fourteenth century and, in the accounts of her life, offered her crown and her pilgrim staff at the shrine. She made the journey more than once, the second time as a widow in the habit of a Franciscan tertiary. She is buried at Santa Clara-a-Nova in Coimbra, on the route, and she is honoured as a peacemaker who repeatedly stood between warring members of her own family.

Medieval hospitals and confraternities grew up along the line to serve pilgrims, and the towns of Barcelos, Ponte de Lima and Valenca owe much of their shape to that traffic. The bridge at Ponte de Lima, rebuilt in the fourteenth century, was a pilgrim bridge as much as a trade one.

Decline and Revival

The pilgrimage declined sharply after the sixteenth century, as the Reformation cut off northern Europe, wars closed the roads, and the relics themselves were hidden during a period of English naval raids and then lost track of for generations. They were rediscovered in the cathedral in the late nineteenth century and their veneration was confirmed by Pope Leo XIII in the bull Deus Omnipotens of 1884.

The modern revival of the Camino as a walked pilgrimage began in the 1980s, driven by Galician and Spanish associations, by the waymarking of the routes with the yellow arrow, and by the visits of Pope John Paul II to Santiago in 1982 and 1989. The Portuguese Way was waymarked in that wave, and the coastal variant was developed as a signed route later, which is why it feels newer on the ground. Numbers on both have risen steeply since.

Holy Years

A Compostelan Holy Year, the Xacobeo, falls when the feast of Saint James on 25 July lands on a Sunday. In those years the Holy Door of the cathedral is opened and a plenary indulgence is available on the usual conditions. Holy Years draw far more pilgrims onto every route, and the Portuguese Way feels the pressure as much as the Frances does.

9. Distance, Difficulty and the Hundred-Kilometre Rule

Distances on the Camino Portugues vary by a few kilometres depending on which variants and connectors a walker takes, and published figures differ for that reason. The working numbers are these.

How Hard Is It?

The Camino Portugues is among the gentler of the main roads to Compostela. The coastal variant is close to flat until Galicia. The central variant has one genuine climb, the Alto da Portela Grande between Ponte de Lima and Rubiaes, and a series of moderate rises in Galicia between Redondela and Pontevedra. Neither route asks for mountain fitness.

Two things do the damage. The first is cobbles: long stretches of the Portuguese road are laid in granite setts, and hours on that surface bruise feet in a way that hill walking does not. The second is heat, on the inland variant in high summer. Walkers who train on hard surfaces and start early in the day avoid most of what goes wrong on this route.

The Credencial

The credencial is the pilgrim passport, a folded card stamped along the route as evidence of the journey. Parishes, cathedrals, diocesan pilgrimage offices and confraternities of Saint James issue them, as do the pilgrim offices at the main starting points. Stamps, carimbos in Portugal and sellos in Spain, are collected from churches, hostels, town halls, cafes and police stations along the way.

The Hundred-Kilometre Rule

The Pilgrim's Office of the Cathedral of Santiago issues the Compostela to pilgrims who have covered at least the final hundred kilometres on foot or on horseback, or the final two hundred by bicycle, who hold a stamped credencial, and who state a religious or spiritual motive for the journey. Pilgrims who state a different motive receive a certificate of welcome instead.

That rule is why Tui fills with pilgrims starting a week's walk, and why Baiona and Vigo do the same on the coastal line. Over the final hundred kilometres the office asks for two stamps a day rather than one, as a check against covering the distance by vehicle. A separate certificate of distance, recording where you started and how far you came, is available for pilgrims who want the full journey stated.

10. Praying the Camino Portugues

A pilgrimage is a prayer made with the body, and the Portuguese Way gives a walker plenty of hours to make it. The Catechism treats pilgrimages as occasions of special renewal in prayer, and as signs of the Christian life understood as a journey toward the Father (CCC 2691). A road that takes two weeks makes that sign hard to miss.

Fix an Intention Before You Start

The pilgrims who get the most out of this road name what they are walking for before they leave the cathedral in Porto. A person, a decision, a sin, a grief, a thanksgiving. Write it in the front of the credencial. On day nine, when the cobbles have done their work and the rain is sideways at Rubiaes, the intention is what keeps the walk from becoming a hike.

A Shape for a Walking Day

• Morning. An offering of the day's walking before you leave the albergue, and the first hour in silence. The first hour is the quietest of any day on this road.
• Mid-morning. A decade or a full rosary. The rhythm of walking and the rhythm of the beads fit together, which is why so many pilgrims who never say the rosary at home say it every day on the Camino.
• Midday. Stop at a church. On the central route there is nearly always one. Sit in it for ten minutes without doing anything.
• Afternoon. Walk with someone. Half the point of a pilgrim road is that it puts you beside strangers for hours with nothing to do but talk.
• Evening. Mass where you can find it, and an examination of the day before sleep.

Confession and Mass on the Route

Parish Masses along both variants are in Portuguese and then in Galician or Spanish, and many parishes give a pilgrim blessing at the end when walkers are present. Priests on the route hear confessions in several languages, and the cathedral at Santiago has confessors available in a range of languages for arriving pilgrims. If it has been years, this is a good road on which to end that. Our guides to confession and to the Mass cover what to expect and how to prepare.

What the Walk Is For

Penance is one of the classic motives for pilgrimage, and the Portuguese Way supplies enough discomfort to make the word real without making it heroic. Sore feet offered deliberately for someone else are a small thing done well. The tomb at the end is the point, and the apostle whose bones are honoured there was one of the three who saw the Transfiguration and the agony in the garden, and the first of the Twelve to be killed for the name of Christ.

Whether the coastal or the central variant carried you north matters less than that. If you cannot travel at all, the practice of making a pilgrimage in prayer from where you are has a long history in the Church; our guide to the virtual pilgrimage sets out how it is done, and our guide to what a pilgrimage is explains what the Church holds about the practice itself.

11. Which Route Suits You

Here is the decision put plainly, by the kind of walker asking.

You Have Two Weeks and It Is Your First Camino

Start at Porto. Take the coastal route to Viana do Castelo for the flat days and the sea air, cut inland to the central route, and finish through Tui, Pontevedra and Padron. You get both faces of the road, the ground is kind, and the second half puts you in the pilgrim crowd where the company is.

You Came for the Churches and the History

Central route from Porto, whole way, and add the Variante Espiritual after Pontevedra. That gives you Rates, Barcelos, Ponte de Lima, Tui cathedral, the Peregrina at Pontevedra, Armenteira and the water stage of the Traslatio. It is the richest version of this pilgrimage.

You Are Walking in July or August

Coastal. The inland valleys between Barcelos and Valenca are hot, and the sea breeze on the Portuguese shore is worth more than any amount of scenery when the temperature is high. Start walking at first light either way.

You Have Six Days

Start at Tui on the central route or at Baiona on the coastal, either of which clears the hundred kilometres for the Compostela. Tui gives you a cathedral on the first morning and the busier, more sociable road. Baiona gives you two days on the Galician coast before the road turns inland at Vigo.

You Have a Month and You Want Solitude

Lisbon. Accept the asphalt, plan the Fatima detour, and know that you will walk some days alone. Santarem, Tomar and Coimbra are the reward, and you will arrive in Porto as a pilgrim rather than a tourist, which changes the second half completely.

You Are Choosing Between This Road and the Camino Frances

The Camino Frances crosses northern Spain from the Pyrenees through Pamplona, Burgos, Leon and Sarria, and it is longer, higher, drier and busier than anything in Portugal. The two roads share a destination and almost nothing else. Choose the Portuguese Way for a shorter, gentler, greener walk with a border crossing in the middle, and the French Way for the long classic traverse. Our comparison of the Camino de Santiago routes sets all the main roads side by side.

12. Related Places