Dispatch

Technical Reasons: Ferrol's Record Year and Its Locked Door

· 5 min · Camino Inglés

On the carretera Alta del Puerto in Ferrol, a few minutes from the quay at Curuxeiras where the Camino Inglés begins, there is a sign hung in a window of the pilgrim albergue. It says the space is inoperative for technical reasons. Taped up beside it is a list of other places in the city to sleep. The local paper that went to look could not establish who had put the list there — a pilgrim, or someone from the albergue itself.

The technical reason is bedbugs. They were found in some of the beds in mid-August, and the albergue, a Xunta facility in the Casa do Mar, has been closed since the fourteenth. As of the last report on it, on 7 September, it was still closed. In early September the closure reached the regional parliament, where a PSdeG-PSOE deputy, Aitor Bouza, asked for a reopening and for measures so that it does not happen again.

It closed in the best year this route has ever had. Ferrol finished the first half of 2026 with its highest pilgrim count in ten years. 20,660 people have walked the route so far this season, up four percent, and August by itself was up sixteen — 3,618 walkers, a record for the month. The city is now the third most-chosen place to start a Camino. Not the third on this route: the third of all of them, behind only Sarria and Tui. Ferrol’s tourist office is up more than twenty percent, and the councillor for tourism has noted that the growth is a mix — Spanish visitors, foreign visitors, and pilgrims arriving to start or continue the walk.

So the route had its biggest August on record, and the one municipal bed at kilometre zero was locked for all of it. A night there ran about ten euros, a figure the reporting flatly describes as impossible to match anywhere else in the city. And the Inglés, more than any other Camino, is chosen for exactly that: 112 kilometres, five to seven days, the precise minimum for the Compostela, the road for people who cannot take a month off. Its whole proposition is that it is the short, cheap, low-friction one. The bugs took out the cheap part, at the top, in the busiest month on the books.

Bedbugs in a pilgrim hostel are not a lapse in virtue. They are arithmetic. The same reporting makes the point plainly — infestations have not been strangers to other lodgings of this kind, because of the sheer volume of people moving through them. A route whose August grows sixteen percent is a route turning over more mattresses every week than it did the August before. The infestation is the popularity, expressed in insects. Every road that gets what the Inglés has spent a decade getting eventually meets this bill.

The part worth reading twice is the language on the glass.

A refuge tells you there are bedbugs. A facility tells you there are technical issues.

Cuestiones técnicas is a phrase addressed to a customer. It is chosen to avoid the one word that would have been useful, which is chinches, because a pilgrim who reads chinches knows what to do: bag the sleeping bag, check the mattress seams at the next stop, and get everything through a hot wash and a hot dryer at the first town that has one, before the clothes go back in the pack. A pilgrim who reads technical reasons learns nothing, shrugs, walks on to Neda and Pontedeume, and carries whatever they are carrying down the route with them. The euphemism is not only evasive. It is operationally worse than the truth, because it withholds the single instruction that would have helped.

Which is why the list taped to the window is the better document. Whoever put it there — pilgrim or staff, and it is somehow right that nobody knows — did the thing the official notice declined to do, which is tell an arriving stranger where to sleep tonight. That is not a courtesy. It is the oldest working institution on any of these roads, older than the certificates and the stamps and the ranked starting points: someone who is already here telling you where the bed is. The ten-euro bunk is a formal version of the same gesture. The Pilgrim Age has the mechanism exactly — a tradition is a decade of someone else’s arguing, already won, handed to you as a gesture. A municipal albergue at the start of a route is an argument won long ago about what a road owes the people walking it, handed to you for ten euros and a credential. When it shuts, the loss is not really the money. It is that you now pay full price for something the tradition used to simply hand over.

So walk it, and start in Ferrol. A Coruña is the other historic port and only 75 kilometres, which does not reach the hundred on its own — the certificate is the reason most people are on this road, and Ferrol is the only end of it that clears the bar. Book your first night in Ferrol as a paid room, now, and treat the albergue as a bonus if it reopens rather than a plan that needs no backup. September and October are the good months here: the eucalyptus still smells of cough drops, the heat is off, and the crowd that made August a record is thinning by the week. Carry the bedbug drill even if every door you pass is open, because a route this busy will meet the problem again somewhere, and the pilgrim who knows the word is the one who does not spread it.

And if the ranked list of starting points is what caught your eye — Sarria first, Tui second, Ferrol third — understand what it describes. Those are the three places where people join a Camino at the last legal moment: the final hundred on the Francés, the final hundred on the Portugués, and the whole of this one. Sarria and Tui are where a long road is joined near its end. Ferrol is a road you walk all of. That is the reason to go, and it is unaffected by whether the door on the carretera Alta del Puerto is open when you get there.

— Pilgrimages

Questions

Is the pilgrim albergue in Ferrol open in September 2026?
As of the most recent reporting, on 7 September 2026, no. The albergue — a Xunta facility in the Casa do Mar on the carretera Alta del Puerto — has been shut since 14 August. The official explanation given was maintenance work; local reporting established that the trigger was a bedbug infestation found in some of the beds. A sign hung in a window says only that the space is inoperative for technical reasons, and a list of alternative lodgings in the city has been put up beside it. The closure went to the regional parliament in early September, when PSdeG-PSOE deputy Aitor Bouza asked both for a reopening and for measures to stop it recurring, so there may be news by the time you read this. Treat the albergue as closed when you plan, and confirm before you rely on it: a bed there ran about ten euros a night, and nothing else in Ferrol matches that, so the difference is a paid room rather than no room at all. Book your first night in Ferrol as a private bed and count the albergue as a bonus if it reopens.
Do I have to start the Camino Inglés in Ferrol, or can I start in A Coruña?
You can start in either, but only Ferrol earns the Compostela on its own. Ferrol to Santiago is about 112 kilometres, just over the 100 km walking minimum; A Coruña to Santiago is roughly 75 km and falls short, which is why the medieval pilgrims who landed at that port are a precedent rather than a permission — check the current rule with the Pilgrim's Office before counting on any way to make up the difference. The practical consequence in 2026 is that almost everyone walking this route for the certificate begins at the same quay in Ferrol, on the same few days of the week, which is exactly why the loss of the municipal albergue at that starting point is felt more sharply here than a single closure would be on a longer road.