Dispatch

Twenty-Five Degrees: The Camino del Norte in a Summer That's on Fire

· 4 min · Camino del Norte

There is a thread on the Camino forums this week that is really a weather report, and a confession. A second Spanish heatwave settled in on the seventeenth of June and pushed the interior to 45.1 degrees in Andújar on the twenty-second — the kind of heat that turns the Francés meseta from a long walk into a survival problem. And the pilgrims posting about it are not asking how to endure it. They are quietly asking whether they should have gone north instead.

Because the Camino del Norte is having the summer it was built for. While the interior bakes at forty degrees and above, the Atlantic sea breeze holds the Cantabrian and Asturian coast at around twenty-five. That is not a small difference. That is the difference between a walk you remember and a walk you survive. The standard heat advice making the rounds — leave at sunrise, carry more water than you think, surrender the middle of the day — is the advice of pilgrims managing a problem the Norte mostly doesn’t have.

The meseta tests your will. The coast just quietly removes the test.

So this is the week the Norte stops being the scenic alternative and becomes the sensible one. But it asks a price, and the honest thing is to name it. The coast that keeps the Norte cool is the same coast the rest of Spain goes to in August. San Sebastián, Getaria, Santander — in high summer you are not competing with other pilgrims for a bed so much as with families on holiday, and the rooms go early. The counsel pilgrims trade is specific and a little sad: don’t end your day at the beach. Finish in a small inland town where the tourists aren’t, and let the resort towns be places you pass through. The first stage out of Irún toward Bilbao is the known pinch for beds. People are booking private rooms three to six months out for July and August. The cool coast is not free.

And here is the turn the forums themselves keep stumbling into. The thing pilgrims fear about the Norte in summer — the bed race — is not, this year, where the crowd actually is. The loudest crowding complaints on the boards right now are about the Francés, the river of people walking the last hundred kilometres. The Norte, by comparison, is the route nobody is posting about — one pilgrim this month remarked on how little the del Norte gets written about at all. You can walk a coast in a heatwave summer and still have the path mostly to yourself between the beach towns — which is the opposite of what the word “bed race” makes you brace for.

What you are choosing on the Norte, then, is not really heat versus beds. It is which scarcity you can live with. The interior gives you cheap, plentiful beds and a sky that wants to cook you. The coast gives you twenty-five degrees and a handful of nights where you have to plan or sleep inland. Two scarcities, and you walk into one of them on purpose.

For pilgrims who find even the Norte too peopled, there is a third door this summer: near Villaviciosa the route splits, and a two-day connector peels off to Oviedo and onto the Primitivo, the high mountain road where pilgrims this season still report two or three empty beds in the albergues at night. Cooler air, fewer people, harder climbing. The mountain keeps its own bargain.

This is the older lesson, and the heatwave is just making it legible. You do not get to walk a pilgrimage in the conditions you ordered. The weather this summer is doing what weather has always done on these roads — it is moving people, sorting them, deciding for them which way is wise. The pilgrims rerouting north right now are not being clever. They are doing the thing pilgrims have always done, which is to let the conditions outrank the plan. For more on why the environment outweighs the will on the trail, read The Environment Is Greater Than the Will.

Go north while the interior burns. Carry the sea with you for thirty days. And book the beach towns early, or don’t sleep in them — the coast will keep you cool, but only if you let it set the terms.

— Pilgrimages

Questions

Is the Camino del Norte a good choice during a summer heatwave?
It is the coolest of the major routes in high heat. The Atlantic sea breeze keeps June and July highs on the Cantabrian and Asturian coast around 25°C, while the inland interior the Francés crosses runs 40°C and above — a second Spanish heatwave in late June 2026 peaked at 45.1°C in Andújar in the south. The trade-off is that the coast is wetter and the path climbs and drops across headlands all day, so you swap heat exhaustion for vertical grind and the chance of Atlantic rain in any month.
How hard is it to find a bed on the Camino del Norte in July and August?
Harder than the rest of the year, because the coast that keeps the Norte cool is also a beach-holiday coast. In July and August the standard counsel is to book private albergues and pensiones three to six months ahead, especially in the resort towns — San Sebastián, Getaria, Santander — where pilgrims compete with summer tourists for rooms. The practical fix pilgrims pass around is to end the day in a small inland town rather than at the beach. The first stage out of Irún toward Bilbao is the recognised pinch point for beds. Even so, the live crowding complaints this season are landing on the Francés, not the Norte.