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🇪🇸 Routes in Spain
🇪🇸 Camino del NORTE (from Irún)
What's going on? Camino del Norte hard?
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[QUOTE="Thomas V, post: 793524, member: 41936"] I started following this thread early on with great interest. Now that I just finished (Last week) The Norte from Irùn to Santiago I can give a first hand recent account of what the Norte was like for a couple that are in their sixties (I’m 68, my wife 63), and have walked the Frances twice (2016,2017) and Portuguese (2018). We walk a lot, not just on Caminos. We train, I was in full pack training four months before we left for the Norte. We were in decent shape. We took it slow, 41 days walking with four rest days. Okay, that being said, this my humble opinion about how hard it was for us. No doubt the beauty of Spain’s headlands and beaches are some of the most beautiful I have ever seen. Being a guy that has lived in California all my life that is saying a lot. I did love walking in all the forest and farmland at first. But I have to admit that I did get a bit tired of the farmland towards the end. Second, yes there is more asphalt walking than most people would like. To me is was not the asphalt that was tough but there were more times than I liked when the road was mixed with fast moving vehicles and tight curves. Was it hard? For us, Irùn to San Sebastián was probably the hardest physically day walking! I laugh now when I think back to my first Camino and I thought walking from SJPD over the Pyrenees was hard. Yes we took the high road at the split but it was the stairs and the hills (after the ferry) the last four miles into San Sebastián. Okay I’m not the first one to make this claim about day one, but all the days to Bilbao we’re almost as tough. The downhill into Deba, after a long day, there are hundreds of stairs to descend. The accent out of Deba going to Markina-Xemein made it a very long tough day. We made some great Camino friends during these stages, most fit, in their thirties and early forties and they too admitted that these stages were hard! So it was not just this old guy’s brain working against him. After Bilbao it gets a little better because you get what I call your Camino Legs, but it stays hilly and there are some difficult days ahead like the 30k day coming into Gijón. No choice but to do 30k that day with one very steep rocky climb that is about 3k long. Three other days come to mind after Gijón. The day after Soto Del Lauina to Cadavedo. Check the elevation on that up and down day. Also this first two days after leaving Ribadeo, a couple very good climbing days! I felt, as we got near the end of the Norte, the last three or four days before the Camino Frances, were a bit uneventful. The stages were not tough, just a tad boring. Maybe because we were anxious to get it done. In closing, I write this because the Camino Norte is still fresh in my brain. I do not wish to discourage anyone from attempting this great Camino. I only wish to give my point of view as a 68-year-old man who just completed this beautiful but at times difficult task. A point I must make in closing, no matter how difficult the stage on the Norte, when the day was done and my wife and I sat with a cold beverage in our hand, we laughed, gave thanks for a safe day and were amazed at the day we had just completed! If you would like to read a day by day account of our Norte it is on Instagram, Please search t_vela_aka_lbpilgrim [/QUOTE]
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