Renting a mobile phone for the Camino

I bought a ' dumb ' phone for an elderly family member recently . No bells or whistles , just a phone for emergency use . It cost Aus $36. and came with $10 worth of call time included .
I doubt if you could rent a phone for less , see what the major phone companies have on offer , they usually keep these cheap options under the counter so ask directly at a store . Once you have no further use for it you could always pass it onto to a pilgrim that has a similar need or has lost their own phone .

On further investigation it seems I paid far too much at $36

Here is one for the princely sum of $19.

https://www.target.com.au/p/optus-x...vwFfM-L-JIBkWAPYaqBoCFbkQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

My apologies I don't know if rentals, but I would guess your cellular provider would rent you one. I would guess that would be the expensive route.

You can purchase a prepaid (prepago) SIM and local telephone number (if your phone isn't 100% CDMA or it isn't locked by your carrier) or prepaid phone packages (no contract) within Spain. Movistar (Telefonica), Orange, Vodafone and a few other companies are the bigger players. I purchased a SIM for about 20 euros and it came with 6GB of data and an hour or two of talk time. If you have a smart phone you just have to be careful and make sure you don't have apps that are using data in the background or keep the phone off/airplane mode.

Everything @Darby67 said. I bought a SIM for my unblocked IPhone in Pamplona from Movistar. Cost was about $20-30 as I recall. Perfect for making local calls and accessing occasional apps like mapping while enroute. Also, as he said, turn off background data use of your apps or they will eat up your data allocation. It worked fine. Only thing that would have made it better was me being able to speak Spanish.