Dear walker,Sacred Steps: The Camino is out. It is the third app we have made, and our second pilgrimage. Your daily steps now carry you across Spain toward the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, on whichever of three historic roads you choose to walk.
If you have walked the Temple Path or the Pacific Crest Trail with us, the mechanics will feel familiar. Apple Health hands the app your step count. The app turns it into distance and moves you along the route. There is nothing to log, no workout to start, no GPS following you around. You walk your own streets; the Camino advances underneath you.
What is different is the road itself. Shikoku is a circle that brings you back to where you began. The Camino is a line with one destination, and nearly everything about it, from the arrows on the walls to the stamps in your credential, exists to get you there.
We want to spend this letter on that road, because it is the part we found most moving to build.
A road with one destination
The Camino de Santiago is not one path but a web of them, laid across Europe over more than a thousand years and drawn together at a single point. Tradition holds that the apostle James is buried in Santiago, and that his tomb was found there in the ninth century. Within a few generations pilgrims were walking to it from all over the continent, and the roads they wore down became the Way of St James.
They are still walking. Hundreds of thousands of people a year now arrive in the cathedral square, most of them on foot, many after weeks on the road. Some come for faith, some for grief, some for the walk itself. The Camino has always been generous about reasons.
The app gives you three of the great routes, each modelled stage by stage on the real overnight towns, and each carrying the history of the ground it covers.
Three ways to Santiago
The Camino Francés
The classic road, and the busiest, begins in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port at the foot of the Pyrenees. The first day is the hardest: straight up and over the mountains into Spain. From there the route runs through Pamplona, over the Hill of Forgiveness with its iron pilgrims silhouetted against the sky, and down into the wine country of La Rioja, where a fountain at Irache pours wine for anyone passing.
Then come Burgos and its cathedral, and the Meseta, the high, flat plateau of wheat fields and enormous skies that many pilgrims dread and later remember most fondly. After León the road climbs again to the Iron Cross, where walkers leave a stone carried from home, and then to O Cebreiro, the first village in Galicia, where the green country and the mist begin.
Pyrenees · Pamplona · Burgos · the Meseta · León · the Iron Cross · O Cebreiro
The Camino del Norte
The northern road starts at the French border in Irún and follows the coast: through the Basque Country, Cantabria and Asturias, past whaling villages and fishing harbours, with the Bay of Biscay on your right for weeks at a time. It climbs down the Begoña stairs into Bilbao, crosses the river at Portugalete on the hanging Vizcaya Bridge, and passes Gijón before turning inland into Galicia, where it joins the Francés at Arzúa for the last days into Santiago.
It is quieter than the Francés, hillier, and wetter. Walkers who choose it tend to say the sea was the point.
Basque coast · Bilbao · the Vizcaya Bridge · Cantabria · Asturias · Gijón
The Camino Portugués
The Portuguese road begins at the cathedral in Lisbon and runs north through the Ribatejo, past Santarém and the Templar town of Tomar, to Coimbra, once the kingdom's capital. It reaches the sea at Porto, passes Barcelos and its legend of the cockerel, and crosses the Lima at Ponte de Lima, a river Roman soldiers were afraid to ford because they believed it was Lethe, the river of forgetting.
It enters Spain over the bridge at Tui and finishes through Padrón, where tradition says the boat carrying James's body came ashore, tied to a stone that still sits beneath the church altar.
Lisbon · Tomar · Coimbra · Porto · Ponte de Lima · Tui · Padrón
Finisterre, the end of the earth
For many pilgrims, Santiago is not quite the end. Beyond it the road continues west for four more days to Cape Finisterre, the headland the Romans took to be the edge of the known world, on a stretch of shore called the Coast of Death for its shipwrecks. When you reach Santiago in the app, you can rest there or walk on to the sea.
The credential
On the real Camino every pilgrim carries a credential, a folded card that gets stamped at albergues, churches and cafés along the way. It is proof of the walk, and to receive the Compostela, the certificate issued in Santiago, you need stamps covering at least the last hundred kilometres on foot.
The app keeps one for you. Each town you reach adds its stamp: 39 on the Francés, 38 on the Norte, 30 on the Portugués. They are illustrated, one for every village, monastery town and city on your route, and they fill in as you walk, in order, because there is no other way to collect them. When the last stamp lands in Santiago, your Compostela is waiting.
The credential is the simplest idea on the Camino, and the best: a record that you were there, one town at a time.
Following the arrows
Anyone who has walked the Camino remembers the yellow arrows. They are painted on walls, kerbs, tree trunks and road signs the whole way across Spain, and most of them trace back to one man, the parish priest of O Cebreiro, who began painting them in the 1980s so that pilgrims would stop getting lost.
In the app the arrows mark the map. Every story, piece of history and local custom you have reached appears along your route as a yellow arrow, so the map becomes a record of what you have learned as well as how far you have come.
Santiago, and the Stories of the Way
Every one of our apps has a guide. On the Temple Path it is Kōbō Daishi. On the PCT it is John Muir. Here it is St James himself, who greets you at the start of each route and walks beside you to the end.
Alongside him the app carries 500 passages of daily wisdom, one each morning to take out with you, and the Stories of the Way: 384 short pieces across four collections, on faith and mysticism, history and legend, culture and daily life, and the landscapes themselves. They unlock as you go, so the story of the Templars arrives in Templar country and the legends of Galicia wait for the Galician mist.
What we left out, and what we did not
Forty-four patches mark the milestones, from your first thousand steps to the end of the road. There are 38 pilgrims to walk as, among them a Templar knight, a Galician bagpiper, a flamenco dancer and Hemingway, who found his way to Pamplona long before most of us. Walking groups let friends and family share the road on one map. There is a full Apple Watch app, widgets and Live Activities, and the app is available in eight languages.
What is not there: no account, no ads, no subscription, no in-app purchases. Your health data is read on your device and stays there, or goes into your own private iCloud, and never comes to us. We say this in every app we make and we mean it every time.
Why we made this one
We built the Temple Path because a long walk with meaning attached to it does something a treadmill cannot. The Camino is the pilgrimage that taught most of the world that idea. It is the oldest long-distance walk in Europe that people still undertake in large numbers, and it has survived wars, plagues and the invention of the car because the reasons people walk it never really change.
Most of us cannot take five weeks off to walk across Spain. But the road is not only a test of endurance. It is a thousand years of people setting out toward the same place, and that part can be walked a few thousand steps at a time, from wherever you are, over as many months as you need.
Pick a road. They all end at the same cathedral.
With thanks to the historians and guidebook writers whose work we leaned on, and to the pilgrims whose accounts taught us what each stage actually feels like — — The Lost Theory team
Walk the Camino de Santiago
Sacred Steps: The Camino is available now on the App Store for iPhone & Apple Watch.
Download on the App Store →