The Camino de Santiago—a network of hiking routes through France, Portugal, and Spain that converge on the shrine of St. James the Apostle in the Galician capital, Santiago de Compostela—has beckoned the Catholic faithful for more than 1,000 years. The trails are expected to host a record number of travelers in 2025, according to the pilgrim reception office in Santiago, with U.S. visitor stats second only to those of Spain.
John Brierley’s independently published Camino Guides series, distributed by Baker & Taylor Publisher Services and billed as “practical and mystical” manuals, have been a mainstay among pilgrims for more than two decades; November sees the release of two updated editions. In recent years, as the route has attracted increasing numbers of secular travelers, mainstream guidebook publishers have begun to walk the walk.
“We’ve moved from mass tourism to experiential tourism to transformative tourism,” says Lonely Planet publisher Piers Pickard. LP’s Journey El Camino de Santiago (Sept.) is functional, with maps, lists, and mile-by-mile itineraries, and also personal, Pickard explains; essays include Josh West’s on the communal aspects of the trek and Anna Kaminski’s on walking solo while grieving a friend. “People invest so much in this experience, and not only financially. We want to help them come out of this journey changed.”
Daniel Stables, one of three writers who contributed to DK Travel’s Walking the Camino de Santiago (Sept.), is not religious but is drawn to pilgrimage routes. “Walking the Camino, you get those feelings of awe and personal development and physical accomplishment, whether you believe or don’t believe,” he says. “You’re participating in something that millions of people have participated in before.” The guide is highly visual, with DK’s characteristic mix of photography, maps, and colorful infographics.
Moon Travel, an early convert, published Camino de Santiago in 2019. The guide, whose third edition is due out in February, offers historical context alongside the expected practicalities, says author Beebe Bahrami, an anthropologist and memoirist. “There are layers of pre-Christian history that exist in these geographies that laid the track for what would later become a natural corridor for people in the Middle Ages to walk,” she says. “It was Roman roads. Before that it was Iron Age roads. And before that it was the migratory routes of animals and nomadic people.”
Bahrami is mindful of overtourism, and advocates for cultural respect and environmental sustainability throughout her guide. But, as a student of history, she notes, “We have documentation by an ambassador from the royal court in Morocco who, in the Middle Ages, wrote, ‘The Camino is so crowded I can barely pass with my horse.’ That’s like some passages today. You know what? The Camino has seen this before and it survived.”
