Caminantes

Camino Inglés elevation profile

110.5 km and 1,802 m of ascent, between 0 m and 458 m. Measured from the route's own GPS track rather than copied from anywhere, which matters more than it should: almost every ascent figure published for these routes, including ours until August 2026, was an estimate nobody could source.

Know these words before your Camino. Spanish is preparation, the same as boots and stages. Try the free topic

01002003004005000102030405060708090100110458 m

Metres up the side, kilometres along the bottom. Ticks are stage boundaries. Sampled every 100 m against SRTM 30m, smoothed over 500 m, climbs under 3 m discarded as noise.

Move across the profile to read any point, or drag to measure a stretch. With the keyboard: focus the profile, then arrow keys to move, shift for finer steps, Enter to start and end a measurement, Escape to clear. Each stage in the table below can also be measured directly.

What the profile shows

The Camino Inglés climbs 16.3 m per kilometre on average, which makes it the fifth gentlest of the 10 routes measured here. A total on its own mostly measures how long a route is; per kilometre is what decides whether your days feel hilly.

The climbing is not spread evenly. The middle third of the route carries 46% of the total ascent (33%, 46% and 21% across the three thirds), so pace yourself for that section rather than for the average.

The longest sustained climb runs from km 53 to km 67, gaining 408 m over 14.1 km, an average grade of 2.9%. The high point, 458 m, comes at km 67, 61% of the way in.

The hardest days

Ranked by climbing rather than distance, which is a different list and the one that decides how the evening feels.

  • Day 2, Fene to Betanzos : 623 m over 29.2 km
  • Day 3, Betanzos to A Salgueira : 442 m over 15 km
  • Day 4, A Salgueira to Os Ramos : 219 m over 15.4 km
  • Day 6, Vilacide de Arriba to Santiago de Compostela : 218 m over 17.8 km
  • Day 1, Ferrol to Fene : 153 m over 17.7 km

Every stage

Measured ascent for every stage of the Camino Inglés
DayFromTokmAscentHigh point
1FerrolFene17.7153 m58 m
2FeneBetanzos29.2623 m181 m
3BetanzosA Salgueira15442 m290 m
4A SalgueiraOs Ramos15.4219 m458 m
5Os RamosVilacide de Arriba15.4145 m334 m
6Vilacide de ArribaSantiago de Compostela17.8218 m344 m

Stages are a suggested split, not a rule. Most people walk their own.

Where the numbers come from

The GPS track carries position but no height, so the altitude was measured rather than read off: 1,105 points along the route, one every 100 m, each looked up against the SRTM 30 m elevation dataset.

One check worth stating, because it is the difference between plausible and correct. Total ascent minus total descent comes to +249 m. The profile's own start and finish differ by +261 m, so the two agree to within 12 m over 110.5 km.

They do not match exactly, and the reason is the noise floor: climbs under 3 m are discarded as sensor jitter, which removes a little real height along with a lot of imaginary height. A tool claiming these two numbers agree perfectly would be hiding that.

Ascent depends on method. Sample more finely and you measure noise as climbing; smooth harder and you flatten real hills. Anyone quoting a single authoritative number for a route this long is hiding that choice, so the settings used here are stated above and you can compare like with like.

Route facts, stages and the full description are on the Camino Inglés route page. Every route's profile is on the elevation profiles page, and how the ten routes compare puts the totals side by side.

Compare with another route

All measured the same way, so the numbers are comparable. Ordered by total ascent, hardest first.