Caminantes

Camino Primitivo elevation profile

306.6 km and 6,777 m of ascent, between 39 m and 1,214 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.

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040080012000501001502002503001,214 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 Primitivo climbs 22.1 m per kilometre on average, which makes it the second steepest 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 spread fairly evenly: 40%, 36% and 24% of the total ascent falls in the first, middle and final third. There is no one section that decides the route.

The longest sustained climb runs from km 39 to km 58, gaining 676 m over 18.9 km, an average grade of 3.6%. The high point, 1,214 m, comes at km 92, 30% 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 5, Borres to Montefurado : 698 m over 16.6 km
  • Day 3, Salas to Tinéu : 679 m over 20 km
  • Day 8, Valdedo to A Fonsagrada : 679 m over 22.4 km
  • Day 2, Grau / Grado to Salas : 592 m over 22.1 km
  • Day 9, A Fonsagrada to O Cádavo : 571 m over 24.4 km

Every stage

Measured ascent for every stage of the Camino Primitivo
DayFromTokmAscentHigh point
1OviedoGrau / Grado24.8329 m249 m
2Grau / GradoSalas22.1592 m349 m
3SalasTinéu20679 m783 m
4TinéuBorres15.6327 m910 m
5BorresMontefurado16.6698 m1214 m
6MontefuradoEl Vilar de Buspol15.7420 m1039 m
7El Vilar de BuspolValdedo15.1478 m777 m
8ValdedoA Fonsagrada22.4679 m1110 m
9A FonsagradaO Cádavo24.4571 m1016 m
10O CádavoLugo30.1440 m867 m
11LugoCarricova15.1276 m580 m
12CarricovaMelide31.8499 m700 m
13MelideSeixas15240 m463 m
14SeixasO Pedrouzo18.5273 m413 m
15O PedrouzoSantiago de Compostela19.4271 m390 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: 3,067 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 +14 m. The profile's own start and finish differ by +19 m, so the two agree to within 5 m over 306.6 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 Primitivo 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.