Guidebook and maps from the Asociación Amigos Camino de Santigo Comunidad Valenciana

I carried the excellent guidebook and maps from the Asociación Amigos Camino de Santigo Comunidad Valenciana. The kit is available in Spanish and English, and screams out for some comments. It is unnecessarily bulky as many if not most maps are duplicated, and I had cause on only a few occasions to refer to the separate collection of maps. There is no reason why the full compliment of maps could not appear in the guidebook as most are already in there.

Accommodation information is slim and needs updating. This comment is based on my own experiences and information in other recently published guidebooks.

Distances are not based on town to town centres as is normal convention; rather they are measured from town to town perimeters. (I stand to be corrected.) For example,  the Cebreros - Ávila leg is listed as 37.2-km, and that is a gross underestimate of the overall journey’s length. That was, without doubt, the toughest leg of the entire pilgrimage and involved strenuous ups and downs in addition to the long overall distance. From the edge of Ávila it took more than one hour to reach our albergue, and I recall arriving there utterly and totally exhausted. To avoid any misunderstanding, I recommend that future guide books review the distances published, or at least makes the basis of measurement clear to the reader. That is necessary to plan each day’s journey.