Customer Reviews

The Way of st James: Le Puy to Santiago : A Walker's Guide (A Cicerone Guide)

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This book became well worn from being used several times a day on our 68 day Camino. It is a nice pocket-size with lots of background info as well as route descriptions.
If you are only doing the Spanish portion (Camino Frances route) you might feel that this book is not necessary but if you are starting in Le Puy it will be helpful. Since any book on the Camino will be outdated as soon as it is printed, I would suggest that you also carry the supplemental guides from the Confraternity of St James, since they are updated every year.

This book may be usefull if you walk all the way from St. Jean or Le Puy, but I doubt that. I walked from Astorga to Santiago 7/2001 and had this book with me, but found it quite useless and outdated and I was not the only one with this opinion in the camino (my book was printed in 2000). Raju's book is consists mostly of route descriptions, but today the yellow arrows are very good in Castille and Galicia and it is quite difficult to get lost and fountains are also easy to find.
I needed the info in this book only once during my trip and even then only to choose between two alternative routes.
The book does not have info on refugios which would be really important and also very little about history of the towns in the route which would be interesting.
If you have this book I recommend reading it before you go or just copying the pages you think you need. The only book I can warmly recommend taking with you is the annually published quide of Confraternity of St James. It is light and up to date.
Ultreia!

Best used as a supplement to the Confraternity of St. James guides. I don't know of another compact guide to the Le Puy to Roncevalles part of the trip to Santiago. It's abbreviations such as L for left, R for right, etc. make it terse and not smooth reading, but it saves on total book size, and weight is important to the Camino walker. This is a 1999 guide, so now getting a little dated.

Once you hit the border of Spain, more recent guides such as Davies and Cole's Walking the Camino de Santiago become available.

On all parts of the Camino, if English is your first language, it is essential to get the corresponding Confraternity of St. James guide books. Do a web search on camino santiago or confraternity, or even backpack45 and they should pop up.

This book is the essential guide to walking the camino to Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain. It is a factual guide and leads you from village to village. Very useful in that it charts shops, refugios and fountains for filling the water bottle. If you want to walk the camino from St Jean to Santiago de Compostela this is the book for you. As a walker you will be carrying everything you need in a rucksack, so you may need to copy the pages and throw them away as you walk, to lighten your load.