Somewhere between Estella and Los Arcos, on day six of a walk that had already covered 83 miles, two pilgrims learned an important lesson about the Camino de Santiago: never follow someone wearing noise-cancelling earbuds up a mountain. When the pair took a wrong fork onto a rugged, muddy wilderness track, one had to sprint a mile uphill screaming to be heard over the wind and the playlist. The reward for the rescue mission? A two-mile penalty loop back to the correct path.
That mix of mishap and magic is the essence of this leg of the French Way through Navarre, Spain. The day began with cold rain at 9 a.m. out of Estella, with a roughly 1,100-foot climb spread over five miles to the high point at Villamayor de Monjardin. Early on, there was a stop at one of the trail's most famous curiosities: the wine fountain at the Irache monastery, where pilgrims can fill bottles with free red wine from the tap. Half a litre went into an empty water bottle for later.
The route then passed through the oddly abandoned hamlet of Urban Irache and the medieval village of Azqueta before climbing to Villamayor de Monjardin, its summit shadowed by a ruined castle. From the top, the views opened onto red cliffs, distant mountain ranges and hills striped with vineyards — this is white-wine country. Crucially, it was also the last water stop for the remaining 7.5 miles into Los Arcos, so bottles were filled to the brim.
The descent flattens into a wide dirt track through wheat, grapevines and yellow canola fields, lined with poppies in spring. There is almost no shade, which would make this stretch punishing in July and August. Midway through the fields came one of the trail's small miracles: a volunteer-run food truck parked beside the Camino, staffed by Americans, dispensing cheap, good coffee at exactly the moment exhaustion and jet lag converged.
Los Arcos itself delivered a proper finish: a handsome medieval town anchored by an enormous, ornate cathedral, plus a large enough grocery store to self-cater spaghetti in a rented apartment. That apartment then produced the day's final drama — a hidden drain cover left on in the shower flooded the floor with soapy water while dinner cooked. As the writer puts it, decoding these oddities is half the fun of the pilgrimage.
For anyone weighing up the Camino, this stage is a useful sample of what the walk actually feels like: 13-mile days, changeable weather, a missed turn that costs an hour, and generosity from strangers — but also wine fountains, castle ruins, wildflowers and a trail culture where you keep bumping into the same friendly faces, in this case a British pilgrim met repeatedly since Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Spring offers the best colours and mild temperatures; summer trades them for relentless sun on this exposed stretch. If you can laugh at a flooded bathroom floor, you will fit right in.
Story via The Trek.
