Nine days off work and three Camino routes to pick between is a different question from “which Camino is best”, and the forums mostly answer the wrong one. Walking a steady 25 km a day, nine days gets you to Ponferrada on the Camino Francés, Barcelos on the Camino Portugués, or Ribadeo on the Camino del Norte — three different starting towns on three different walks, every one of them already past the 100 km the Compostela certificate requires. The route that fits is the one whose arithmetic matches your calendar, not the one with the best photos.
The three routes, in one line each
The Camino Francés is the longest of the three at 770 km, starting in the Pyrenees at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and running through Navarre, La Rioja, and the flat interior meseta of Castilla y León before Galicia. The Camino Portugués, walked from Porto, is the short one at 240 km, crossing into Spain at Tui and finishing through Galicia’s Rías Baixas. The Camino del Norte is the longest at 822 km, tracing Spain’s Atlantic coast through San Sebastián, Bilbao, and Santander before cutting inland near Arzúa to join the Francés for its final stretch into Santiago. (These are the three routes Skoma’s planner models in full stage detail — Inglés and Primitivo are real Camino routes too, but without stage data behind them here, so they’re left out rather than guessed at.)
Match the route to the days, not the days to the route
Walked at a steady 25 km a day, the three routes land you in very different places for the same number of days off:
- 7 days — O Cebreiro (Francés), Rubiães (Portugués), or Abadín (Norte)
- 9 days — Ponferrada (Francés), Barcelos (Portugués), or Ribadeo (Norte)
- 10 days — Rabanal del Camino (Francés), Vilarinho (Portugués), or La Caridad (Norte)
- 14 days — Mansilla de las Mulas on the Francés or Muros de Nalón on the Norte, but the Portugués is already finished — it only needs about 11
Every one of those stopping points already clears the 100 km minimum the pilgrim office requires for the Compostela, so on a short trip the real decision is where you start and which towns you walk through, not whether you qualify.
The one route you can walk end to end on a normal holiday
At 25 km a day the Camino Portugués from Porto finishes in about 11 walking days — the only one of the three short enough to walk start to finish, Porto to Santiago, inside an ordinary two-week holiday, with two or three days free for a rest day or a slower pace through the Rías Baixas at the end. The Francés and the Norte don’t fit a fortnight at any sane daily distance: a 770 km or 822 km walk needs four to five weeks at this pace, so on either of those the honest question for a shorter trip isn’t “can I finish” but “which stretch do I walk”.
If you only have a week
A week still buys a real Compostela on any of the three. At 25 km a day, five walking days lands at Sarria on the Francés (115 km to go), O Porriño on the Portugués (100 km), or Baamonde on the Norte (101 km) — all three over the line, two of them barely. Sarria’s fame as the one-week starting town isn’t an accident of the calendar: it sits almost exactly five walking days out, which is also why it’s the most-booked starting point on the whole Francés. The same week buys a genuinely different walk on the other two routes, not a lesser one — a point worth remembering before defaulting to the Francés because it’s the one everyone names first.
What a short trip actually trades away
Joining the Francés or the Norte partway in doesn’t cut a slice out of the middle — it cuts off the start. A nine- or ten-day trip on the Francés skips the Pyrenees crossing out of Saint-Jean and the whole flat run through the meseta, because those stages sit earliest and a short day-budget runs out before reaching them, not because they’re the parts worth skipping. The same arithmetic applies to the Norte’s coastal stretch through the Basque Country and Cantabria. The Portugués doesn’t have this problem on a two-week trip, because two weeks is enough to walk the entire thing from its own start rather than joining partway through someone else’s.
Run your own daily distance and day count through the Camino days calculator to see exactly where each route puts you, then take the result to the Camino stage planner for the actual day-by-day itinerary — real stage towns, rest days included, in order. The full arithmetic behind days, cost, and stage time together is laid out in planning a Camino: the numbers nobody tells you until you’re on it. Skoma turns whichever route you walk into a page-a-day book, Santiago as the last page rather than a phone full of photos.