Link to pictures from Portuguese Route, 2012

These are some of the pictures from the Portuguese route, September and October 2012.  They might be useful, although it's harder to see the comments in the new flickr format. -Buen Camino!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/amgirl5/sets/72157627898664915/

Pictures begin in Madrid and end in Toledo.

If you're walking the Camino for the first time, I highly recommend the French route through Spain. It's better set up for peregrinos, there is more company, the paths are more often dedicated to walkers, and the distances are shorter between food, water and places to stay.  There's more comraderie. From Lisbon to Porto, I think it might still be mostly hostels, pensions for lodging, and from Porto to Redondela, Spain, you share the way with cars and trucks alot. Especially the first day out of Porto. If you do walk from Porto to Santiago, highly recommend the oceanside option for walking on the first day (I believe there is less traffic involved.) Otherwise, you are walking in traffic, on sealed, winding roads with fast-moving trucks for a fair chunk of the day. It was nerve-wracking for me. I wanted to quit, but I couldn't because I had to get somewhere first.  I sat in a bus stop and cried for an hour until I saw two other peregrinos and ran across the highway to join them. Safety in numbers. (And then I did walk, to Santiago and then on to Finisterre.)  I used John Brierley's guides for both routes. http://www.caminoguides.com/guide.html. 

I used a combination of Davies and Cole's Walking the Camino de Santiago and Lonely Planet's Walking In Spain, when I walked the Camino Frances. Both, I think, are out of date now. Lonely Planet's begins in Roncesvalles, but it was interesting in that they each offered different alternative routes, and then I managed to find others through the process of walking (the N-120 route from Santovenia into Burgos, which is flat once you walk the logging road down from San Juan de Ortega, but alongside the highway all day. There is an actual walking path, so not in traffic.) Here's a link to the Camino forum regarding guidebooks. http://www.caminodesantiago.me/board/el-camino-frances/topic12436.html  It's worth joining, if you haven't already.

And here's a link to the Confraternity of St. James in England. http://www.csj.org.uk/