Author: Margaretha Montagu

(And why short nature immersion Camino de Santiago breaks in France are so popular)

No man has ever said yes to a “healing men’s retreat.” Plenty have said yes to a hard week of walking through France with three other guys and no phone signal.

Take Mark, for example. Mark had told his wife it was a hiking holiday. He told his business partner the same thing. It took until day three, halfway up a hill in the French countryside, for him to find out it was something else entirely.

There’s a particular kind of silence that falls over a group of men on the second morning of a walk. It isn’t awkward. It isn’t tense. It’s the sound of nobody quite needing to fill it yet. Boots on gravel. A buzzard somewhere overhead. The occasional grunt about whose pack is heavier. And then, somewhere around kilometre eight, one of them says something he has never, ever, said out loud before.

This is not a new phenomenon, and it isn’t unique to the Camino de Santiago. But it is, increasingly, what men are seeking out — and deliberately avoiding calling by its real name. Ask a roomful of men if they’d like to go on a “healing men’s retreat” and watch the silence turn a different colour. Ask them if they fancy a week of hard walking through French countryside and several hands shoot up.

“Most men know they are stressed. They know they are sleeping poorly. They know they have gained weight. They know they are exercising less than they should. They know that their energy levels are not what they once were.” Dr Cijith Sreedhar, Naturopathy Doctor at Prakriti Shakti Clinic of Natural Medicine

The Global Wellness Institute’s Men’s Wellbeing Initiative reports that mental wellbeing is no longer the unmentionable topic at the men’s table. The old “grin and bear it” model of strength is finally losing its grip. Slowly, the old rulebook is being rewritten: replacing outdated notions of masculinity with a broader understanding of what it means to thrive physically, mentally and emotionally. Which is, in a way, exactly what a week on the Camino de Santiago gives a man room to do.

“Increasingly, men are seeking spaces that allow them to slow down, reconnect, restore balance and step away from constant performance and pressure.” Laura Montesanti, Founder of Synergy – The Retreat Show.

Key Takeaways

• Men tend to open up through shared activity rather than face-to-face conversation — what’s often called “shoulder-to-shoulder” connection, and walking is ideal for this sort of connection.
• Burnout, identity strain, and the absence of an “instruction manual” for modern manhood are now widely cited by retreat leaders as the top drivers behind men seeking out retreat experiences.
• The description matters enormously. Retreats marketed around wellness or healing see lower uptake from men than retreats marketed around challenge, the outdoors, and perspective — even when the experience itself is similar.
• A multi-day walk, like walking sections of the Camino de Santiago, removes the pressure of direct confrontation, lets conversation happen at its own pace, and builds the kind of unforced trust that therapy rooms often spend months trying to manufacture.
• Small groups, several days on foot, and distance from daily roles all appear to matter more than any single “activity” — it’s the sustained rhythm of walking together that does the work.

Mark’s Third Day

Mark’s calves were still cramping from the day before when he zipped his pack and stepped outside at six. Cold enough that his breath showed. The kind of grey light that makes a stone farmhouse look like it’s been carved out of the hill rather than built on it. He hadn’t told his wife the real reason he’d booked this. He’d told his business partner it was “just a walking thing.” Four nights, France, get some air. Nothing that needed explaining.

By day three, his legs had found a rhythm his head hadn’t caught up to yet — and that gap, the half-step between body and mind, was where everything started to go sideways. No emails landing. No calls to dodge. Just gravel, the crunch of his own boots, and three other men who didn’t ask him anything he didn’t want to answer.

Day three broke the pattern. Twenty kilometres, a brutal climb out of the valley, cloud sitting low enough to taste. Forty minutes in, his lungs were burning and his legs felt like they belonged to someone else. He liked that. The pain gave him somewhere to put his attention that wasn’t the thing he’d been avoiding for eighteen months.

It was the other man’s breathing that got him talking — short, hard, right beside him on the climb, the two of them matching pace without ever deciding to. Somewhere past the worst of the gradient, with his heart going harder than the hill alone justified, the other man said it flat, no windup: “I haven’t slept right since my dad died.” No eye contact. Both of them staring at the track six feet ahead, breathing like men who’d earned the right to say something true.

Mark didn’t say anything back. Not then. But that night, in a stone gîte that still smelled of woodsmoke from a fire lit hours earlier, lying in the dark with someone’s snoring rattling down the hall, the thing he’d been carrying for a year and a half started moving on its own. The eighteen months since the company had nearly gone under. The year he’d told no one — not his wife, not his partner, not one person — because admitting how close it had come felt like admitting he wasn’t built for this after all.

The next climb was worse. Steeper, longer, the kind that turns conversation into grunts. And it was exactly there — gasping, legs gone, sweat stinging one eye — that Mark heard his own voice say it out loud for the first time. Not a confession. More like something finally given enough rope to hang itself.

Nobody stopped walking. Nobody made it a moment. One of the others reached over, put a hand flat on his shoulder for two seconds, kept moving, and said the only thing that needed saying: “Yeah. That’s heavy. Keep walking.”

So he did. And by the top of that climb, for the first time in eighteen months, the weight in his chest had lifted — not gone, but carried by more than one man for the first time since it settled there.

Why Walking Works When Talking Doesn’t

There’s a reason that moment happened on a hillside and not over coffee. Researchers studying interpersonal coordination have found that when two people physically synchronise their movement — walking in step, matching pace, sharing rhythm — they report greater connection, trust and cooperation with each other afterwards, and the effect appears to be mediated by the same hormonal pathways involved in social bonding more broadly.

None of this requires a confession circle or a facilitator with a flip chart. It requires distance, pace, and enough hours on foot so that the usual social armour gets too heavy. This is, in essence, the entire design principle behind a good Camino de Santiago walking retreat for men: the walking does the work that conversation alone can’t.

A lot of men who’d never sign up for “self-care” are deep into stress management, longevity protocols, sleep tracking, cold plunges, and zone-two cardio. Performance optimisation has become an acceptable, even admirable, male pursuit. The appeal is partly the data (men like a number they can improve) and partly the framing: optimising your body for the coming decades sounds a lot more palatable than “working on yourself.” A week of sustained walking through hill country fits neatly into that same logic — real exercise, real recovery, real sleep.

There’s a quieter strain running underneath all of this, and it rarely gets named directly: the identity question. For a lot of men, the sense of who they are has been welded for decades to what they do — provider, fixer, protector, leader. That works well right up until career plateaus, kids stop needing rescuing, bodies stop performing the way they used to, and the welds start to show. Researchers studying men’s psychosocial health describe this less as an individual weakness than as a predictable response to a culture that hands men one script — succeed, provide, stay strong — and very little guidance on what to do when that script becomes obsolete. A week of walking doesn’t hand a man a new identity. But it does something almost as useful: it strips away the roles for long enough that he can feel, even briefly, who he is underneath.

There’s also something to be said for what the walk takes away rather than what it adds. Recent research tracking loneliness across the U.S. and Europe found that midlife adults — broadly the demographic most likely to be running a business, raising teenagers, and quietly wondering where the last decade went — are experiencing rising and sustained loneliness that researchers now describe as endemic rather than episodic, a steady undertow rather than a passing phase. Five days on the Camino doesn’t solve that on its own. But it interrupts it, in a way that few other experiences manage, by putting a small group of men in physical proximity, on foot, for long enough that the usual scripts run out.

What a Men’s Camino de Santiago Retreat in southwest France Retreat Actually Looks Like

This isn’t the crowded, infrastructure-heavy Camino Francés of guidebook fame, with its thousands of pilgrims and packed albergues. My 5-day hiking breaks run along one of France’s own pilgrim routes, the Voie du Puy. The Voie du Puy is quieter and, in many ways, more atmospheric than its Spanish counterpart. These are the original medieval roads that pilgrims walked for centuries before ever reaching Spain: stone farmhouses, Romanesque churches, sunflower fields in summer and amber woodland in autumn, and a profound, working quiet that’s becoming increasingly rare to find.

I keep groups deliberately small — a maximum of four guests at a time — because the dynamic that lets men actually talk to each other doesn’t survive a crowd. There’s no facilitator standing over the group narrating the experience back to them, and there’s no language of “healing” anywhere in the itinerary. There’s solid, medically informed advice about stress management, good food, comfortable lodging on a working farm each night, daily walking through genuinely beautiful countryside, and the kind of unstructured time that, as it turns out, men tend to fill with exactly the conversations they didn’t know they wanted to have.

Mistakes Men Make When Choosing (or Avoiding) a Break Like This

• Waiting for a crisis to justify it. Most men who eventually book this sort of break say they wish they’d done it two or three years earlier. You don’t need to be in freefall to benefit from stepping off the treadmill — burnout builds quietly, long before it becomes undeniable.
• Choosing intensity over rhythm. A handful of men gravitate toward the most extreme version of a retreat available — multiple cold plunges a day, breathwork sessions stacked back to back — assuming more intensity equals more transformation. In practice, sustained, moderate physical effort over several days tends to do more for genuine connection than any single dramatic moment.
• Going in expecting an instant breakthrough. The most meaningful conversations on a walking break rarely happen on day one. They happen once the body has settled into the rhythm and the small talk has run its course — usually day three or four. Expecting day one to deliver the goods, and feeling disappointed when it doesn’t, can sour the whole experience unnecessarily.
• Underestimating the role of distance from home. A long weekend close to home, with phone signal and the option to “just check one email,” rarely produces the same shift as a week somewhere genuinely removed. The unplugging isn’t incidental — it’s structural.
• Assuming the location matters more than the format. Plenty of men assume the spiritual or historical weight of Spain’s Camino Francés is what makes the experience powerful. In truth, it’s the format — walking, small group, multiple days, away from daily roles — that does most of the heavy lifting, which is exactly why the quieter French routes work just as well, if not better.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a Camino de Santiago walking break in France different from walking the Camino in Spain?

Yes, meaningfully so. The French routes — the Via Turonensis, Via Lemovicensis, and Voie du Puy — are the historic approach roads that pilgrims walked for centuries before ever crossing into Spain. They’re quieter, less crowded, and arguably more atmospheric, with the same rhythm and reflective quality but without the high-season crowds of the Camino Francés.

Do I need to be fit to do this?

A reasonable, steady walking fitness is helpful, but this isn’t a forced march. Days are paced to allow conversation, rest, and genuine enjoyment of the countryside, not punishing distances for their own sake.

Will there be any pressure to “open up” or share personal things?

None at all. There’s no facilitated sharing circle and no expectation that anyone discusses anything they don’t want to. What tends to happen, happens because the walking creates the space for it — not because anyone is asked to perform vulnerability.

Why keep the group so small?

Four guests maximum keeps the dynamic genuinely conversational rather than performative. It’s the difference between having a real conversation and having an audience.

What time of year do these retreats run?

Retreats run from spring to autumn, when the French countryside is at its most walkable and most beautiful — golden light, manageable temperatures, and the harvest season in full swing through much of the route.

If any of this sounds like something you — or a friend who’s been “fine” for slightly too long — might need, you’ll find more information on my website. No wellness jargon used.

Research Notes & Sources

On synchronised movement and social bonding

Vuust, P. et al. Oxytocin improves synchronisation in leader–follower interaction. Scientific Reports / PMC, 2016. Found that interpersonal synchronisation — such as walking in time with another person — promotes liking, cooperation, and trust between participants.

On midlife loneliness trends

Study reported via ScienceDaily, 2026 (Arizona State University / American Psychologist). Found that loneliness among midlife adults (45–65) in the U.S. and Europe is rising across generations and increasingly endemic rather than episodic.

On men’s midlife crises

Midlife Crisis in Men: Psychosocial Dimensions and Mental Health Implications. Research review, 2025. Frames midlife identity strain in men as a predictable psychosocial response to cultural expectations around masculinity, career, and provider roles — not an individual weakness — and notes that these norms often hinder men’s ability to recognise vulnerability or seek support.

On why men respond differently to retreat marketing language

Montesanti, L. Why Men Are Turning to Retreats: Connection, Brotherhood and the Search for Something More. Synergy — The Retreat Show, 2026. Interviews with retreat leaders Mark Hodgson (Mind & Body Travel), Scotty Johnson (Explore What Matters), Rob Williams (Nordic Wellness), and Steve Hodgson (Beyond The Noise Collective) on burnout, identity, and the role of challenge-based design in men’s retreats.

Why five days on the Camino de Santiago does what three months of therapy cannot — and costs less than your gym membership

What This Article Is About (And Whether It’s Worth Your Next Five Minutes)

You are probably carrying more than you should be right now. Not in your bag — in your head. The low-level hum of things unresolved, decisions deferred, conversations avoided, and a general background noise of modern life doing what modern life does best, which is refuse to be quiet for five consecutive minutes. This article is about why walking to reduce anxiety — specifically, walking the ancient pilgrimage route of the Camino de Santiago — has been dissolving exactly this kind of accumulated human weight for over a thousand years, and why it continues to work with a reliability that would be frankly embarrassing for most wellness industries if they cared to look too closely. If you have ever stood in your own kitchen feeling vaguely overwhelmed by a life that is, by most objective measures, absolutely fine, this article is for you.

5 Key Takeaways

• Walking is not exercise disguised as therapy. It is, neurologically speaking, one of the most powerful mood-regulating tools available to a human being — and it requires no prescription, no Wi-Fi, and no prior experience of being outdoorsy.
• The Camino de Santiago works not just because of the walking, but because of the specific combination of rhythm, nature, community, and purposeful forward movement that is almost impossible to replicate in ordinary life.
• Three days is enough. You do not need to walk five hundred kilometres to experience a genuine shift. The pilgrimage effect — that particular quality of attention and release that the Camino is famous for — begins on day one.
• The worries do not vanish. Something more interesting happens: they rearrange themselves. The ones that were enormous at home become manageable. The ones you had forgotten about entirely turn out to be the ones that mattered.
• People do not return from the Camino unchanged. This is not marketing copy. It is the consistent, slightly startled testimony of the vast majority of people who have walked it, regardless of age, fitness level, background, or original reason for going.

The Man Who Walked Until the Noise Stopped

Daniel Forsythe had not slept properly in eleven months. He knew this because his phone, with the cheerful cruelty of modern technology, had been tracking his sleep and presenting him with weekly summaries that read like a minor medical concern dressed up in pastel graphics. He was forty-four years old, a project director at a mid-sized engineering consultancy in Bristol, the father of two children who were technically at ages he had been told would be easier by now, and the owner of a body that had recently started expressing its opinions about his lifestyle in ways that were increasingly difficult to ignore.

He was not, he would have been at pains to clarify, unwell. He was just — and here he would pause, looking for the word — full. Full of information. Full of decisions. Full of the particular modern affliction of never being entirely anywhere because there was always somewhere else he was supposed to be monitoring. His wife had described it as watching a man who had forgotten how to be in a room. His GP had suggested mindfulness. His colleague had suggested a long weekend in the Cotswolds. His mother had suggested he was working too hard, which was true but not useful.

What Daniel did instead — on the recommendation of a man he barely knew at a conference in Birmingham who had said ‘I’m not a spiritual person at all, but something happened on that road’ — was book five days on the Camino de Santiago.

He packed badly. He drove to the airport in a state of low-grade panic about seventeen things he had not finished before leaving. He sat on the plane with his laptop open for forty minutes before he admitted he was not actually reading what was on the screen. He closed it. He looked out of the window. Somewhere below him, southern France was doing what it had been doing for millennia, which was existing with considerable serenity and no particular interest in his project deadlines.

He began walking on a Tuesday morning. The path was marked with red-and-white arrows. The air smelled of eucalyptus and, less poetically, his own sun cream. His feet, in boots he had owned for three years and never properly broken in, began to offer feedback within the first two kilometres.

By the end of day one, something had happened that Daniel would later describe, with the slightly embarrassed precision of a man who does not usually talk like this, as the noise getting quieter. Not gone. Just — further away. As though the walking had created some physical distance between him and the contents of his own head. As though his worries, unable to keep up with the pace of his boots on an ancient stone path, had fallen slightly behind.

He stopped on a hillside above a village whose name he couldn’t pronounce. He stood still. For the first time in eleven months, his mind was not already somewhere else. He was, entirely, there.

What happened on the remaining days — and what Daniel understood by the end of them that he had not understood at the beginning — is the subject of the rest of this article.

Why Walking to Reduce Anxiety Works When Everything Else Doesn’t

There is a reason human beings have been walking towards things that matter to them for as long as they have existed. Before therapy, before pharmaceuticals, before the fourteen-day mindfulness course with the optional retreat, there was movement. Forward, purposeful, rhythmic movement through landscape — and the particular quality of thinking that it produces.

Neuroscience has spent the last two decades catching up with what pilgrims have known for centuries. Bilateral stimulation — the left-right alternating movement of walking — activates the same neural mechanism used in EMDR therapy to process difficult experiences and memories. The rhythmic nature of walking regulates the nervous system in ways that sitting, however therapeutically, does not. Nature exposure reduces cortisol. The combination of mild physical exertion and forward progress releases a neurochemical cocktail that even the most enthusiastic pharmacologist would struggle to improve upon.

But the Camino is not merely a walk in the woods. It is a walk with intention. And intention, it turns out, matters enormously. The pilgrimage format — a route with a beginning, a direction, and a destination — provides something that a circular walk in a local park does not: the psychological architecture of a journey. You are going somewhere. You are moving forward. You are, however you choose to interpret it, heading towards something.

This is not a small thing. A significant proportion of the anxiety and low-level misery that characterises modern life is the product of feeling stuck. Stuck in patterns, in roles, in relationships, in identities that were assumed years ago and never quite examined since. The Camino does not ask you to examine any of this. It simply puts you on a path and asks you to walk. And in the walking — in the days of putting one foot in front of the other through villages and vineyards and ancient stone-paved hills — the examination happens anyway. Quietly, without fanfare, at its own pace.

The Camino does not solve your problems. It does something more useful: it gives you enough distance from them to see which ones are actually problems, and which ones are just noise you forgot to stop listening to.

The community of the Camino adds another layer that is difficult to replicate. You walk alongside strangers who become, with the peculiar alchemy of shared miles, something approximating friends — people who know the version of you that showed up on a French road with nothing to prove and nowhere particular to be, rather than the version that exists inside your professional title and your family role and the ten-year accumulation of other people’s expectations. These conversations — unhurried, unscheduled, conducted at the pace of walking rather than the pace of modern life — have a quality that most people recognise immediately as something they have not had in years.

Five days is not a long time. But it is, as it turns out, precisely long enough.

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Walking to Reduce Anxiety

1. Treating it like a fitness challenge rather than a walking meditation. The Camino will involve physical effort, and you will be glad of a degree of preparation. But approaching it primarily as a fitness test — tracking pace, competing with other walkers, measuring everything — is a reliable way to miss the point entirely. The goal is not a personal best. The goal is to be present on a road for five days. The body is the vehicle. It is not the destination.

2. Filling every quiet moment with your phone. The quality of attention that the Camino produces is not accidental. It is the product of extended periods of not being entertained, stimulated, or distracted. Podcasts during every hour of walking, social media updates from the albergue, live-streaming your pilgrimage to your Instagram audience — all of these are ways of bringing the noise with you. Leave more space than feels comfortable. The discomfort is precisely where the interesting things happen.

3. Expecting a dramatic revelation rather than a gradual one. People arrive on the Camino hoping for a Road to Damascus moment — a single clear insight that restructures everything. What usually happens is quieter and more durable: a slow accumulation of small clarities over several days, arriving not as lightning but as light. The shift you will feel on day five would not have been possible without days one through four. Trust the pace of the thing.

4. Under-preparing physically and then suffering for it. There is a balance to strike. Treating it as purely spiritual and doing no walking preparation whatsoever means your first two days will be dominated by the extremely unspiritual experience of managing blisters. Walk regularly in the weeks before you come. Break in your boots. Bring the right socks — this is not a trivial detail. Your feet are carrying you to wherever you are going. They deserve your prior attention.

5. Rushing to return to normal life the moment it ends. The Camino effect is real, but it is also fragile in the immediate aftermath. The people who find that it changes nothing are often the people who stepped off the plane and immediately reimmersed in exactly the conditions that sent them to France in the first place. Build in a day of transition. Write something down before you land. Give the shift a chance to settle before the noise reconvenes.

Further Reading

The Camino de Santiago: A Pilgrimage to the Stars by Gitlitz & Davidson

For anyone who wants to understand what they are actually walking through — not just geographically, but historically and culturally — this is the essential companion. Gitlitz and Davidson trace the full history of the pilgrimage from its medieval origins to its modern revival, with a depth of scholarship that transforms the road beneath your boots from a pleasant walking route into a thousand-year conversation between human beings and the things they are trying to work out. Understanding why the Camino has drawn millions of people across a millennium of human history does not diminish the experience of walking it. It considerably deepens it.

Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte

David Whyte is a poet who has walked the Camino and written about walking, belonging, and the interior life with more precision and beauty than almost anyone working in the language. This book — a meditation on words like ‘Alone,’ ‘Despair,’ ‘Rest,’ ‘Silence,’ and ‘Worrying’ — is the ideal companion for anyone going to the Camino with unresolved things in their head. It does not offer solutions. It offers, as the title suggests, consolation: the particular relief of having your experience named accurately. Pack it alongside your boots.

Embracing Change — in 10 Minutes a Day by Margaretha Montagu

The Camino is, at its core, about change — walking away from one version of yourself and returning as someone slightly, meaningfully different. Margaret Montagu’s Embracing Change — in 10 Minutes a Day offers the perfect preparation for that process: a practical, warm, and genuinely useful framework for loosening the grip of the patterns and habits that make change feel more threatening than it actually is. Read it before you go. The Camino will do the rest.

If you are currently facing a major life transition or any other dramatic change in your circumstances, and you have no idea how you are going to cope, the good news is that the strategy presented in this book can help you, step by step, to improve your ability to handle the stress caused by change, even if you feel entirely powerless at the moment.

5 FAQs

Do I need to be fit to walk the Camino?

You need to be able to walk comfortably for several hours a day — which is a different thing from being conventionally fit. People of all ages, sizes, and fitness levels walk the Camino. The preparation that matters most is not gym work but progressive walking practice in the weeks before you go: building up to longer distances, on varied terrain, in the boots you intend to wear. If you can walk ten to fifteen kilometres on a weekend without significant difficulty, you are ready.

Does it matter if I’m not religious or spiritual?

Not in the slightest. The Camino is a pilgrimage route with deep religious origins, but the majority of modern walkers describe their motivation as personal rather than religious: they come because they need space to think, a change of perspective, a break from the life that has been accumulating around them. The road does not enquire about your beliefs. It simply offers the walking, the landscape, the community, and a thousand years of other people’s footsteps. What you make of it is entirely your own business.

What actually happens to your mental state after five days of walking?

The consistent testimony across thousands of walkers is a combination of the following: reduced anxiety, improved sleep, greater clarity about what matters and what doesn’t, a reduced tolerance for unnecessary complexity, and a heightened capacity for being present. Some people also report decisions made, conversations planned, or long-postponed changes finally felt as possible. The neurological reasons for this are well-documented. The experiential reasons are harder to articulate, which is why most Camino veterans eventually give up trying to explain it and simply recommend that you go.

Can walking actually help with anxiety and burnout, or is that overstated?

The research on this is robust and consistent. Regular walking in natural environments reduces cortisol, lowers blood pressure, improves sleep quality, and decreases symptoms of anxiety and depression with an effectiveness that compares favourably to medication for mild to moderate cases. The Camino adds the dimensions of purpose, community, rhythm, and extended nature immersion to the basic neurological benefits of walking. Whether it is ‘better than therapy’ depends on the person and the problem. But as a reset for an overloaded nervous system, it is difficult to improve upon.

How do I know if a five-day Camino retreat is right for me rather than doing it independently?

Independent walking on the Camino is wonderful — and also involves logistics, navigation, accommodation-booking, and an amount of planning that can itself become a source of stress for people who are already operating at capacity. A small-group guided retreat removes that friction entirely: the route is planned, the meals are arranged, the accommodation is sorted, and you arrive simply to walk. For first-time visitors, for people coming to walk as a form of recovery rather than adventure, and for anyone who wants the depth of the experience without the overhead of organising it, a guided retreat is not the soft option. It is the sensible one.

The Road Has Been Here the Whole Time

Daniel Forsythe came home from the Camino on a Friday evening. His children were at the kitchen table doing homework. His wife was making something that smelled of garlic and good intentions. The house was exactly as he had left it. The job was waiting. The emails had accumulated with their usual indifference to his five days of enlightenment.

But something had shifted in the way he stood in the middle of it all. Not the circumstances — those were identical. The relationship between Daniel and the circumstances. The noise was still there. He had simply stopped mistaking it for the important thing.

The Camino does not offer you a different life. It offers you a different relationship with the one you have. And sometimes — more often than you might expect, more reliably than almost anything else available to a human being with a pair of boots and five days to spare — that is exactly enough.

If you are carrying more than you should be right now, there is a road in northern Spain that has been receiving exactly this kind of weight for over a thousand years. It is very good at it. Summer and autumn retreats are available for small groups of up to four guests — three Camino walks, good food, good company, and the particular quality of silence that only arrives when you have been walking long enough to earn it.

Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on a Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the southwest of France. This isn’t just a scenic hike – it’s a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Imagine quiet paths, rolling hills, cozy evenings, and slow conversations. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and a journey that meets you exactly where you are.

What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide

Find out more and book your retreat at margarethamontagu.com

Research

1. “The Benefits of Walking the Camino de Santiago” — Psychology Today (September 2022)

Written by a psychologist who has walked the Camino three times, this article examines the research on pilgrimage as a form of Exceptional Human Experience (EHE) — a term coined by researcher Rhea White to describe spontaneous experiences that produce lasting positive changes in mental and physical health. The most striking changes documented include increased appreciation for life, a heightened quest for meaning and purpose, greater self-acceptance, and deeper concern for others. Accessible, well-sourced, and written by someone with both academic credentials and personal experience of the route. Psychology Today

2. “The Effects of the Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela on Mental Health and Wellbeing” — ResearchGate / Proyecto Ultreya (2021)

This is the academic study behind everything. Compared to a control group who took a standard holiday, pilgrims showed significantly greater increases in positive affect, life satisfaction, and valued living, alongside greater reductions in anxiety, depression, and perceived stress — with most improvements sustained at a three-month follow-up. Stress and depressive symptoms decreased by 20–50%, and the Camino was found to function as a form of mindfulness training, encouraging pilgrims to be present in the moment and navigate challenges without judgment. This is the one to cite when anyone asks “but is there actual evidence?”

3. “Effect of Nature Walks on Depression and Anxiety: A Systematic Review” — MDPI Sustainability (April 2021)

A broader peer-reviewed systematic review covering 12 studies on nature walking as a mental health intervention. Nature walks consistently reduced state anxiety across multiple studies, with significant decreases measured by validated scales — and nature walks produced notably greater reductions in anxiety than urban walks. Useful for the wider argument that the Camino’s effects are grounded in solid, replicable science rather than anecdote or pilgrim romanticism.

“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu

© Margaretha Montagu | margarethamontagu.com

You don’t need to be religious, mystical, or even particularly outdoorsy. But something happens on the Camino that even the most committed cynic finds hard to explain.

What This Article Is About

This article is specifically for you if you have heard about the Camino de Santiago, felt a flicker of something that might generously be described as interest, and then immediately dismissed it on the grounds that you are not religious, not spiritual, not the sort of person who talks about energy or uses the word ‘journey’ in a non-geographical context, and is not entirely sure you even own a pair of boots.

It is also for the person whose partner, friend, or suspiciously evangelical colleague has been going on about the Camino for months and who has been nodding politely while internally composing reasons why it is not for them. I will not try to convince you that the Camino is a spiritual experience. It will simply report, with the precision of someone who respects your scepticism, what actually tends to happen to people on it — including the ones who arrived with a substantial quantity of well-organised doubt — and let you draw your own conclusions. Which you will. Because you are a sceptic, and that is what sceptics do, and the Camino, as it happens, has a great deal of time for that.

5 Key Takeaways

• The Camino de Santiago is a pilgrimage route. It is also, simultaneously, one of the most well-marked, well-supported, and scenically extraordinary walking routes in Europe. Both of these things are true at once, and you are entirely free to engage with only one of them.
• The majority of people who walk the Camino today describe themselves as non-religious. You would be joining a very large and well-represented constituency — one that has been walking pilgrimage routes for secular reasons since well before it became fashionable to do so.
• Something does tend to happen on the Camino that is difficult to account for entirely through neuroscience, scenery, and decent French food. Sceptics are statistically more likely to find this annoying than non-sceptics. They walk it anyway, and are glad they did.
• The value of a pilgrimage structure — a route, a direction, a daily rhythm of walking and arriving and resting — does not depend on religious belief any more than the value of a library depends on believing in the divine origin of literature. The structure works. You can examine why later.
• The most common post-Camino report from committed sceptics is not ‘I found God’ or ‘I had a spiritual awakening.’ It is: ‘I can’t quite explain what happened, but something shifted, and I’m different in ways I haven’t entirely mapped yet.’ This is, in my view, considerably more interesting.

The Engineer Who Went to Prove It Wouldn’t Work

James Kowalski was, by his own cheerful admission, the least likely person to walk a pilgrimage route in France. He was forty-eight years old, a structural engineer from Manchester, a man who had spent his professional life applying load calculations to physical problems and his personal life applying roughly the same methodology to everything else. He was not religious. He was not spiritual. He was not, he would specify with some precision, anti-religious — he simply had no particular use for frameworks that weren’t verifiable, which included astrology, homeopathy, most of what he had read about mindfulness, and the entire genre of book whose cover featured a person standing on a hillside with their arms outstretched.

The Camino had come to his attention via his friend Marcus, who had walked a section of it the previous autumn and had returned speaking about it in a way that James found simultaneously compelling and faintly suspicious. Marcus was not, historically, a man who used words like ‘profound.’ He was an accountant from Stockport who drove a sensible car and had strong opinions about the correct way to load a dishwasher. And yet here he was, describing something that had happened on a hillside above a valley in the French countryside in terms that James was finding, however reluctantly, difficult to dismiss.

‘What actually happened?’ James had asked, with the precision of a man who wanted specifics.

‘I can’t really explain it,’ Marcus had said, which was, in James’s professional experience, either the answer of a mystic or the answer of someone who had encountered something that genuinely exceeded the available vocabulary. He had stared at Marcus for a long moment, trying to determine which.

He booked the retreat six weeks later. He told himself he was going because it was a good walk in beautiful countryside and he needed a break. He told himself this so many times, and with such conviction, that he almost believed it. He packed with the efficiency of a man who had read the kit list twice and then read it again, who had broken in his boots over four dedicated weekend walks in the Peak District, and who had written a note in his phone that said simply: ‘Observe. Evaluate. Process.’

He arrived in France on a Saturday evening in September. The air smelled of something he couldn’t immediately identify — something green and old and unhurried. He had dinner with the small group of other walkers and spoke to a recently retired GP from Edinburgh called Fiona who had walked the Camino twice before and who, when James explained that he was there primarily as a sceptic conducting an informal experiment, had laughed with a warmth and recognition that suggested she had heard this particular opening position before.

‘How did the other sceptics get on?’ James asked.

‘They all came back,’ said Fiona simply. ‘Most of them more than once.’

James noted this. He filed it. He went to bed at ten o’clock, in a room that was quiet in a way that his flat in Manchester was not, and slept for nine hours without once waking up, which was not something he had done since approximately 2019.

He began walking the following morning. The path was clear. The waymarks were logical. The landscape was, he conceded immediately and without resistance, extraordinary — the kind of French countryside that looked as though it had been specifically designed to make structural engineers from Manchester feel that they had been living in the wrong place. He walked. He observed. He evaluated.

On the third day, something happened that was not in his observational framework.

He had been walking alone for two hours on a long, quiet stretch of path through ancient oak forest, the kind of silence that is not actually silence but a layered, textured, living quiet — birdsong, his own breathing, the rhythm of his boots on the old stone path. He was not thinking about anything in particular. His mind, for the first time in what felt like years, had simply stopped producing content. It was not meditating. It was not being mindful. It was just — empty. Clear. Present in a way that he had no category for and no particular interest in labelling. He walked in it for perhaps forty minutes. When the forest opened onto a ridge above a valley blazing with autumn colour, he stopped. He stood. He was aware, with a clarity that was entirely physical, that something had shifted in the architecture of his interior. Not dramatically. Not mystically. Just — differently arranged than it had been that morning.

He stood on that ridge for eleven minutes. He knows it was eleven minutes because he checked his watch when he arrived and again when he left, which is either the most or the least spiritual thing about the story, depending on your disposition.

What James Kowalski made of those eleven minutes — and what he told Marcus over a pint in Stockport three weeks later that made Marcus’s dishwasher opinions seem, temporarily, beside the point — is what this article is about.

What Actually Happens on the Camino (A Report for the Evidence-Minded)

The question is not whether the Camino is a spiritual experience. The question is what actually happens to people who walk it, measured against whatever framework of understanding they arrived with — and whether the results are consistent enough to be worth paying attention to.

The results are consistent enough to be worth paying attention to.

The neuroscience is the easiest part to account for. Sustained rhythmic walking in natural environments produces measurable changes in cortisol levels, activates the parasympathetic nervous system, and stimulates the default mode network in ways that are associated with creativity, insight, and what researchers describe as self-referential thought — the brain’s tendency, when released from active problem-solving, to begin processing the things it has been deferring. This is not mysticism. It is the entirely predictable consequence of giving an overloaded human brain five days of sustained, gentle, purposeful activity in a landscape that asks nothing of it except attention.

The pilgrimage structure adds something that a standard walking holiday does not, and this is worth examining carefully because it is where the sceptic’s position becomes most interesting. A pilgrimage is a walk with a direction and a purpose — even if that purpose is, for the secular walker, nothing more metaphysically loaded than ‘I am walking from A to B along a historically significant route.’ The direction matters. The purpose matters. The human brain, it turns out, responds differently to purposeful forward movement than to circular or directionless walking — it processes the journey as a narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an endpoint, and that narrative structure creates the conditions for a kind of interior processing that ordinary life, with its circular repetitions and deferred decisions, rarely provides.

The community matters too, and in ways that are difficult to replicate outside the Camino context. The self-selecting nature of people who walk pilgrimage routes — the fact that they have all, for whatever reason, chosen to spend several days doing something that requires effort and intentionality — produces a conversational quality that most people recognise immediately as different from the conversations of ordinary life. People talk, on the Camino, about the things they are actually thinking about. Not the things they are supposed to be thinking about, not the professional and social performances of daily existence, but the actual contents of their minds. This happens with strangers. It happens within hours. The walking seems to dissolve, with a speed that is consistently startling, the usual social protocols that keep people at a polite distance from each other’s real lives.

The Camino does not require belief. It requires only the willingness to walk, and the basic intellectual honesty to report accurately what happens when you do. Most sceptics find, to their mild irritation, that what happens is rather more than they had budgeted for.

As for the thing that happens that cannot be entirely accounted for by neuroscience and scenery and the social alchemy of shared miles — the thing that James experienced on the ridge, felt in the forest, that person after person describes with the slightly embarrassed precision of someone trying to be accurate about something that resists accuracy — the honest answer is that this article will not tell you what it is. Not because it is too sacred to name, but because the naming tends to get in the way of the experiencing. What can be said with confidence is that it happens, that it happens to a remarkably high proportion of people including those who arrived specifically intending that it wouldn’t, and that the most useful thing a sceptic can do with it is what James Kowalski did: note the time, keep walking, and think about it later.

5 Mistakes to Avoid

1. Deciding before you arrive what the experience will and won’t be. The sceptic’s greatest asset — a well-calibrated resistance to being credulous — becomes a liability when it is deployed pre-emptively against an experience that hasn’t happened yet. There is a difference between healthy scepticism, which is the commitment to evaluating experience accurately, and defensive scepticism, which is the decision to protect yourself from certain categories of experience before you’ve had them. The Camino rewards the former and gently dismantles the latter, usually somewhere around day two.

2. Treating other walkers’ experiences as a measuring stick for your own. The Camino community is wonderfully mixed in what it produces for people, and the person at dinner who describes a profound emotional release on the path that morning is not reporting a superior experience to the person who simply had a very good walk and saw an excellent view. There is no correct Camino experience. There is only yours. The sceptic who spends five days waiting for the dramatic revelation that other people seem to be having is missing the quieter, more durable thing that is actually happening.

3. Filling the silence with podcasts and music. The silence of the Camino — not the absence of sound, but the absence of the particular cognitive noise of modern life — is not a problem to be managed. It is the point. The brain state that the walking produces, the one that creates the conditions for insight and clarity and the thing that cannot quite be explained, requires the silence to arrive. Piping your favourite podcast directly into it is the equivalent of going to a concert and spending the whole time on your phone. You are there. The music is playing. You are elsewhere.

4. Intellectualising the experience in real time. The sceptic’s instinct, when something unexpected happens on the path, is to immediately attempt to categorise and explain it. This is understandable and almost entirely counterproductive. The explaining is best done afterwards, with a glass of wine and the benefit of some temporal distance. In the moment, the most useful thing is simply to be present to what is happening without immediately reaching for the filing system. James Kowalski checked his watch. This was fine. He didn’t then spend the next forty minutes constructing a neurological framework for what had just occurred. The framework came later. The experience came first.

5. Coming home and telling no one about it. The sceptic who has an unexpectedly significant experience on the Camino often falls into a particular silence about it — partly from the difficulty of articulating something that resists articulation, partly from a reasonable concern about how it will sound to people who weren’t there. This silence is a small loss. The conversation that happens when you tell someone what occurred — not the mystical version, not the dismissive version, but the honest, slightly puzzled, ‘I’m not entirely sure what to make of this’ version — is frequently the most interesting conversation you will have all year. Have it. The Camino has been generating exactly this conversation for a thousand years.

Further Reading about the Camino de Santiago for Sceptics

I’m Off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago by Hape Kerkeling

Hape Kerkeling is one of Germany’s best-known comedians — a man constitutionally suited to scepticism, wit, and the puncturing of pretension — and his account of walking the Camino Frances is the most useful book on this list for precisely that reason. He does not arrive on the path as a seeker. He arrives as a tired, overweight celebrity with dodgy knees who has been advised by his doctor to do something restorative and has selected this particular option with the resigned pragmatism of a man whose other options were worse. What happens to him is funny, honest, and progressively impossible to dismiss. It is the book to read if you want a first-person account of the Camino that respects your intelligence and your right to remain unimpressed — and that shows, without labouring the point, why remaining entirely unimpressed turns out to be rather difficult.

The Way of the Stars: Journeys on the Camino de Santiago by Robert Mullen

Mullen’s book is the most rigorously honest account of the Camino experience from a secular perspective currently available in English — a writer who neither embraces the pilgrimage mythology uncritically nor dismisses it with the lazy certainty of someone who hasn’t looked closely enough. He is interested, with genuine intellectual curiosity, in what the Camino actually does to the people who walk it — what the evidence shows, what the experience reports, and where the gap between the two becomes interesting rather than suspicious. For the sceptic who wants to understand the Camino before committing their boots to it, this is the book that earns that understanding honestly.

Embracing Change — in 10 Minutes a Day

The sceptic returning from the Camino tends to face a particular challenge: something has shifted, they are not entirely sure what, and ordinary life is waiting with its customary indifference to their interior rearrangement. Margaret Montagu’s Embracing Change — in 10 Minutes a Day is the book for exactly this moment — not mystical, not evangelical, but practical and honest and entirely respectful of the reader’s right to engage with change on their own terms. Ten minutes a day is a commitment even the most time-poor sceptic can defend. What those ten minutes produce is, like the Camino itself, rather more than the format would suggest.

Stop second-guessing yourself. Start owning your success. This book gives you the step-by-step roadmap to break free from imposter syndrome, build unshakable confidence, and finally believe you deserve every bit of your success. You ARE Good Enough!

5 FAQs about the Camino de Santiago for Sceptics

Do I need to have any interest in religion or spirituality to walk the Camino?

None whatsoever. The Camino de Santiago is a Catholic pilgrimage route, and that history and architecture is present throughout — the churches, the chapels, the scallop shells, the occasional roadside shrine — but it makes no demands on your beliefs and offers no obligations beyond walking. Surveys of modern Camino walkers consistently show that the majority describe their motivation as personal, cultural, or simply practical rather than religious. The path is entirely indifferent to what you believe. It is interested only in what you do, which is walk it.

What is the ‘something’ that people say happens on the Camino?

This is the question the article has been circling, and deserves a direct answer even if the answer is imprecise. The most consistent reports across thousands of walkers, including committed secular and sceptical ones, describe some combination of the following: an unusual quality of mental clarity, a reordering of priorities that happens without being deliberately engineered, a sense of being present in a way that daily life rarely produces, unexpected emotional processing, and occasionally something quieter and less categorisable that most people describe, with some embarrassment, as a feeling of being connected to something larger than themselves. Whether that something is neurological, historical, communal, or something else entirely is a question the Camino cheerfully declines to answer on your behalf.

Is a five-day retreat enough to experience whatever it is people experience?

Yes. The Camino effect — that particular quality of clarity and shift that the route is known for — does not require five hundred kilometres. It requires sufficient time away from the conditions that prevent it, sufficient walking to engage the body and quieten the overactive mind, and sufficient openness to notice what arrives when both of those conditions are met. Five days, in the experience of most people who have done it, is more than enough for something significant to happen. It is also, practically speaking, the minimum duration that allows the mind to genuinely arrive somewhere rather than just pass through.

What if I walk the whole thing and nothing particularly significant happens?

Then you will have spent five days walking through some of the most beautiful countryside in France, eating well, sleeping deeply, and having better conversations than you are likely to have had in the preceding six months of ordinary life. This is, by any reasonable measure, a successful holiday. The Camino does not guarantee transformation. It provides the conditions for it. What you do with those conditions — or what they do with you — is not something that can be contractually specified. Most people report that something happened. A small number report that it was primarily a very good walk. Both groups tend to go back.

How do I explain to people why I’m doing a pilgrimage if I’m not religious?

‘I’m walking a historic route through the French countryside for five days’ is both accurate and entirely unassailable. ‘I’m doing a section of the Camino de Santiago’ has, in recent years, become sufficiently mainstream that most people will nod rather than raise an eyebrow. If pressed for a reason, ‘I needed a proper break and someone whose judgment I trust recommended it’ is the answer that James Kowalski gave, and it has the considerable advantage of being completely true. You do not owe anyone a spiritual framework for your holidays. You owe yourself the experience of taking one that is actually worth having.

A Note to the Sceptic, From Someone Who Respects the Position

James Kowalski came home from France on a Sunday. He had walked approximately fifty kilometres. His boots, which he had broken in conscientiously over four weekends in the Peak District, had performed adequately. His ‘observe, evaluate, process’ note remained in his phone, undeleted, which he considered either a monument to consistency or a mild personal joke, depending on the day.

He had not found God. He had not had a spiritual awakening in any sense that he would have recognised before he left. He had not come home speaking in the manner of Marcus, with words like ‘profound’ deployed in settings that made the dishwasher conversation seem like a reasonable alternative.

What he had come home with was harder to name and, he was discovering, considerably more durable. A quality of quiet that hadn’t been there before. A slightly different relationship with the contents of his own head. A revised list — shorter and more honest than the previous one — of what he actually needed in order to feel that a day had been well spent. And the clear memory of eleven minutes on a ridge above a valley in autumn, which he had not told many people about and which had not, in three weeks, shown any signs of fading.

He told Marcus about it over that pint in Stockport. Marcus listened with the expression of a man hearing something he already knew. ‘Same thing happened to me,’ he said. ‘I still can’t explain it properly.’

‘I know,’ said James. ‘It’s extremely inconvenient.’

They both laughed. Outside the pub, Stockport went about its business with the cheerful indifference of a place that has not been walking pilgrimage routes in France. James looked at his pint. He was already, he realised, thinking about going back.

Retreats on the French Camino are available for small groups of up to four guests. Three non-guided walks, beautiful countryside, proper beds, excellent food, and the particular quality of something that this article has done its best to describe and that the Camino will, if you let it, demonstrate considerably more effectively. No religious requirement. No spiritual prerequisites. Sceptics not just welcome but, frankly, among the most interesting guests.

Find out more and book your retreat at margarethamontagu.com

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Join us for the Book Lovers Binge Reading Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the sun-drenched southwest of France: a journey where the trail and the story unfold together. Walk ancient paths at your own pace, then settle in each evening with a good book. This isn’t a fitness challenge—it’s a gentle rhythm—one step, one chapter, one honest conversation at a time. Rolling hills, quiet villages, golden light. No expectations, no performance, no agenda but your own unfolding.

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on a Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the southwest of France. This isn’t just a scenic hike – it’s a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Imagine quiet paths, rolling hills, cozy evenings, and slow conversations. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and a journey that meets you exactly where you are.

“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu

Practical, honest, and occasionally hilarious — a solo travel guide to taking the trip you’ve been putting off because no one will come with you

What This Article Is About

You have a list. You’ve had it for years. It lives somewhere between your to-do app and your heart, and near the top of it is a place you desperately want to go — except every person you’ve asked is either broke, busy, scared of flying, or deeply committed to a husband who won’t eat foreign food. This article is for you: the woman who wants to travel solo, who is terrified of travelling solo, and who has been waiting for someone to give her permission, a plan, and a stiff drink of honest reassurance. Consider this all three.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Fear is not a stop sign — it’s a compass. The things that frighten us most are usually the ones most worth doing. Solo travel is scary precisely because it matters.

2. Planning beats paralysis every single time. Most of the terror around solo travel lives in the imagination. A bit of research and a decent itinerary deflates the monster under the bed quite spectacularly.

3. The Camino de Santiago is one of the safest and most solo-woman-friendly routes in the world. It has a built-in community, a well-marked path, and an 1,000-year-old tradition of welcoming strangers. It was practically designed for women who want to be brave but would also like a warm meal at the end of the day.

4. You will not be lonely. You might be alone, but those are startlingly different things. Solo travel tends to make you more socially connected, not less — because you are no longer hiding behind a companion.

5. The woman who comes home will not be quite the same as the woman who left. This is, in every possible way, the goal of the exercise.

Carla Hennessy’s Solo Travel Story

Her name was Carla Hennessy, and she had been “about to book the trip” for approximately four years.

Four years of browser tabs left open. Four years of guidebooks purchased and lightly annotated. Four years of asking friends — Justine, who was saving for a kitchen renovation; Bree, who was “a bit nervous about the food situation in Europe”; and her sister Helen, who had young children and laughed so hard at the suggestion that she nearly spilled her coffee.

Carla was fifty-three years old, worked in hospital administration, had walked her dog every morning for eleven years, and could organise a ward restructure with one arm tied behind her back. She was competent, warm, occasionally very funny, and completely convinced that she was incapable of travelling on her own.

She’d heard about the Camino de Santiago from a colleague — “people just walk it, you follow the arrows, there are beds along the way” — and something in her had lurched sideways, the way something does when it recognises itself in a description it wasn’t expecting.

She bought another book. She read it. She put it on the shelf next to the other ones.

And then, on a Tuesday in October, her dog died.

It wasn’t the grief alone — though the grief was real and surprisingly large — it was more that Milo’s absence revealed how small her world had quietly become. She walked the route they always walked together, alone, and at the corner where he used to stop to investigate a particularly interesting fence post, she stood still on the pavement and said, out loud to nobody: “This is not enough.”

She booked the flight that evening. Not to the start of the Camino — she wasn’t quite there yet — but to Paris. One city. One week. Herself.

The night before she left, she sat on her bed with her packed rucksack beside her, stared at the wall, and felt a fear so clean and clear it was almost exciting.

Almost.

She landed in Paris at 7am on a Thursday. She collected her bag. She walked out into the city. And standing at the taxi rank, still damp from the plane and slightly baffled, she felt something shift — small but seismic, like a key turning in a lock she hadn’t known was there.

What happened next changed everything she thought she knew about herself.

The Fear of Travelling Solo

The fear of solo travel for women is not irrational. It is layered, complicated, and handed down across generations like a family recipe that nobody questioned. We were told — in ways explicit and implicit — that the world was not entirely safe for us alone in it, and while that is not entirely untrue, it is considerably more nuanced than the anxiety would have us believe.

What the fear often obscures is that solo travel does not mean isolated travel. It means unaccompanied travel — which is, in practice, one of the most social things a woman can do. When you travel alone, you stop being half of something and become entirely yourself. You talk to strangers because there is no one else to talk to. You make decisions for your own pleasure without negotiation. You discover what you actually want to do, as opposed to what you’re willing to agree to.

The Camino de Santiago is an especially extraordinary place to test this, because the path itself provides community. You walk among other pilgrims — hundreds of them, from dozens of countries, of every age and background — all moving in the same direction for reasons as varied and personal as fingerprints. The Camino has welcomed women walking alone since the medieval pilgrims set out for Santiago in the twelfth century.

Research consistently shows that women who travel solo report higher levels of confidence, self-knowledge, and life satisfaction — not in spite of the discomfort, but because of it. The stretch is the point. The story you tell yourself about who you are and what you’re capable of quietly, irrevocably changes. You stop asking for permission — from friends, from partners, from your own internal voice of catastrophic what-ifs — and start simply going.

5 Mistakes to Avoid

1. Waiting for the perfect companion who will never materialise. This is the single most common reason women never take the trip they want to take. Companions are wonderful, but they are not a prerequisite. If you keep waiting for someone else’s schedule, budget, and appetite for adventure to align perfectly with yours, you will wait indefinitely.

2. Over-researching as a form of procrastination. There is a point at which reading every review, joining every Facebook group, and watching every YouTube vlog stops being preparation and starts being avoidance dressed up in productivity clothing. You need enough information to feel safe. You do not need to have pre-lived the entire experience. Leave room for the actual trip to surprise you — because it will, and the surprises are often the best bits.

3. Packing as though you’re preparing for both a summit expedition and a black-tie dinner. Solo female travellers are statistically known to overpack. Every extra kilogram you carry is a tax on your joy. A good rule: pack what you think you need, then remove a third of it. You can buy a forgotten item almost anywhere. You cannot buy back a ruined back.

4. Staying in touch too constantly. There is a version of solo travel where you spend the entire time reporting back — updating Instagram, texting home every two hours, FaceTiming your best friend from every café. This is understandable, especially at first, but it prevents the very thing solo travel is meant to offer: the experience of being fully, gloriously present with yourself. Check in when needed. Then put the phone away and look at where you actually are.

5. Dismissing your instincts as paranoia. The flip side of over-worrying is dismissing every uncomfortable feeling as irrational. It isn’t. Your instincts are remarkably good information, honed over decades of navigating the world. If a person makes you uneasy, leave. If a neighbourhood doesn’t feel right, go elsewhere. Solo travel is empowering precisely because you are in charge of the decisions — trust yourself to make them.

Further Reading

“Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert I’ve chosen this book not because it is perfect — it has been gently mocked in certain circles for its navel-gazing — but because it was the first mainstream book to tell millions of women that leaving your life to find yourself is not self-indulgent. It is necessary. It gave a generation of women permission, and permission was what they needed. Read it for the courage it lends, and take the navel-gazing as part of the deal.

“Wild” by Cheryl Strayed This is the book for women who think they can’t do it alone. Strayed hiked over 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail with no prior experience, considerable grief, and boots that were the wrong size. She was not prepared. She went anyway. It is brutal and beautiful and will make you feel that whatever you’re afraid of on your modest solo trip is probably manageable by comparison. Essential reading before any solo adventure.

“You ARE Good Enough” by Margaretha Montagu And then there is this — which is, quietly, the book that sits underneath all the others. Because the real reason many women don’t travel alone isn’t logistics, or safety, or companions. It’s the deep-seated belief that they don’t quite deserve the adventure. That their needs aren’t important enough to rearrange life for. That solo travel is for other women — braver ones, freer ones, ones without responsibilities. Margaretha Montagu’s You ARE Good Enough takes that belief gently but firmly by the collar. It is, at its core, about recognising your own worth — and that is the prerequisite for everything else, including buying the plane ticket. Find it here.

Stop second-guessing yourself. Start owning your success. This book gives you the step-by-step roadmap to break free from imposter syndrome, build unshakable confidence, and finally believe you deserve every bit of your success. You ARE Good Enough!

5 FAQs about Solo Travel

Q: Is solo travel actually safe for women? Yes — with the caveat that “safe” is relative and requires common sense, not paranoia. The majority of solo female travellers report no significant safety incidents. The Camino de Santiago, specifically, has an excellent safety record, with a well-lit and well-monitored route, communal albergues, and a culture of mutual looking-out-for-each-other that is genuinely remarkable. Standard precautions — keeping valuables secure, trusting your instincts, sharing your itinerary with someone at home — are sensible everywhere. Fear of the worst-case scenario should not prevent the best-case experience.

Q: What if I get lonely? You probably will, briefly, especially at the beginning — and then something unexpected will happen. You’ll share a table at dinner with a stranger and have the best conversation you’ve had in years. You’ll fall into step with another walker on the Camino and find yourself laughing about something that has no translation into your ordinary life. Loneliness on a solo trip is almost always temporary and is frequently followed by a kind of connection that simply isn’t possible when you’re busy being half of a partnership.

Q: Do I need to speak the local language? No. A smile, a phrasebook, the willingness to mime enthusiastically, and an honest attempt at “please” and “thank you” in the local language will carry you far. English is widely spoken throughout Western Europe, and on the Camino specifically, the shared language of the pilgrimage transcends words.

Q: What age is too old to travel solo? This question is asked by women of every age, which tells you something. Pilgrims in their seventies and eighties complete the Camino regularly. The question is not about age but about fitness, preparation, and desire. If you want to go and you are physically able, there is no age at which the world stops being worth seeing.

Q: How do I deal with the people who think I’m crazy for going alone? Nod pleasantly, thank them for their concern, and book the trip anyway. They are not coming from a bad place — they are coming from their own fears, projected onto your itinerary. The most effective response to the doubters is, ultimately, to come home transformed and to tell the story so well that they start asking you how you did it.

Conclusion

Here’s what nobody tells you about solo travel: the bravest part is the bit before you go. Once you are on the plane, or on the path, or standing in a foreign square with a coffee and nowhere to be except exactly there — the fear largely evaporates, replaced by something that feels suspiciously like freedom.

Carla Hennessy found this out in Paris, and then again, a year later, on a dirt path in Spain with her boots muddy and her rucksack lighter than she’d expected and a hundred strangers who became, for a while, her people.

If you are the woman who has been waiting for someone to tell you it’s time — consider this your yellow arrow.

If you’d like to walk the Camino during a retreat with a host who has done this many, many times and has thought carefully about what women need when they’re doing something they’re afraid of, my five-day retreats were made for exactly this moment. You don’t have to figure it all out alone. You just have to take the first step.

Explore the retreats at margarethamontagu.com

Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on a Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the southwest of France. This isn’t just a scenic hike – it’s a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Imagine quiet paths, rolling hills, cozy evenings, and slow conversations. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and a journey that meets you exactly where you are.

What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide

Research

1. Jordan, F., & Gibson, H. (2005). “I’d like to kill him sometimes”: Understanding the relationship between women and solo travel. Annals of Leisure Research, 8(2–3), 117–138. This study explores women’s motivations for and experiences of solo leisure travel, documenting the personal transformation and increased self-confidence that participants consistently reported — alongside the fear that preceded departure. Its findings mirror what solo female travellers describe anecdotally: the fear is real, the reward is larger.
2. Wilson, E., & Little, D. E. (2008). The solo female travel experience: Exploring the ‘geography of women’s fear.’ Current Issues in Tourism, 11(2), 167–186. This paper maps the relationship between perceived risk and actual experience in solo female travel, finding that women’s fears are often disproportionate to encountered reality — and that the act of travelling alone substantially increases perceived competence, independence, and personal agency over time.
3. Berdychevsky, L., Gibson, H. J., & Bell, H. L. (2013). Girlfriend Getaways and Women’s Well-Being. Journal of Leisure Research, 45(5), 602–623. While focused on women’s group leisure travel, this research illuminates the mechanisms by which travel — removed from everyday roles and responsibilities — promotes psychological wellbeing, identity exploration, and resilience in women. Its findings are directly applicable to solo travel, which magnifies these effects by removing the social buffer entirely, placing the woman face-to-face with herself and the world simultaneously.

“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu

© Margaretha Montagu | margarethamontagu.com

If you wonder if there are alternatives to beach holidays for adults, rest assured, there are meaningful travel experiences for grown-ups who are bored of beach resorts but have been traumatised by tents — especially the 5-day Camino de Santiago option you didn’t know existed

What This Article Is About

There are two types of holiday that most adults of a certain age have been cycling through for the past decade, and neither of them is quite right anymore. There is the beach resort holiday, which involves a great deal of lying down, a drinks menu with too many options, and the nagging sensation on day three that you are bored in a way that is somehow more dispiriting than being bored at home, because at least at home you have the excuse of things to do. And then there is the adventure holiday, which involves sleeping in a tent, being cold in ways you didn’t know was possible, and spending a significant portion of each day doing something that feels less like leisure and more like a punishment you have paid a considerable amount of money for.

This article is about the third option. The one that sits precisely between ‘subjectively passive’ and ‘aggressively outdoorsy.’ The one that involves proper beds, good food, beautiful French countryside, genuine physical effort, and the particular kind of satisfaction that only arrives when you have done something that was worth doing. It is about the Camino de Santiago — specifically the French routes through some of the most quietly spectacular landscape in Europe — and why it has become, for a growing number of adults who have finally admitted that they want more from a holiday than a sun lounger and a wifi password, exactly the thing they had been looking for without knowing what to call it.

5 Key Takeaways about Meaningful Travel Experiences

• The meaningful holiday gap is real and growing. Research consistently shows that passive, consumption-based holidays produce significantly less lasting happiness than active, experience-based ones — and that the effort involved is directly correlated with the satisfaction remembered afterwards.
• The Camino de Santiago is not a hardcore adventure. It is a walking pilgrimage route through beautiful landscape with a thousand years of infrastructure behind it, which means that ‘adventure’ and ‘comfortable bed’ are not mutually exclusive propositions here.
• Five days is the Goldilocks duration for a genuinely transformative short break — long enough to actually arrive somewhere mentally, short enough to fit around the reality of modern working life without requiring a sabbatical.
• The French Camino routes offer something the more famous Spanish sections cannot: genuine wildness, dramatically fewer crowds, extraordinarily beautiful countryside, and the particular pleasure of being somewhere that feels discovered rather than overrun.
• The story you come home with matters more than you think. The memories that sustain people — the ones they are still telling five years later — are almost never from the beach holiday. They are from the time they did something.

The Man Who Had Run Out of Holiday Options

Patrick Brennan had been on a lot of holidays. He was fifty-six years old, a recently semi-retired management consultant from Dublin, a man who had spent thirty years travelling for work and who had, as a result, accumulated a fairly comprehensive knowledge of business hotels in fourteen countries and absolutely no knowledge of how to actually be anywhere. He had been to Rome three times and seen the Colosseum once, from a taxi, at speed, while on a phone call. He had stayed in a hotel in Kyoto that had a bathroom the size of his Dublin kitchen and had spent two of his four evenings there watching English-language television because he was too tired from the conference to do anything else.

The holidays were not better. His wife, Siobhan, was an infallible detector of his holiday restlessness, which typically set in around day two and manifested as a progressive inability to find a comfortable position on a sun lounger combined with a tendency to read the news on his phone with the intensity of a man who is monitoring a developing crisis rather than one who is, technically speaking, relaxing. They had done the Maldives. They had done Tuscany, twice. They had done a river cruise along the Danube that had been, by any objective measure, beautiful, and that Patrick had found, by a measure that was entirely his own, deeply boring in a way he felt guilty admitting because it seemed to reflect poorly on him as a human being.

He was not a difficult man. He was not impossible to please. He was simply, he had finally admitted to Siobhan over dinner one February evening, a man who needed to do something on holiday rather than merely be somewhere. He needed, he said, to feel like he’d earned the glass of wine at the end of the day. He needed, and this was harder to say, to come home with a story rather than a suntan.

Siobhan had looked at him across the table with the expression of a woman who had been waiting eleven years for him to say exactly this, and had refilled his glass, and had said: ‘I know exactly where we’re going.’

They arrived in France in July. The landscape was extraordinary — rolling hills and ancient forest and villages that appeared to have been designed by someone with an aggressive commitment to photogenic stonework, punctuated by the Camino’s shell waymarks pointing reliably north. Their accommodation was comfortable. There was hot water. There was, on the first evening, a bottle of local wine that was, Patrick later said, the best thing he had drunk in eleven years of trying to enjoy himself in expensive hotels.

He had walked eleven kilometres by the time he sat down to that wine. His legs ached pleasantly. He had spoken to a retired teacher from Glasgow on the path that morning about something he couldn’t quite remember now, but that had felt, at the time, entirely absorbing. He had stood on a ridge above a valley that had made him stop walking simply to look at it, which was not something he was in the habit of doing.

He had, he realised with a start, not checked his phone since ten o’clock that morning.

Siobhan was watching him from across the dinner table with that expression again — the one he recognised now as the look of a woman who had been right about something and was too fond of him to say so. He raised his glass. She raised hers. Through the window of the farmhouse dining room, the French countryside was doing what it did best in the early evening light, which was looking completely and unreasonably magnificent.

‘Right,’ said Patrick Brennan, semi-retired management consultant, lifelong over-thinker, and man who had run out of holiday options. ‘I understand now.’

What Patrick understood — and what the remaining four days confirmed with the unhurried certainty of good landscape and well-marked paths — is what this article is about.

Why Doing Something Sometimes Feels Better Than Being Somewhere

The science of holiday happiness is considerably more interesting than the holiday industry would like you to know, because if you knew it, you might stop booking the all-inclusive and start booking the walking retreat, and the profit margins are rather different.

The research — and there is a significant body of it, from positive psychologists and behavioural economists who have spent considerable time studying why expensive holidays so often produce such modest lasting happiness — consistently points to the same conclusions. Passive leisure produces what researchers call hedonic adaptation very quickly: the pleasure of lying by a pool diminishes rapidly as the novel becomes familiar, usually within two to three days, which is why the fourth day of a beach holiday so often has a quality of mild existential flatness that no cocktail menu fully resolves.

Active, effortful, experience-based leisure does something different. The effort involved — the physical challenge, the navigation of new situations, the moments of mild discomfort that resolve into satisfaction — creates memories that are stored differently. The brain, when encoding experiences, weights novelty, emotion, and effort. A day of walking through extraordinary French landscape, arriving tired and genuinely hungry at a farmhouse table as the light drops over the hills, produces a memory that is still vivid five years later. The day by the pool produces a general impression of warmth and a vague memory of reading something.

There is also what researchers call the ‘effort heuristic’ — the well-documented human tendency to value things more highly when they have cost us something. The wine at the end of a day’s walking tastes better than the wine at the pool bar not because it is better wine, but because it was earned. The conversation at dinner has a different quality because the day created the conditions for it. The sleep is deeper. The appetite is realer. The satisfaction is not manufactured by a hospitality industry working very hard to produce the impression of a good time — it is the genuine article, arrived at through the unglamorous but entirely reliable mechanism of having actually done something.

The best holidays are not the ones where everything was taken care of. They are the ones where you were required to show up — and discovered, in the showing up, that you were considerably more capable of enjoyment than the sun lounger had been giving you credit for.

The French Camino routes add a layer to this that is worth dwelling on. The sections of the Camino that pass through France — the Via Turonensis, the Via Lemovicensis, the Voie du Puy — are among the most historically rich and scenically extraordinary walking routes in Europe, and they carry a fraction of the foot traffic of the famous Camino Frances in Spain. This means something practical and something less tangible. Practically, it means you are walking through landscape that feels genuinely wild and genuinely yours, rather than through a procession of other walkers that occasionally resembles a mildly spiritual queue. Less tangibly, it means the sense of discovery that is so central to meaningful travel — the feeling of being somewhere real rather than somewhere prepared for your arrival — is present in a way that heavily touristed routes cannot fully provide.

You come home from the French Camino with stories that other people have not already heard. You come home with a landscape in your memory that is not available on anyone else’s Instagram feed. You come home having done something rather than been somewhere, which is a distinction that turns out, in the remembering, to matter enormously.

5 Mistakes to Avoid

1. Choosing the holiday that sounds impressive rather than the one that will actually suit you. All-inclusive resorts exist because a significant number of people genuinely enjoy them, and there is no shame in that. But if you are the kind of person who finds passive leisure quietly maddening — who comes home from beach holidays slightly more tired than when you left, who has never once used a hotel gym but somehow feels guilty about the fact — then booking another beach holiday in the hope that this time it will be different is an expensive way of ignoring information you already have about yourself.

2. Confusing ‘adventurous’ with ‘uncomfortable.’ This is the mistake that keeps a great many perfectly capable adults away from walking holidays, and it rests on a false binary. You do not have to choose between a five-star hotel and a sleeping bag on a hillside. The French Camino routes pass through villages with excellent accommodation, farmhouses with remarkable food, and gîtes that have been hosting pilgrims for centuries with a hospitality that puts most boutique hotels to considerable shame. Adventure does not require suffering. It requires only the willingness to walk somewhere beautiful and arrive hungry.

3. Under-estimating the social dimension. One of the least-advertised pleasures of a small-group walking retreat is the quality of the people you meet. The self-selecting nature of a Camino retreat — the fact that everyone there has chosen to spend their holiday doing something rather than nothing — produces, reliably, a more interesting dinner table than the average resort. People who walk pilgrimages tend to be people with things on their minds and the willingness to talk about them. The conversations that happen over dinner after a day on the path are frequently the ones guests remember longest. Budget for this. It is not a small part of the experience.

4. Arriving without any physical preparation and suffering for it unnecessarily. A five-day walking retreat on the French Camino is not an ultramarathon. It does not require special training or exceptional fitness. It does require that your feet have some prior acquaintance with your boots and that your body has been reminded, in the weeks beforehand, that it is capable of sustained walking. Build up gradually in the month before you arrive. Walk at weekends. The difference between arriving prepared and arriving unprepared is the difference between aching pleasantly and managing a crisis of blisters — and only one of those allows you to be present for the landscape.

5. Spending the whole time documenting it rather than experiencing it. The French Camino countryside is, without question, worth photographing. It is also worth putting the phone away for long enough to actually see it. The research on photo-taking and memory is nuanced — moderate photography can enhance memory, but the compulsive documentation of every moment is reliably associated with reduced presence and, paradoxically, less vivid memories of the experience itself. Take the photographs. Then put the phone in your pocket and walk. The landscape will still be beautiful when you look at it directly.

Further Reading

The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton

De Botton’s examination of why we travel, what we expect from travel, and why those expectations so frequently collide with reality is the most intelligent thing written on the subject since Montaigne. His central argument — that the quality of attention we bring to a place matters more than the place itself, and that we are capable of the same quality of attention in our own back garden as in the Maldives, if we could only slow down enough to deploy it — maps perfectly onto what the Camino does. The walking enforces the slowing. The landscape rewards the attention. Read this before you go and you will arrive already better equipped for what the path offers.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit’s remarkable book traces the cultural, philosophical, and political history of walking — from the Romantics to the Situationists, from pilgrimage to protest — and makes the case, with scholarship and wit and considerable passion, that walking is not merely a form of transport but a mode of thinking, being, and relating to the world. It is the book that turns a walking holiday from a pleasant outdoor activity into something you understand yourself to be doing. Reading it is the difference between walking the Camino and knowing why you are walking the Camino, which turns out to be a significant difference in the quality of the experience.

Embracing Change — in 10 Minutes a Day by Margaretha Montagu

The meaningful holiday, at its best, is the one that changes something — in perspective, in habit, in the relationship between you and the life you have been living. The challenge, as every returning pilgrim knows, is holding onto that change when ordinary life reconvenes with its customary efficiency. Margaret Montagu’s Embracing Change — in 10 Minutes a Day is the practical companion for exactly that challenge: a gentle, honest, and genuinely useful guide to making the shifts that the Camino starts into the shifts that last. The ten-minutes-a-day format is designed for people with real lives and full schedules — which is to say, for most people reading this article. Read it on the journey home, while the walk is still in your legs and the wine is still in your memory.

If you are currently facing a major life transition or any other dramatic change in your circumstances, and you have no idea how you are going to cope, the good news is that the strategy presented in this book can help you, step by step, to improve your ability to handle the stress caused by change, even if you feel entirely powerless at the moment.

5 FAQs about Meaningful Travel Experiences

How fit do I need to be for a five-day walking retreat on the French Camino?

Comfortably active rather than athletically exceptional. If you can walk for two to three hours without significant difficulty, you are in the right territory. The distances covered each of the 3 walking days chosen for manageability as well as beauty, and the pace is that of a group rather than a competition. The preparation that matters most is not gym work but consistent walking in the weeks beforehand, in the boots you plan to bring — your feet will thank you for this in ways that no amount of cardiovascular fitness can compensate for.

What makes the French Camino different from the Spanish one?

The Spanish Camino Frances is magnificent, historically important, and extraordinarily popular — in peak season, it carries tens of thousands of walkers, which creates a particular atmosphere that is communal and energetic and occasionally resembles a very purposeful outdoor festival. The French routes are different in character: wilder, quieter, more intimate, with a sense of discovery that the heavily walked Spanish sections can no longer fully provide. The landscape through southwest and central France — the Dordogne, the Lot valley, the volcanic plateau of the Massif Central — is among the most quietly extraordinary in Europe. For those coming for the experience of the path rather than the social spectacle of it, France offers something the Spanish sections cannot.

Is a retreat better than walking independently?

It depends entirely on what you are looking for. Independent walking offers freedom, flexibility, and the particular satisfaction of having navigated everything yourself. A small-group retreat offers something different: the route planned, the accommodation arranged, the logistics handled, and the landscape with the depth of long familiarity. For first-time Camino walkers, for people coming primarily for the experience rather than the logistics challenge, and for those who want to arrive simply to walk rather than to organise, the retreat is not the easier option so much as the more focused one. The effort goes into the walking. Everything else is taken care of.

What kind of people typically come on a Camino walking retreat?

The range is broader than you might expect — which is itself one of the pleasures of it. The consistent thread is not age or background or fitness level but a particular disposition: people who want more from a holiday than passive consumption, who have something on their minds that deserves more than a fortnight of distraction, and who are drawn to the idea of earning their rest rather than simply purchasing it. They tend to be good company at dinner. They tend to have interesting things to say. They tend, in my experience, to be people who are more interesting than the roles they occupy in their ordinary lives — and the Camino, reliably, gives those people room to show it.

Will I feel out of place if I’m not religious or spiritual?

Not in the slightest. The Camino de Santiago is a pilgrimage route with deep religious roots and a thoroughly secular present — the majority of modern walkers describe their motivation as personal, cultural, or simply adventurous rather than religious. What the pilgrimage structure provides is not a theological framework but a practical one: a route, a direction, a community of fellow travellers, and a daily rhythm of walking and arriving and resting that produces, regardless of what you believe, the particular quality of attention and clarity that the Camino is famous for. The path does not check your credentials. It simply marks the way with yellow arrows and shell symbols and lets you bring whatever you need to bring.

A Holiday Option You Haven’t Tried Yet?

Patrick Brennan came home from France on a Sunday evening. He was tired in the manner of a man who has used his body for something it was designed for rather than subjected it to another flight and another hotel room. His boots were muddy. His legs were, he reported to anyone who asked, absolutely fine, which was technically accurate and considerably underselling how fine they actually were.

He had walked approximately fifty kilometres over three days. He had eaten better than he had eaten in years, in the unpretentious way of food that has been earned rather than ordered. He had had a conversation on the third day with a woman from Montreal who was walking the Camino for reasons she explained over the course of six kilometres and that Patrick found, when he tried to summarise it to Siobhan that evening, surprisingly difficult to reduce to a sentence. He had taken forty-three photographs, which was forty-three fewer than he had taken in the Maldives and represented, in his view, a significant improvement in his relationship with the places he visited.

He had not once checked the news. He had not once looked for a sun lounger. He had not once reached for a cocktail menu and felt, inexplicably, that there was something missing from his life that could be addressed with a small paper umbrella.

‘Same time next year?’ said Siobhan.

‘Same time next year,’ said Patrick.

Five-day retreats on the French Camino are available for small groups of up to four guests. Three non-guided walks through some of the most beautiful countryside in France, proper beds, extraordinary food, and the particular satisfaction of having genuinely earned it. No cocktail umbrellas. No sun loungers – well, actually there are a couple. No sense, at any point, that you are spending your holiday in the wrong way.

Find out more and book your retreat at margarethamontagu.com

Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on a Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the southwest of France. This isn’t just a scenic hike – it’s a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Imagine quiet paths, rolling hills, cozy evenings, and slow conversations. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and a journey that meets you exactly where you are.

What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide

Research

1. “A Wonderful Life: Experiential Consumption and the Pursuit of Happiness” — Professor Thomas Gilovich, Cornell University / Journal of Consumer Psychology (2014)

The foundational study behind this article’s entire argument, and one of the most cited pieces of research in positive psychology. Gilovich’s research demonstrates that experiential purchases provide greater satisfaction and happiness than material ones for three specific reasons: they enhance social relations more readily and effectively, they form a bigger part of a person’s identity, and they are evaluated more on their own terms rather than through invidious social comparisons. This is the science behind why a week on the French Camino leaves a deeper mark than a week at an all-inclusive resort. Cite it with confidence — it has been replicated across multiple studies over two decades.

2. “Why Travel Prolongs Happiness: Longitudinal Analysis Using a Latent Growth Model” — ScienceDirect / Tourism Management (2019)

This is the study that directly addresses hedonic adaptation — the mechanism this article identifies as the reason the beach holiday stops working by day three. The research provides evidence that travel experience actively reduces hedonic adaptation, and identifies expectation and serendipity as the two factors most important for prolonging happiness after a trip — meaning that active, discovery-based travel produces a more durable happiness effect than passive, predictable leisure. The French Camino, with its unpredictable encounters and ever-changing landscape, delivers precisely those two qualities in abundance.

3. “Examining the Change in Wellbeing Following a Holiday” — ScienceDirect / Tourism Management (2021)

The study that proves Patrick Brennan’s instinct was scientifically correct all along. This longitudinal research found that people who had greater optimal tourism experiences during their trip reported higher levels of both hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing afterwards — and crucially, that the adaptation and decline of wellbeing was slower for those who had active, meaningful experiences compared to those who had passive ones, with eudaimonic wellbeing declining only marginally over the two months following the trip. In plain terms: the meaningful holiday keeps giving long after you’ve unpacked. Mundiplus

“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu

A Simple Guide to Finding The Perfect Camino de Santiago Walking Shoe

Walking Shoe Buying Checklist : free downloadable document (pdf)

There is a particular kind of optimism involved in lacing up a pair of walking shoes and heading out the door. You don’t know exactly what the ground will throw at you — rain-slicked pavement, a sudden detour down a gravel path, a stretch of grass that looked dry from across the park but very much was not. A great walking shoe is the friend who says, “Honestly? I’ll go wherever.” A bad one is the friend who bails at the mention of hills.

Few places put shoes to the test quite like the Camino de Santiago. Paved roads, dirt paths, gravel tracks, and the occasional ancient cobblestone have been humbling walking boots since the medieval era. There is arguably no better real-world test of a walking shoe’s character. And the lessons learned on the Camino apply equally to anyone covering serious ground across varied terrain — whether or not they’re carrying a scallop shell.

This guide is here to help you find the right companion for the journey — wherever yours happens to lead.

Why The Terrain Matters More Than You Think

Here’s a truth that the footwear industry sometimes buries under marketing copy: no single shoe is perfect for all surfaces. But some come remarkably close. The key is understanding what “varied terrain” actually means for your life.

Are you a city dweller who occasionally gets ambitious on weekends? A suburban rambler who alternates between sidewalks, parks, and unpaved trails? A traveler who logs ten miles a day across cobblestones, airport carpets, and mountain pathways? Each of these scenarios calls for slightly different priorities — and knowing yours before you shop will save you both money and blisters.

The Camino de Santiago is a useful mental model here, because it contains almost everything: the route is a variety of surfaces — paved, dirt, and gravel — and includes some challenging early days with significant climbs followed by many moderate days of slowly ascending or descending paths. If your shoe can handle that, it can handle most of what daily life will throw at it.

The three big variables to balance are traction (what the outsole grips), cushioning (how the midsole absorbs impact), and stability (how the shoe keeps your foot from rolling or fatiguing). Spoil yourself in one direction and you often sacrifice another. A heavily cushioned cloud of a shoe might leave you feeling uncertain on wet rock. A grippy trail shoe might feel like punishment after six hours on pavement. The sweet spot is what we’re hunting.

The Anatomy of Great All-Terrain Walking Shoes

Before we get to specific recommendations, let’s talk about what to actually look for — because understanding the language helps you shop smarter.

The outsole is the bottom layer, and it’s doing all the diplomacy with the ground beneath you. The outsole is the grippy material at the very bottom of the shoe — the part that makes contact with the ground — and some outsoles are better suited to indoor or outdoor terrain. For mixed surfaces, look for multi-directional lugs (the little rubber nubs): deep enough to bite into dirt and gravel, but not so aggressive that they clack obnoxiously on tile. Vibram rubber, in particular, has earned its excellent reputation — Vibram EcoStep outsoles scored a friction score 36% above average in traction tests, which is the rubber equivalent of an A+ on the report card. On the Camino, where conditions can shift from a muddy track to hard-packed village streets within the same hour, that kind of all-surface grip is not a luxury.

The midsole is where comfort lives. This foam layer absorbs the shock of each step — and over the course of a long walk, that adds up to thousands of micro-impacts your knees and hips are quietly grateful not to feel. Podiatrists emphasize that a cushioned midsole helps the shoe absorb shock and provide stability during each step, while arch support maintains natural foot alignment and helps reduce strain on the ankles and lower leg. For Camino pilgrims covering several miles a day, this is the difference between arriving at a hostel feeling tired-but-triumphant versus hobbling in at dusk wondering what went wrong.

The upper — the part that hugs your foot — should ideally be breathable mesh reinforced with TPU (thermoplastic urethane) overlays. A combination of ripstop nylon mesh and TPU in the upper provides durability without sacrificing breathability. On a warm afternoon in the French countryside, breathability is not a selling point — it is a mercy.

And then there’s the toe box, which more people should think about. A roomy toe box allows your toes to splay naturally as you walk, reducing fatigue and the likelihood of blisters. Podiatrists flag a roomy toe box as one of the most important features to look for, alongside a grippy outsole and cushioned midsole. Cramped toes are not a character-building experience. They’re just uncomfortable — and on day four of a long-distance pilgrimage, uncomfortable becomes unbearable remarkably quickly.

The Shortlist: Walking Shoes Worth Your Attention

Hoka Transport 2 — The Dependable All-Rounder

If you want a shoe that will simply handle it, the Hoka Transport 2 has become a standout pick across multiple independent testing panels. It’s a highly-capable and dependable walking shoe that inspires confidence no matter the terrain — not a dedicated hiking boot, but a durable and reliable shoe ready to take on just about any surface, from tile and hardwood to mild-to-moderate paths. Testers logged thousands of steps across varied conditions and praised its balance between capability and comfort. It is not the cheapest option on the shelf, but you do get a lot for the cost.

The Transport 2 features a twist-resistant base for steady footing, a broader-than-average heel for stability, and a prominent rocker midsole that rolls you forward effortlessly — useful on any long walk, but especially welcome on the rolling terrain of southwest France. One caveat worth noting: with its limited breathability, the Transport 2 will feel best in cool weather — in summer heat, the warmth can build up uncomfortably. Pair it with merino wool socks, it’s nearly unbeatable.

Brooks Ghost 18 — The Miles-Eater

Brooks has been making reliable footwear for decades, and the Ghost line is the company’s most loved workhorse. The Brooks Ghost 18 delivers a well-judged amount of cushion in the midsole, a durable rubber outsole, and a breathable mesh upper to keep your feet comfortable mile after mile. Recent updates to the upper include a softer flat-knit tongue, improved breathability, and a slightly roomier toe box — nothing earth-shattering, but the kind of updates that add up over miles.

This is the shoe for the person who has a long day ahead and doesn’t want to think about their feet. It performs beautifully on pavement, holds up admirably on packed dirt trails, and transitions from the Saturday farmers’ market to a post-lunch stroll in the park without complaint. On the Camino, where many days alternate between country paths and village streets, the Ghost 18’s easy versatility is precisely the point.

Hoka Clifton 10 — The Cushion Champion

If your joints are asking for a little more tenderness, the Clifton line answers the call with characteristic generosity. The Hoka Clifton 10 balances cushioning and responsiveness better than almost any comparable shoe — it feels light on your feet while still delivering well-cushioned landings, and at 11 oz, it’s one of the most lightweight walking shoes with serious cushioning.

One enthusiast described her Cliftons as feeling like “walking on a cushiony cloud” across hilly terrain, day after day — perfectly cushioning without squeezing, with plenty of room in the toe box for toes to flex. The Clifton also comes in a waterproof GTX version — a wise consideration for anyone walking the Camino in the southwest France in spring or autumn.

Salomon X Ultra 5 — The Trail-Ready Adventurer

For those who take “varied terrain” seriously — or who are contemplating those first dramatic days of the Camino Francés, which begin in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port with a steep climb into the mountains — the Salomon X Ultra 5 is the shoe that bridges the gap between hiker and sneaker. Built as a lightweight, low-cut hiker that fits like a sneaker, it features a stable chassis and Salomon’s Contagrip® outsole, designed for improved traction across varied surfaces. One reviewer described the stability as making her “feel like a younger person” on the trail, which is possibly the most wholesome product testimonial ever committed to the internet.

The Camino is, by expert consensus, very varied — and for the rougher, rocky sections in the early Pyrenean stages, lightweight hiking shoes like the Salomon X Ultra 5 are precisely what is recommended over heavy boots or simple running shoes. It’s a capable all-rounder: stable enough for hauling a pack over a mountain pass, light enough to feel like a pleasure on the gentler meseta days that follow. The women’s version weighs around 1.5 pounds; the men’s mid version just under 2 pounds.

ASICS GT-2000 14 — The Stability Specialist

For walkers who overpronate (meaning the foot rolls inward with each step), or who have flat feet, support is non-negotiable. The ASICS GT-2000 14 has been recognized as the walking shoe with the best arch support in independent testing, and its reputation among podiatrists backs that up. The Gel Kayano — ASICS’ sibling stability shoe — offers superior support to reduce fatigue and a secure fit that won’t slip or slide while in motion.

On a journey like the Camino, where foot fatigue accumulates across days rather than hours, a shoe that actively supports your gait mechanics is not a nice-to-have — it’s the difference between finishing and not. If your feet have opinions about arch support, ASICS is worth a very close look.

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Buying Walking Shoes for the Camino

1. Buying new shoes just before you leave This is the single most common mistake pilgrims make — and the most painful. A brand-new shoe needs weeks of breaking in before it’s ready for 15-mile days. Turning up at the start with shoes still stiff from the box is an invitation to blisters that will haunt you all the way to the end. Buy your shoes at least six weeks before departure and walk in them everywhere.

2. Choosing style over function A sleek, minimalist trainer might look wonderful in the shop. On a wet gravel track descending a hill, it will let you down in every sense. Resist the temptation to prioritise how a shoe looks over what it does. Nobody on the Camino is judging your footwear — except your feet.

3. Ignoring your foot type Flat feet, high arches, and overpronation all demand specific kinds of support. Buying a neutral shoe for a foot that needs stability — or vice versa — leads to fatigue, knee pain, and misery by day three. If you’re not sure what your foot type is, visit a specialist running or walking shop and ask them to assess your gait. It takes ten minutes and saves enormous grief.

4. Trusting “they’ll loosen up” If a shoe feels tight or rubs anywhere in the shop, it will feel tighter and rub harder after eight hours on a mountain path. A shoe that fits should feel comfortable immediately — not eventually. The Camino is not the place for positive thinking about footwear. Take note of the discomfort and keep looking.

5. Forgetting that conditions change daily Pilgrims often buy for the weather they’re hoping for rather than the weather they’ll actually get. The French Pyrenean stages can involve cold, wet, and muddy conditions even in June. The meseta in July can bake your feet in anything with poor ventilation. A shoe that handles the full range — or a carefully considered pair of shoes for different conditions — will serve you far better than the perfect shoe for one ideal day.

Frequently Asked Questions: Walking Shoes for the Camino

Should I wear hiking boots or trail running shoes on the Camino? For most people, lightweight trail running shoes or low-cut hiking shoes strike the best balance. Full hiking boots offer more ankle support on rocky terrain but add significant weight — and over 500 miles, that weight accumulates into fatigue. Unless you have a history of ankle instability or are carrying a very heavy pack, most experienced pilgrims find that a well-cushioned trail shoe handles the Camino beautifully.

How many pairs of shoes should I bring? Two is the sweet spot. A primary pair of trail shoes or walking shoes for the daily stages, and a lighter pair — sandals or packable shoes — for evenings at the albergue and rest-day strolling. Alternating your main shoes over consecutive days also lets each pair dry fully, which extends their life and keeps your feet healthier.

When should I replace my shoes before the Camino? Buy your shoes at least six to eight weeks before your start date, and begin breaking them in immediately with progressively longer walks. If you’re an experienced long-distance walker and your current shoes have fewer than 300 miles on them, they may well be fine — but test them on hills and mixed terrain before committing.

Do I really need waterproof shoes? It depends heavily on when you’re walking. Spring and autumn pilgrims on the Le Puy route will be very grateful for waterproofing. Summer walkers may find that GORE-TEX becomes uncomfortably warm and prefer breathable shoes they can dry out overnight. A useful middle ground is a water-resistant (rather than fully waterproof) shoe, which handles light rain without trapping heat.

My feet are fine at the shop but hurt after a few miles. What’s going wrong? Several things could be at play. The most common culprits are insufficient cushioning for the distance, a toe box that’s too narrow (causing the toes to compress as they swell), or a shoe that’s slightly too short — feet lengthen as well as swell on long walks. Try sizing up half a size, ensure there’s a thumb’s width of space at the toe, and if the problem persists, consider an aftermarket insole for additional arch support. A gait assessment at a specialist shop is also worth the trip.

A Few Principles That Transcend Any Specific Shoe

Fit first, features second. Fit is the most important part of any pair of walking shoes, according to podiatrists and footwear experts alike. The fanciest midsole technology in the world cannot compensate for a shoe that doesn’t fit your foot. Always try on at the end of the day, when your feet are at their largest, and wear the socks you’d actually walk in.

Break them in before the big day. This bears special emphasis for anyone with Camino ambitions: test your shoes and break them in well before the pilgrimage — not doing so is one of the most common mistakes walkers make, and can lead to blisters or injury. Multiple experienced Camino veterans recommend beginning training walks months ahead. Your first outing in new shoes should be modest. Feet have long memories, and blisters have longer ones.

Weather is terrain too. The southwest of France and the Pyrenean crossing can be famously unpredictable — rain, mist, and mud are real possibilities even in the warmer months. If you walk in wet climates, or plan a spring or autumn Camino, invest in a GORE-TEX or waterproof GTX version of your chosen shoe. A soggy foot at mile two is a miserable companion for the rest of the day. Waterproofing adds a little weight and reduces breathability, but for routes where the sky has strong opinions, it’s an entirely worthwhile trade.

Consider your complete footwear kit. Many seasoned pilgrims recommend bringing a second, lighter pair — sandals or packable flats — for evenings at the albergue, rest stops, and the gentler stretches where your feet deserve a change of scenery. The Camino is a long conversation between you and the ground; it helps to have more than one thing to say.

Match the shoe to the mission. All feet are not created the same — the structure of your feet dictates the types of shoes you may find more comfortable. There is no universally perfect shoe, only the shoe that is perfect for your feet, your terrain, and your particular walking life.

The Bottom Line

A good walking shoe is an act of self-respect. It’s an acknowledgment that you’re going to use your body, cover some ground, and that your feet deserve to arrive at the destination in roughly the same condition they set out in. Whether you’re a city strider, a weekend trail explorer, or a pilgrim who has just left Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port with a backpack, a scallop shell, and a somewhat ambitious itinerary, there is a shoe out there that will keep up with you cheerfully.

Buy for the terrain you actually walk, fit for the foot you actually have, and break in gently before the grand adventure. Your future self — somewhere out there on a cobblestone street in Eauze, or a sun-dappled trail through the vineyards of the Cotes de Gascogne — will be quietly, profoundly, comfortably grateful.

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on a Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the southwest of France. This isn’t just a scenic hike – it’s a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Imagine quiet paths, rolling hills, cozy evenings, and slow conversations. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and a journey that meets you exactly where you are.

Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.