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.

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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.

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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.

Couples who walk the Camino together don’t just survive the blisters — they start talking to each other in a different way.

What This Article Is About

This article is for the couple who is fine. Not in crisis, not miserable, not in need of urgent intervention — just fine. Fine in the way that a good jumper that has been washed too many times is fine: still perfectly functional, slightly less vivid than it used to be, a little shapeless in places you’d rather not examine too closely. If you and your partner have been meaning to do something properly together — not a weekend city break where you mostly argue about where to eat, not a package holiday where you stare at separate phones by a pool — but something that actually means something, this article is about why walking the Camino de Santiago together through the French countryside might be the most unexpectedly transformative thing you do for your relationship all decade.

Walking Together as a Couple: 5 Key Takeaways

• Couples who walk together talk to each other in a different way. Side-by-side movement removes the face-to-face confrontational dynamic that makes difficult conversations feel like negotiations, and replaces it with something more like thinking aloud together — which is frequently where the real conversations finally happen.
• Shared physical challenge recalibrates how partners see each other. You discover things about the person you have been living with for years — their pace, their resilience, their particular way of navigating difficulty — that daily life had completely obscured.
• Five days without the usual props of distraction (work, screens, social obligations, the endless administration of ordinary life) creates a quality of attention between two people that most couples haven’t experienced since the early days of their relationship.
• The Camino’s structure — a route, a direction, a shared daily purpose — provides couples with something surprisingly rare: a goal they are working towards together, rather than in parallel.
• Most couples who walk the Camino together report not just enjoying the experience, but returning with a renewed sense of who they are as a pair — not the administrative unit that manages the household and the children and the diary, but the two actual people who chose each other.

The Couple Who Walked Until Found Each Other Again

Tom and Rachel Girard had been together for nineteen years and married for fourteen of them. They had two children aged eleven and eight, a semi-detached house in Lyon that was simultaneously too small and too expensive, a shared calendar on their phones that contained almost no entries that belonged exclusively to either of them, and a relationship that both of them would have described, if pressed, as good. Solid. Fine, really.

The problem — if it was a problem, which neither of them was entirely prepared to name as such — was that they had not had a conversation that surprised either of them in approximately three years. They knew each other’s opinions on everything. They finished each other’s sentences not because of romantic synchronicity but because the sentences were usually about logistics. Who was collecting Léa on Thursday. Whether the boiler service had been booked. What they were doing about Christmas this year given the situation with Tom’s mother, which was, as it had been for some time, complicated.

The Camino retreat was Rachel’s idea. She had read about it somewhere, mentioned it over dinner with the tone of someone proposing something they expect to be declined, and was slightly startled when Tom said yes immediately. He would later admit that he had said yes before she finished the sentence because he could not, at that precise moment, have told you a single interesting thing about himself that wasn’t also true of the role he occupied. Father. Husband. Architect. Man who needed to book the boiler service.

They arrived in Gascony on a Friday evening in September. The air was different. Cooler than Lyon, green in a way that felt almost aggressive after months of city living, and conspicuously, thrillingly quiet. They had dinner with the other walkers — a retired woman from Edinburgh, a man who had left his job in finance and wasn’t yet sure what came next, a woman from Amsterdam who laughed at everything. Rachel had two glasses of local wine and told a story about herself that Tom had never heard before. He looked at her across the table with an expression she didn’t immediately recognise.

It was, she realised later, interest. Uncomplicated, undistracted, fully present interest. The look he used to give her before they knew everything about each other.

They began walking the following morning. The path wound through farmland and ancient forest, marked with the Camino’s familiar shell symbols, unhurried and entirely indifferent to the contents of their shared calendar. By the end of the first hour, they were talking. Not about Léa’s Thursday collection or the boiler or Christmas. About something Tom had been thinking about at work that he hadn’t mentioned because there had never quite been a moment. About something Rachel had been reading that had shifted something in her thinking and that she had filed away because the right conversation hadn’t arrived.

The right conversation, it turned out, had been waiting for a path through the French countryside and ten kilometres of uninterrupted time.

On the second day, somewhere on a ridge above a valley that had no name either of them could find on their phones, Tom said something that made Rachel stop walking. She stood on the path and looked at him. He was standing in the light with mud on his boots and his hair slightly toussled by the wind, and she thought — with a clarity that felt almost physical — that she had missed him. That she had been missing him for years while living in the same house. And that he was, standing right there on an old French pilgrimage path, entirely real.

What they discovered over the remaining three days — and what they brought home that neither of them has been able to leave behind — is what this article is about.

What Couples Who Walk Together Know That Too-Busy-To-Walk Couples Don’t

There is a well-documented phenomenon in psychology sometimes called the ‘shoulder-to-shoulder effect.’ It describes the way that conversations held during side-by-side activity — walking, driving, doing something physical together — have a measurably different quality from conversations held face-to-face. The directional gaze is removed. The implicit confrontational dynamic of facing each other dissolves. There is something else to look at, something else to be present to, and in that slight redistribution of attention, the defences come down and the honest things become easier to say.

This is one reason why the most important conversations in many relationships happen in cars. It is also one reason why walking together is, neurologically and relationally speaking, one of the most connecting things two people can do.

The Camino de Santiago amplifies this effect considerably. A single walk in a local park has some of it. Several consecutive days of walking through ancient French landscape, with nowhere else to be and nothing else to manage, has it in a concentration that most couples find genuinely startling. The conversations that happen on day four of a Camino retreat are conversations that have often been waiting years to occur — not because the couples were avoiding them, but because modern life had never once produced a silence long enough for them to begin.

There is also the question of novelty. Relationship research is consistent on this point: shared new experiences reactivate the neural pathways associated with early-stage attraction and bonding. The brain, encountering something new alongside a familiar person, responds in ways that closely resemble the neurochemistry of falling for someone. New landscape, new physical challenge, new community, new rhythm of days — the Camino delivers all of this, and it delivers it to both people simultaneously, which means you are having the experience together rather than one of you having it while the other watches.

The couples who come to the Camino not in crisis but simply in need of something they can’t quite name are often the ones who are most changed by it. They didn’t know they were looking for each other. They found each other anyway.

The physical challenge matters too, and it is worth being honest about this. Ten kilometres a day is not a stroll. There will be moments of discomfort, of tiredness, of blisters requiring unglamorous attention at the end of the day. There will almost certainly be at least one moment when one of you is walking faster than the other, or one of you wants to stop for longer at a view that the other has already finished admiring. These small negotiations — navigated daily, in real time, in a context where the stakes are low enough to be honest — are, in miniature, the negotiations of a shared life. Couples who walk together are, without necessarily realising it, practising something.

What they practise on the path, they tend to carry home.

Walking Together as a Couple: 5 Mistakes to Avoid

1. Treating it as a test of the relationship. The Camino is not an assessment centre for couples. It is not designed to expose your incompatibilities or stress-test your communication under pressure. Arrive with curiosity rather than an agenda. The couples who get the most from it are the ones who came to have an experience together, not to prove something or fix something. If something needs fixing, the walking tends to surface it gently anyway — without anyone having to engineer the moment.

2. Walking at different paces and making it mean something. Partners rarely walk at exactly the same pace, and this can become, if you let it, a surprisingly charged daily negotiation. One of you will be faster. One of you will want to stop more. Neither of these things is a metaphor for the relationship unless you decide it is. Walk at the pace of the slower person, or agree to walk separately for sections and reconvene. The path goes to the same place regardless of how quickly you arrive.

3. Using the retreat to have the conversation you’ve been avoiding for three years. The Camino will, in all likelihood, create the conditions for honest conversation naturally. You do not need to arrive with a list of grievances and a five-year plan for the relationship. Couples who attempt to use the walking as a venue for pre-planned difficult discussions tend to find the conversations go badly — not because the Camino can’t hold difficult things, but because forced conversations in beautiful landscapes have the same problem as forced conversations anywhere. Let it happen naturally. It will.

4. Spending the evenings on your phones. The quality of what builds between two people over several days of walking is directly proportional to the quality of attention they give each other when they stop walking. The evenings — dinner, a glass of wine, the particular tiredness that comes from a day of purposeful movement — are where a significant amount of the relational magic actually happens. If both of you are checking emails by eight o’clock, you are importing the problem you came to leave behind.

5. Not talking about it when you get home. The shift that happens on the Camino requires a little maintenance in the early days after returning. Life reconvenes fast, and the calendar fills quickly, and it is entirely possible to be back in the full logistics of ordinary existence within forty-eight hours of landing. Make a small, specific commitment before you leave France: one evening a week with no phones, a walk together on Sundays, a check-in question at dinner.

Further Reading

The Relationship Cure by Dr. John Gottman

John Gottman has spent four decades studying what makes relationships work and what makes them quietly fail, and his research findings are both rigorous and occasionally uncomfortable reading. This particular book focuses on what he calls ‘bids for connection’ — the small, often-unnoticed moments where one partner reaches towards the other and what happens when those bids are met, missed, or turned away. It is directly relevant to the Camino experience because walking together for five days is, essentially, an extended series of bids for connection made and received in conditions that make the receiving easier than usual. Understanding the mechanism helps you replicate it when you are back in a context that makes it harder.

Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel

Esther Perel’s central argument is that long-term relationships erode desire not through conflict but through excessive familiarity — that knowing someone too completely, in all their domestic ordinariness, is the quiet enemy of passion. Her prescription is not affairs or upheaval but the deliberate cultivation of mystery, novelty, and the experience of seeing your partner as a separate, surprising person rather than the other half of a domestic unit. The Camino, read through Perel’s lens, is exactly this: five days of encountering your partner in an unfamiliar context, watching them navigate something new, and being reminded that the person you came with is more interesting than the role they play at home. Read this before you go. You will walk differently.

Embracing Change — in 10 Minutes a Day by Margaretha Montagu

Walking the Camino together can bring change — and the couples who sustain the shift they find on the path are the ones who bring intentionality to what comes next. MargarethaMontagu’s Embracing Change — in 10 Minutes a Day offers a practical, warmhearted framework for doing exactly that: making change a daily practice rather than a one-off event. Given that the most common post-Camino challenge is returning to the life that needed changing in the first place, this is the book to read on the flight home.

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 Walking Together

What if we walk at completely different paces?

This is one of the most common practical concerns couples raise before a walking retreat, and one of the least problematic in practice. The Camino in France is not a race, and a guided small-group retreat structures the day in a way that accommodates different paces comfortably. You may walk sections together and sections separately — many couples find that the periods of walking alone, followed by reuniting further down the path, are among the most interesting parts of the experience. A little distance, as it turns out, does wonders for the quality of what you say when you catch up.

We’re not in crisis — is a Camino retreat still relevant for us?

Arguably more so. Couples in acute difficulty often need specific therapeutic support that a walking retreat is not designed to provide. But couples who are simply in the slow drift of familiarity — who are functional, affectionate, busy, and quietly less connected than they used to be — are precisely the people the Camino seems to work on most reliably. You don’t need to be broken to benefit from being reset. And the reset, for couples who arrive in reasonable shape, tends to be surprisingly profound.

What if one of us is significantly fitter than the other?

The French Camino routes used in the retreat are chosen for accessibility as well as beauty — they are challenging enough to be meaningful without requiring athletic preparation. The distances walked each day are manageable for people of average fitness who have done some preparation walking beforehand. If there is a significant fitness difference between you, discuss it before you come; the important thing is that both partners arrive having done some walking in the weeks beforehand, so that the experience is one of shared effort rather than one person managing the other.

Can walking together really improve a relationship, or is that overstated?

The research on shared physical activity and relationship satisfaction is consistent: couples who exercise or engage in physical activity together report higher relationship quality, greater feelings of closeness, and increased attraction compared to couples who do these things separately. Add the dimensions of nature, shared novelty, purposeful direction, community, and five days of unhurried time — all of which the Camino provides — and you have a combination that the research would predict to be powerfully connecting. It is not overstated. If anything, the couples who come tend to be surprised by how much more it delivers than they expected.

What if we argue on the walk?

Then you argue on the walk. The Camino is not a conflict-free zone, and a five-day retreat with your partner will not be uniformly harmonious — particularly on the days when someone’s feet hurt and someone else is being relentlessly optimistic about how much further it is to lunch. Arguments that happen while walking through beautiful French countryside, however, have a quality that kitchen arguments do not: they tend to resolve faster, escalate less, and leave less residue. Movement helps. Fresh air helps. The particular absurdity of being cross with someone on an ancient pilgrimage path helps most of all.

The Path Goes in the Same Direction

Tom and Rachel Girard came home from Gascony on a Wednesday afternoon. The children were collected. The boiler appointment was, eventually, rescheduled. The calendar filled back up with the usual entries, because life does not pause for revelation, and theirs was no exception.

But something had changed in the architecture of the ordinary. There was a walk on Sunday mornings now — not a long one, just an hour, just the two of them — that had become, without anyone formally deciding it, non-negotiable. There were dinner conversations that didn’t end at the logistics. There was, occasionally, the particular look across a room that Rachel had thought she might have lost permanently, and that had turned out to be merely mislaid somewhere on a ridge above an unnamed valley in the French countryside.

Nineteen years in, they were still surprising each other. It turned out that was less a matter of having the right relationship and more a matter of giving the relationship room to breathe. Five days, ten kilometres a day, and one very old path had been room enough.

Couples retreats on the Puy en Veslay route of the Camino de Santiago are available for small groups of up to four guests. Three non-guided walks, beautiful surroundings, good food, and the particular quality of time that only arrives when you’ve left the calendar behind. Couples welcome — especially the perfectly fine ones.

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. “The Pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago and Its Impacts on Marital and Familial Relationships” — PubMed / Journal of Religion and Health (2023) pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10150338/

This is a peer-reviewed academic study published in 2023, based on surveys and in-depth interviews with 24 couples who walked the Camino together. The research found that walking the Camino as a couple had a measurably positive impact on marital relationships — specifically helping to strengthen bonds and trust, improve communication and mutual connection, and increase expressions of care and affection. It’s Camino-specific, couples-specific, and academically rigorous. Cite this one with confidence.

2. “Couples’ Shared Participation in Novel and Arousing Activities and Experienced Relationship Quality” — Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Aron et al., 2000)

The foundational study behind the self-expansion theory that underpins so much of modern relationship psychology. Across three controlled experiments, couples who participated in novel and arousing activities together showed significantly greater increases in experienced relationship quality than those who did mundane activities — and the effect held even when controlling for relationship social desirability. This is the science behind why the Camino works on couples specifically — the novelty, the physical challenge, the unfamiliar landscape. Published in one of psychology’s most respected journals and cited thousands of times since.

3. “Walking Together for a Better Marriage” — Marriage Dynamics Institute

A more accessible, practitioner-focused piece that draws together several studies into one readable argument. It cites sociologist Harry Brod’s finding that men are more likely to define emotional closeness as working or playing side-by-side, while women often view it as talking face-to-face — making walking together one of the rare activities that meets both partners’ instincts for connection simultaneously. Psychology Today

“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

And why they rarely regret it – because somewhere between the silence, the vineyards, the blisters, and the breathtaking relief of not having to take care of absolutely everyone else for five whole days, many women rediscover the version of themselves they thought life had quietly swallowed whole.

Some women book Camino walking breaks because they want adventure.

Some because they need a break.

Some because life has become so relentlessly messy and noisy that even the sound of another WhatsApp notification feels personally offensive.

But beneath all the practical reasons lies a quieter truth few women are willing to voice out loud: they actually are just desperate to hear themselves think again.

Not as someone’s wife.
Not as someone’s mother.
Not as someone’s employee, caretaker, therapist, organiser, emotional support human, or unpaid family logistics coordinator.

Preferably while walking through the French countryside with decent coffee available on tap, good food magically appearing at mealtimes, and nobody asking where the extra batteries are.

And that, quietly, is why so many women book Camino da Santiago walking retreats on their own – or with one or two like-minded friends – and why they so rarely regret it.

5 Key Takeaways

• Walking the Camino alone is often less about “escaping life” and more about reconnecting with oneself.
• Many women discover confidence, clarity, and emotional resilience they had forgotten they possessed.
• Small-group Camino retreats offer connection without the emotional exhaustion of large group travel.
• Time in nature help calm an overstimulated nervous system far more effectively than doomscrolling under a weighted blanket.
• Women frequently return home feeling lighter, clearer, braver, and strangely more in touch with themselves.

Why Do Women Want To Walk Alone?

The Camino de Santiago has an uncanny habit of finding women precisely when their lives have become too heavy to carry gracefully. Sometimes the breaking point arrives dramatically — a slammed door, a screaming match, a signed document slid across a table. But sometimes it arrives because someone asked one final, microscopic question at exactly the wrong moment. While you were holding six grocery bags. Managing a crisis. Answering emails on your phone with your chin. Trying not to cry in a supermarket parking lot.

For Claire Botherington, it was the yoghurt.

Not metaphorically. Literally. The yoghurt.

Claire was forty-eight, recently divorced, professionally successful, permanently exhausted, and increasingly certain that everyone else had received a secret instruction manual for adulthood that had somehow never arrived in her mailbox. She booked the Camino walking retreat at 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday — standing in her kitchen, staring at a perfectly good, full pot of yoghurt, while her teenage son shouted from upstairs that there was “nothing to eat.”

There was food everywhere.

But apparently none of it was good enough.

Something inside her snapped. Not loudly — she wasn’t the type. It happened quietly, with the faint internal sound of a thread finally giving way. Which, as it turns out, is often far more dangerous than a scene.

The next morning she woke up to discover she had booked a solo walking retreat in the south of France. She cancelled it in her head at least fourteen times before breakfast. What kind of woman just does that? She made coffee. Cancelled it again. Ate toast. Cancelled it twice more.

She went anyway.

On the first walk, she barely spoke.

On the second, she cried without warning — ugly, unexpected tears — while passing through vineyards under a sky so blue it felt offensive, because nobody had needed anything from her for six consecutive hours. Six. She counted.

That night, back in her room, she stood at the window looking out over the quiet French countryside and felt something she hadn’t felt in years. Not happiness exactly. Something stranger than happiness.

She didn’t want to go home.

The thought arrived small and terrifying, like a crack in a wall you suddenly realise has been there for years. And somewhere in the silence, a second thought crept in behind the first — quieter, more dangerous, impossible to unhear:

What if this isn’t just a temporary escape?

What if this is a whole new beginning?

The Real Reason Women Walk Alone

There is a common misconception that women who travel alone are lonely.

Most are not.

Many women arrive at Camino retreats carrying invisible emotional backpacks heavier than anything they packed in their luggage. Years of responsibility. Caretaking. Emotional labour. Decision fatigue. The relentless pressure to keep functioning cheerfully while quietly running on fumes.

Some have spent years prioritising everyone else’s needs so consistently that they no longer know what they themselves enjoy.

The Camino interrupts that pattern.

Walking creates space. Silence. Perspective.

Something shifts when your only real job for the day is to put one foot in front of the other while birds argue in the hedgerows and ancient paths stretch quietly ahead of you.

Problems untangle themselves differently while walking.

Grief softens.

Burnout loosens its grip.

People breathe more deeply without even noticing.

And perhaps most importantly, women rediscover parts of themselves that had slowly disappeared beneath obligations, routines, and the exhausting performance of “holding it all together.”

Also, there is something deeply empowering about successfully navigating a journey alone.

Even a gentle one.

Especially if life has recently made you doubt your own strength.

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Booking a Camino Walking Break

1. Waiting Until You Feel “Brave Enough”

Confidence rarely arrives before the decision.

It usually arrives afterwards.

Most solo guests feel nervous before their retreat. That is completely normal. Courage is often just fear wearing comfortable walking shoes.

2. Overpacking Emotionally and Physically

Women often arrive carrying enough emotional responsibility to run a small nation.

You do not need to solve your entire life during five days on the Camino.

You only need to walk.

Also, nobody has ever needed six pairs of emergency trousers.

3. Choosing Huge Group Tours

Large group tours can feel socially exhausting, especially for introverts or emotionally depleted people.

Small Camino retreats create space for meaningful conversations, solitude, rest, and genuine connection without feeling like a school excursion with matching backpacks.

4. Treating the Camino Like a Competition

You do not need to walk the fastest, appear the most enlightened, or pretend your knees are not negotiating aggressively with gravity by day three.

5. Ignoring What Comes Up Emotionally

The Camino has a sneaky habit of surfacing thoughts and feelings people have avoided for years.

Let them come.

Many guests discover that the emotions they feared most were simply exhausted parts of themselves asking to be acknowledged at last.

Further Reading

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

I chose this book because it beautifully captures the emotional transformation that can happen when a woman walks alone through uncertainty, grief, and personal reinvention. It is raw, honest, funny, and deeply human.

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

This extraordinary memoir explores resilience, love, loss, and the healing power of walking. It reminds readers that sometimes movement itself becomes medicine when life falls apart.

Embracing Change – in 10 minutes a day by Margaretha Montagu

For readers navigating life transitions, emotional overwhelm, or the unsettling feeling that life no longer fits quite properly, my book offers gentle guidance, practical reflection, and emotional support in manageable daily steps.

You can find it here: Embracing Change – in 10 minutes a day

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.

FAQs about Camino Walking Breaks

Is the Camino safe for solo female travellers?

Generally, yes — particularly when joining a small, professionally organised retreat. Many women discover they feel safer and more supported than they expected.

Do I need to be very fit to join a Camino retreat?

Not at all. Most people are ordinary humans with ordinary knees and occasionally questionable life choices. A reasonable level of mobility and preparation is enough for most of this retreat’s Camino walks.

Will I feel awkward arriving alone?

Almost everyone worries about this beforehand. Interestingly, solo guests often connect more deeply and naturally than people who arrive with companions.

What emotional benefits do people experience on the Camino?

Guests often report reduced stress, greater clarity, emotional release, improved confidence, deeper self-awareness, and a renewed sense of hope.

Why do people say the Camino changes them?

Because slowing down, walking in nature, disconnecting from constant noise, and reflecting honestly on life creates conditions where meaningful internal shifts can happen.

Conclusion

Perhaps the real magic of the Camino is not that people find themselves there.

It is that they finally stop abandoning themselves long enough to find themselves again.

The women who arrive alone are rarely weak, lost, or broken.

More often, they are strong people who have been strong for far too long.

And somewhere between the vineyards, the conversations, the silence, the laughter, the aching feet, and the endless rhythm of walking, many rediscover something they thought they had misplaced years ago:

Their own inner voice.

If your own life has started feeling unbearably loud, heavy, or emotionally overcrowded, perhaps this summer or autumn is the right time to walk for a little while.

Not to escape your life.

But to return to it having found yourself again.

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.