Via de la Plata - Walking the Way of St James

A walker's guidebook to the Way of St James’ southern pilgrim route through Spain to Santiago de Compostela. Nearly 1000km long, the Via de la Plata starts in Seville or Granada and leads north and then north-west through the historic towns and varied scenery of Extremadura, Castille and Galicia.

Maps are a problem in Spain. It would be possible to follow the Vía de la Plata just with the waymarks and this guide but that would be very limiting. Maps are useful not merely as a means of finding the way when lost but also for situating the walk in the context of its surroundings and for making any diversions the walker might wish to make to visit places of interest within striking distance of the route. At present there are no comprehensive, up-to-date Spanish equivalents of the Ordnance Survey maps of Britain available for the whole country, though work on updating the existing ‘military maps’ is underway, and it is for this reason that sketch maps of the route are included with this text. To situate yourself generally, however (though not to walk from), three maps in the Michelin 1:400,000 (1cm to 4km) dark orange series are recommended: 578 (Andalucía), 576 (Extremadura, Castilla-La Mancha, Madrid) and 571 (Galicia). These cover the entire route (with street plans of large towns) apart from a 20km section just south of Zamora; if you want to include that section as well you will need 575 (Castilla-Léon) too. Such Spanish maps as are available in Britain can be purchased from, for example, Stanford’s map shop in London, The Map Shop in Upton-upon-Severn, or from some of the larger general bookshops.