LOTUS EATERS TRAVEL

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WALKING THE CAMINO DE SANTIAGO AS A PREGNANT WOMAN: MY EXPERIENCE

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A bit of context about me

Firstly, a bit of context about me, especially if you’re considering doing this yourself. I first walked the Camino in 2022, taking on the Norte, and quickly became hooked. Since then, I’ve walked more than 10 Camino routes, as well as long-distance hikes including the Fisherman’s Trail in Portugal, the GR131 in the Canary Islands, the Rheinsteig in Germany and various others.

In short, I’m not new to long-distance hiking, and I’m certainly not new to the Camino. Before pregnancy, I was very comfortable walking long distances. I knew what my body could do, how far I could walk in a day and what it felt like to push myself.

My pregnancy is thankfully low risk, and I sought medical advice before going on this trip. I’d also mostly stayed fairly active throughout the first few months of my pregnancy. I teach paddle boarding and yoga, and had managed to keep up both until around 20 weeks.

But pregnancy is a pretty effective way of reminding you that knowing your body doesn’t necessarily mean being in control of it.

My why

Having planned and hoped to have children for a while, we’d often thought about what our future travel experiences might look like. In particular, whether we’d still be able to walk a long-distance hike with a child in the future. We hope it will still be possible, but I know it will look different.

So, when I found out I was pregnant, I knew there was only one “baby moon” I wanted. I wanted to get one last long-distance hike under our belts before everything changed. And this is how I ended up on the Camino Portuguese, in my second trimester.

Why this route

We thought about various different routes. There are a couple of long-distance hikes in Italy that we’ve had on our radar for ages, and we’d also been planning to walk the Coast to Coast in England that year. But as my pregnancy progressed, I knew that the idea of hilly walking wasn’t really an option for me. Nor was the notion of camping particularly appealing.

So we ruled those out.

I’d walked the Portuguese Coastal before, and John and I had both walked the Central route, so there would be an element of repetition. But I knew this route offered a safe sense of familiarity. It has regular accommodation, meaning we could tailor our stages, plenty of amenities, and it’s fairly flat. There was also public transport if all else failed, which felt like a useful safety net.

I was also attracted by the fact that we could treat it as a bit of a walking holiday, rather than walking being our entire mission. We built in stops at lovely beach towns, opportunities for long lunches and swimming, and city visits with museums. It meant that if I was exhausted after a morning of walking, there was still plenty to enjoy.

Preparing for the walk

As the Camino got closer, I started getting more nervous. I was still active and had tried to be throughout my pregnancy, but first trimester nausea, and frankly tiredness, had stopped me working out as much as normal. I built up my walking a little and managed a few 10km walks, as well as regular 5kms, but I hadn’t got anywhere near the distances I’d normally be walking on a Camino.

That was quite a strange feeling for me. Before pregnancy, 15km would have been an easy day. We’d regularly walk 25 or 30km, and I’d done plenty of longer days too. So going into this Camino knowing that I hadn’t really tested my body at anything approaching those distances made me wonder how it would feel once I was actually out there.

Packing also had me a little daunted. I wanted to be sure that I had clothing that would fit for the entire route. In the end, I made a colossal mistake: I bought a brand new pair of hiking shorts in a pregnancy-suitable size. They looked remarkably similar to a smaller pair I had for pre-pregnancy, but were about four dress sizes larger. Of course, I accidentally packed the smaller pair.

I discovered this on day two, when I couldn’t get them over my thighs. Luckily, I’d brought two pairs with me, but I was still rather miffed to be carrying around a tiny pair of shorts that I couldn’t wear. It felt like they were mocking me from the bottom of my backpack.

The first few days

Our first few days started fairly easily, with a 10km and a 17km on day two. But by the middle of day two, I was noticing a problem developing in my hip. I’d had a bit of hip discomfort from normal pregnancy side effects, but this was something else. I wondered if I’d made a completely mad decision trying to walk the Camino, and I started thinking about backup plans.

By the end of day three, I was struggling to sleep because of the hip pain. At one point, John had to help me out of the shower. He was kind, but looked at me and asked, “How are you going to continue?”

I wasn’t really sure.

Normally, when something hurts on a long-distance hike, I have a pretty good idea of what is going on. I’ve had sore muscles, blisters and tired legs plenty of times before, and I know my body reasonably well. But this was different. My body was changing all the time, and I couldn’t always tell what was a normal pregnancy niggle and what was something I needed to take seriously.

I decided to put my efforts into two things: stretching properly and being very careful about foot placement with every step on the way.

I still don’t know exactly what caused the problem, but I can only assume it had something to do with my gait changing due to pregnancy. Luckily, it seemed to be a temporary problem, more like a pulled muscle than anything serious.

But it was certainly a wake-up call. It wasn’t an injury I’d had before, and it reminded me that all these new things were happening in my body that I simply wasn’t in control of.

Getting into my stride

By about day six, my walking strength had come back a bit and my hip pain had eased. I felt that I was starting to get into my stride somewhat, and starting to feel like myself again made me feel that I’d made a good choice to walk the Camino after all. All was not lost.

But nevertheless, I was still shocked by how hard I would find walking 15km or so. Before pregnancy, 15km was barely a walking day for me. Now my feet hurt after about 5km and were constantly swollen. I couldn’t carry much on my back, so John took on more of the load, and I was exhausted by the time we arrived at our accommodation.

There was something quite humbling about it. I hadn’t suddenly become bad at walking. My body just had completely different demands.

The small niggles

Along the way, there were lots of small annoyances that I hadn’t even considered before we left. I seemed to need the loo approximately every 30 minutes. Whilst there were lots of cafés on route, we couldn’t quite justify stopping for a drink that regularly. I met another woman who was lamenting exactly the same thing.

“The problem is,” she said, “you have to buy a drink to use the loo in the café, and then 30 minutes later you need to go again.”

I really felt that.

Trail wees are incredibly hard on the Portuguese Coastal route, as you are often walking along boardwalks and there are lots of people around. On the rare occasion that we found ourselves on a quiet trail or in a forest, I was delighted.

The biggest challenge was one that I hadn’t really considered: sleep. The first few nights, I’d booked private bedrooms. I hadn’t really thought about whether we had shared or private bathrooms, because it’s not really something that normally bothers me on a walking trip. But I soon realised that having a bathroom in the corridor, with two locked doors between me and the toilet, was a bit of an annoyance. At this point, I was averaging three or four trips to the loo each night, and it was basically impossible to go without waking John up.

Of the private rooms we booked, those with twin beds were much more successful. At home we sleep on a super king (luxy, I know), but a small double just wasn’t cutting it with the amount of tossing and turning I was doing whilst pregnant. Having an actual private bathroom – one in the bedroom, rather than in the corridor – was also a game changer.

We’d booked only three albergues with dorm spaces. I’d dreaded these, but actually, having my own little space behind a curtain felt great. It’s also very easy to get in and out of a bottom bunk to go to the toilet without disturbing anyone. Albergues are made for this.

I’d half expected somebody to turn around and tell me I wasn’t welcome because I was pregnant, but of course, this never happened. Everyone was friendly and accommodating. Albergues are incredibly inclusive, and if I walked again as a pregnant woman, I’d be much less concerned about booking into a dorm. In fact, I’d book more of them.

Food & drink

One part of the Camino experience that I always look forward to – is a good meal and a nice drink once the walking is done for the day. If I’m honest, I’d anticipated that this aspect would be a bit of a let down on this particular Camino.

But, I actually found myself pleasantly surprised. For starters, it’s very easy to get decaffeinated coffee – so I could still look forward to this each morning. Snack breaks, and lunches, soon became something I would fixate on – way more than normal. I was basically counting down to second breakfast – hoping for a bit of toast with tomato in Spain, or a nice grilled cheese toasty in Portugal.

We made food a bit more of a feature. A few times during our trip we would go for a long lunch, rather than a big supper. I found this more manageable, as I’d often be too tired in the evening and wouldn’t want to wait until 20:30 to eat (heartburn became an issue too!) And these big lunches became events in themselves.

By far, the biggest surprise for me, was how much I still enjoyed going out to a bar in the early evening and having a few cold drinks. Of course, I was a little sad to miss out on sampling local wines (normally a highlight for me), but Spain’s bar culture isn’t about alcohol – and as such, there are so many zero alcohol options to try. Way more than in the UK. I would look forward to a completely alcohol free beer in the evening, and found they were always served in a nice glass and usually with some nibbles – which pleased me endlessly.

I did have to avoid cured meats – which wasn’t a massive issue. Although it made me a little sad when they would turn up on our table as a complimentary tapas and I couldn’t eat them. John’s favourite phrase quickly became “more for me.”

What I thought about as I walked

It felt amazing to be doing something like this and still having an adventure, even whilst pregnant, and I kept coming back to that. I’d originally thought of this trip as one last big adventure before having a baby, but as I walked, I started thinking more about the kind of parent I want to be.

I want my child to embrace that same spirit of adventure. I want them to be curious about the world, to try things that are difficult and to understand that not everything has to be easy to be worthwhile.

In the hard times, I reminded myself that I wanted to be there. My body was doing something pretty amazing simply by walking whilst also growing a baby, even if that meant I couldn’t do what I would normally have considered an easy day’s walking.

There was one particular moment on my way into Pontevedra when the last 5km of a 20km day felt like too much. John found me crying, sitting on a rock. I was frustrated that I found the walk so hard, especially because I’d walked this exact route two years previously and it had felt like nothing. It was humbling, to say the least.

I think I was partly crying because I knew what I used to be capable of. I’d spent years learning how to walk long distances and understanding my limits, and suddenly those old reference points weren’t particularly useful anymore. My body was different, and I had to learn to listen to it rather than constantly comparing it with the body I’d had even a few months before.

I thought a lot about my relationship with “challenge”, and the idea that you have to walk a long day to feel satisfied. For years, I’d measured a good Camino day in kilometres. A 25km day was comfortable, 30km felt productive, and a really long day could feel like an achievement.

Pregnancy made me question that.

Taking things slower also allowed us to take in our surroundings more. When we’ve walked previously, we’ve normally had such long distances to cover that doing things like stopping at a church, or having lots of breaks, felt like a balancing act. But on days when we had only 10km or so to walk, I could actually relish taking my time.

We stopped for coffee. We had long lunches. We swam. We explored towns. Sometimes I rested whilst John went off to explore somewhere himself.

Perhaps that was the biggest lesson of all. Doing something hard doesn’t always mean pushing yourself to your previous limits. Sometimes it means accepting that your limits have changed, allowing somebody else to carry your backpack, taking a three-hour afternoon rest, or sitting on a rock and having a cry before getting up and walking the next few kilometres.

Would I do it again? Absolutely.

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Written by Emma

Wine Lover. Yogi. Hiker. Writer.

British travel writer and long-distance hiker, native to Kent. Emma has walked the Camino de Santiago more than ten times, completed trails across Europe from the Corfu Trail to the Fisherman’s Trail, and covered thousands of kilometres on foot. She always writes from first-hand experience. Her goal? Inspire just one person to go on their first long-distance hike.

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