Why the Camino de Santiago Didn’t Make Our Top 100

If the Camino de Santiago is your walk, seeing it outside our Top 100 can sting. That is completely fair.

The short answer is this: the classic Camino Francés scores 79 and ranks #574 of 974 on HikeList, while the Top 100 cut-off is 89. That gap is mostly about the length and shape of the route as a piece of walking — not its worth, not its meaning, and not whether you should do it.

And there is a lovely twist: a one-week Camino segment, the Cantabria section of the Camino del Norte, scores 91 and is inside the Top 100.

A number that surprises people — and why it is not a judgement

For many walkers, the Camino is not just another trail. It may be the first long-distance route you ever dreamed of, the one you are saving for, or the walk that changed how you see your life.

So when you see the Camino Francés sitting at 79, and not appearing in the Top 100 long-distance hikes, it can feel as if someone has missed the point.

In a way, they have — or rather, the Score has. The HikeList Score is designed to measure one narrow thing: the quality of the walking experience, factor by factor. It is useful, but it is not wise. It can count distance, challenge, scenery, accommodation, support and path quality. It cannot understand why you cried at the end, or why a conversation in an albergue stayed with you for years.

That distinction matters. A score of 79 is not a verdict on whether the Camino is worth doing. It is not saying the Camino is second-rate, overhyped, too easy, too hard, or somehow lesser than the routes above it.

It is saying something much more specific: as a long-distance walking route, measured by the factors HikeList uses, the classic five-week pilgrimage has a shape the algorithm does not reward as highly as shorter, more concentrated routes.

How the HikeList Score works, briefly

The HikeList Score is a weighted 0–100 score of the walking experience across eight factors:

• Ideal length — weight 18. A Goldilocks factor that peaks at about 7 days and falls off for very short or very long routes.
• Balanced challenge — weight 16.
• Scenery & wildness — weight 20. This penalises urban sections and road-heavy walking.
• Varied terrain — weight 10.
• Accommodation — weight 14.
• Food & support — weight 12.
• Path quality — weight 7. This penalises tarmac.
• Season flexibility — weight 3.

The Top 100 is an elite auto-collection. Across 974 published hikes, the current cut-off is a HikeList Score of 89. The 100th route, the Donausteig / Danube Trail, sits at 89; the #1 route, the Staffordshire Way, scores 96.

So yes, the Camino Francés is outside that list. But the tier matters too: HikeList classifies scores of 72+ as Very Good, 82+ as Great Hike, and 92+ as Outstanding.

A score of 79 is not a failing grade. It is a Very Good long-distance hike — just not, by this particular scoring model, a Top 100 one.

Why the classic Camino Francés scores 79

The route most people mean when they say “the Camino” is the classic Camino Francés. On HikeList it scores 79, ranks #574 of 974, and is listed as a 780 km route taking 33–35 days, with about 13,000 m of ascent. It is rated moderate.

Here is the verified factor breakdown:

• Ideal length: 52 — the biggest drag by far. A 780 km, five-week pilgrimage sits a long way from the roughly one-week sweet spot the Score rewards.
• Balanced challenge: 94 — this is excellent, and important. The Camino is not marked down for being too easy or too hard.
• Scenery & wildness: 66 — the second main drag, because of the long, flat farmland of the Meseta and some urban edges.
• Varied terrain: 100 — a perfect score here.
• Accommodation: 84 — strong, helped by the Camino’s pilgrim infrastructure.
• Food & support: 88 — also strong.
• Path quality: 92 — another high score.
• Season flexibility: 76 — solid.

The headline is simple: length is the main reason the Camino Francés misses the Top 100.

The Score’s Ideal-length factor peaks at about a week. That is not because a week is spiritually better, culturally richer, or more important than five weeks. It is just how this particular metric is built. It rewards routes that deliver a complete long-distance hiking experience without becoming a major life-sized expedition.

A 33–35 day, 780 km pilgrimage is a different kind of commitment. Many pilgrims would say that is exactly the point. The slow accumulation of days, faces, routines and small decisions is part of the Camino’s power.

But mechanically, in the Score, that duration pulls the route down.

The second drag is Scenery & wildness, where the Camino Francés scores 66. This is where the long, flat farmland of the Meseta and some urban edges matter. The algorithm reads those as less wild, less scenic walking.

Plenty of pilgrims would disagree emotionally, and I understand why. The Meseta is not everyone’s favourite section, but for some people its openness, repetition and silence become the part they remember most clearly. A scoring model can recognise that it is long and flat; it cannot know what that space does to you after days on foot.

Just as important are the high scores. The Camino Francés scores 94 for Balanced challenge, 100 for Varied terrain, 92 for Path quality, 88 for Food & support, and 84 for Accommodation.

So let’s be explicit: the Camino Francés is not penalised for being too easy or too hard. On challenge, it scores brilliantly. The issue is not that the walking is somehow invalid. The issue is that the full route is very long for a scoring system whose length sweet spot is roughly one week.

It is the length and shape — not the worth

This is the part I find most reassuring: when you look across Camino routes on HikeList, the scores tell a much kinder and more interesting story.

Same pilgrimage family. Similar symbols, spirit and welcome. Different lengths and shapes. Very different scores.

Camino routes on HikeList: the spread

Route	Length	Days	HikeList Score	Rank
Camino del Norte – Cantabria Segment	180 km	7	91	#63
Camino Aragonés	170 km	6	88	#148
GR65 (Le Puy Camino)	735 km	28–32	87	—
Camino Primitivo	320 km	12–14	85	—
Portuguese Camino	620 km	28–30	80	—
Camino del Norte (full)	825 km	34	79	—
Camino Francés, the classic	780 km	33–35	79	#574

The key insight is that the Cantabria segment of the Camino del Norte scores 91 and ranks #63. It is inside the Top 100.

That is not a contradiction. It is the Score doing exactly what it is designed to do. A 180 km, 7-day Camino segment lands close to the Ideal-length sweet spot, so the same broad pilgrimage world is read very differently by the algorithm.

Same waymarks. Same scallop shell. Same sense of welcome. But a more concentrated walking shape.

Several Camino variants also score strongly, from the 88-point Camino Aragonés to the 87-point GR65 and the 85-point Camino Primitivo. The classic Camino Francés and the full Camino del Norte both score 79, while the Portuguese Camino scores 80.

If you want to explore the family rather than just the famous route, start with all the Camino de Santiago routes on HikeList. And if the spiritual and historical side is what draws you, it is also worth browsing our wider collection of pilgrimage trails.

The pattern is clear: the Camino is not being rejected. Long, full pilgrimages and shorter, sharper Camino segments simply land in different places when measured as walking routes.

What the Score can never measure

This is the heart of it.

The HikeList Score can measure walking qualities. It can compare routes across the same set of factors. That is useful when you are choosing between hundreds of long-distance hikes.

But the Camino’s real magic often lives outside those factors.

There is no column for:

• The community of fellow pilgrims — the people you meet once, lose, then somehow meet again days later.
• The albergues — not as accommodation quality alone, but as a shared rhythm of arrival, laundry, rest and conversation.
• Shared meals — simple, social, and often remembered more clearly than the day’s kilometres.
• Spirituality and history — the feeling of walking inside something much older than your own trip.
• The daily ritual — walking, washing, resting, eating, sleeping, then doing it again.
• Arriving at the cathedral in Santiago — not just reaching an endpoint, but completing something you have carried day by day.

A walking-quality algorithm cannot understand why the Camino works on people. It cannot score the way strangers become familiar. It cannot score the comfort of a repeated routine. It cannot score the private meaning someone brings to the road.

For many people, the Camino is the most meaningful walk of their life.

That statement can be true at the same time as this one: the classic Camino Francés is not in HikeList’s Top 100.

Those two ideas do not cancel each other out. They are measuring different things.

So should you still walk it?

Yes — if the Camino is calling to you, you should absolutely still walk it.

If you want the full pilgrimage, walk the Camino Francés and do not give the score a second thought. Its 79 tells you something about how it fits HikeList’s walking model. It does not tell you what it will mean to you.

If you have only a week and want a Camino route that also fits the Top 100 shape, the Cantabria segment of the Camino del Norte is a superb choice. It scores 91, ranks #63, and shows that a well-chosen one-week Camino can be genuinely Top-100 calibre by the Score’s own standards.

Neither choice is more authentic. You are not doing a lesser Camino because you walk a segment, and you are not making a poor hiking decision because you choose the five-week classic. You are choosing the version that fits your time, body, curiosity and reason for walking.

That is the better question, really: not “why is the Camino not in the Top 100?”, but “what am I hoping the Camino will give me?”

If the answer is community, ritual, history, reflection, endurance, faith, friendship, or the simple act of getting up and walking west again, the Score was never built to measure that.

And perhaps that is why the Camino matters so much. It measures something else entirely.