Camino de Santiago with a baby - Budget

We did a lot of research when it came to deciding on our budget for the camino, here is how it looked like in reality

When you research the budget to Camino de Santiago, you will usually find that it would be on average about 25EUR to 50EUR per person, but how does it look like with a baby? In this post I broke down our expenses to categories and summed it up. The budget and prices I present here are true for April-May 2024. Hope you find it useful

Accommodation

What we thought would be the absolute biggest expense surprised us. We spent most of our night in albergues - pilgrim hostels in which you can stay only if you are walking the camino and have camino credentials. The prices per bed in those vary between 5EUR to 30EUR per bed. There are also donation based albergues where you leave as much as you have or as you see fit. We also had a few days at AirBnbs and private rooms. The bonus about traveling with a baby - he sleeps for free (and sometimes even charms the people to put you in a private room for the price of 2 beds)

Our accomodation budget: 25EUR per night (for all 3 of us)

Food/Groceries

• Restaurants - For us this turned out to be the biggest spend, as we needed to keep Lucy fed throughout the day so she can successfully breastfeed. We ate at every stop, which made it a bit more expensive than we would have done it by ourselves. Of course there are also the donativos in this section. Small stops on the way run by people that help out other pilgrims and with your donations buy more food. This section also includes beers and wines that we (mostly me) had during our camino (which is actually not a lot, but still about 2-3 beers a day - per decision, about 3EUR per day) Our restaurant budget: 28EUR per day

• Groceries - We did not always ate at restaurants. When we had the opportunity we cooked as it was the cheaper option. Also we bought quite a lot of fresh fruits which eventually became our breakfasts and our son's snacks. This section also includes all the baby stuff like diapers, wet wipes, and baby food Our groceries budget: 10EUR per day

Our food budget: 38EUR per day (for all 3 of us)

Other expenses

There is not much else you can spend on during your stay on the camino. It really brings out the basic you. You can of course go crazy with shopping of souvenirs (which I didn't include in this breakdown)

• Laundry - Overall your main "other" expense will be laundry. You can also wash by hand and make it much cheaper, but having a baby and limited amount of clothes, we had to do laundry every 3-4 days so going the manual way would be exhausting. Laundry usually costs 3-5EUR on the caminobut can sometimes climb up to 7EUR if you are unlucky to hit the jackpot (like I was). Drying costs the same. Our laundry budget: 1.6EUR per day

• Credemtials - This section is not as big as the laundry, but it is worth mentioning. If you are like us and want to collect all the stamps to remember where you've been to then you will need to buy some credentials as you will be running out of space. In our 51 days journey each of us finished 3 credentials, each costing 2-4EUR

Total expenses for 2 parents and one baby on the camino

Bottom line - 65EUR per day (for all 3 of us)

Funny to say, but at the end of the day this is also our budget for our everyday life. So the only things we actually spent money on that we wouldn't spend otherwise were the flights and the presents we bought for our friends and relatives (which again, are not included in this post)

Final thoughts

These numbers are our actual budget that we spent during our journey. You can of course optimize it (with drinking wine instead of beer or not drinking at all) but overall I feel that this is the best we could get. Other than a day or 2 of bad supermarket breakfasts I did not feel that we are being cheap and missing out on something. We tried all the local commodities, we were never hungry (not even the baby), we were always comfortable and only had a few nights with snorers. I hope this information helps you out in your plans. If you have any questions, let us know!