Wise Pilgrim Camino Francés

This app was the best $5 I’ve ever spent. It has a useful list of albergues and hotels for every city, pueblo and village on the Camino - with reviews to help you decide. Be sure to use the WhatsApp helper feature - you tell it how many people and what date, and it creates a WhatsApp message in Spanish to request a reservation. I use this feature frequently. But the best feature is the map. It shows your location overlayed on a map of the trail. Not sure if you’re on track? Check the app. It will either reassure you or help you correct your course. I have consulted it frequently on the trail and have never gotten lost. Don’t listen to the old, negative reviews. The app is stable, doesn’t crash, and helps you navigate better than any guidebook.

Most useful for me were the offline map and the user albergue reviews. The first helped me numerous times to keep my bearings even when I couldn’t count on a cellular connection. The camino is well-marked but even so there are plenty of points when I got a little turned around, and this offline map helped me get back on track. The second was invaluable for choosing where to stay at night. I didn’t always choose only based on this guide but I often benefited from warnings of a bedbug issue or else just glowing comments about a given albergue. It lef me to many wonderful places and people. A third praiseworthy thing that occurs to me is the local historical and cultural info given on many towns. It gave me things to look out for or ways to appreciate where I was and what I was seeing. This context offered good reminders since it was often easy to forget about everything except the matter of walking, eating, and sleeping (of course that was good in its own way). I did use a print guide also and google from time to time so I cannot say what a Camino would be like using only this app guide. Regardless, I am very glad I had it (I still look at it from time to time to remember the experience).

I walked part of the Camino in June 2018 and found this app incredibly helpful overall! Unlike many other pilgrims, I did not have to stop and unpack a bulky guidebook every time I wanted to check distances or find the closest bar. All I had to do was pull out my phone and voila! Overall, I found the descriptions of albergues/towns and the route of the camino itself very accurate. Some of the prices of the albergues were slightly different but otherwise everything was great and I did not have any surprises. I also found the elevation profile very helpful for quickly visualizing distance between pueblos and the amenities offered. The online map was also very useful. For some reason, my phone tracks my GPS location accurately even on airplane mode without wifi so I was always able to know exactly where I was on the map. The map itself was very accurate. The only small annoying thing was that every time you open it, it resets to the standard starting place. Overall, I would recommend this app to anyone looking to get accurate maps and information about albergues and pueblos along the way. I found it to be a very good, and often more up-to-date alternative to carrying around a heavy guidebook. 10/10 :)