The Camino from Pamplona, the first days through Navarre

The Camino Francés, the most walked of the routes to Santiago de Compostela, crosses the Pyrenees from France and comes down into Navarre, and for most pilgrims Pamplona is the first city on the way. It is a good place to begin, if you are not walking all the way. The Pyrenean crossing is behind you, the path ahead runs through open, rolling country of wheat fields and vineyards, and the first days out of the city pack a lot into a short distance.

Pilgrims have walked this way for more than a thousand years, since the bones of the apostle James were said to have been found in Galicia in the ninth century. The route through Navarre is one of its oldest stretches, marked by the scallop shell, the pilgrims' badge, and by yellow arrows painted on walls and posts.

Pamplona

Pamplona is best known for one week of the year, the festival of San Fermín in July, when bulls run through the streets every morning, and Ernest Hemingway made it famous in The Sun Also Rises. The rest of the year it is a handsome, prosperous, rather orderly city, the old capital of the kingdom of Navarre, with stout walls and bastions, a Gothic cathedral and the Plaza del Castillo at its heart, a square of cafés where Hemingway drank. The Camino enters through a gateway in the walls on one side of the old town and leaves on the other, and the shell markers set into the pavement guide you through.

Over the Alto del Perdón

The stage west from Pamplona climbs gently through farmland towards a long ridge lined with wind turbines, the Sierra del Perdón. At the top, the Alto del Perdón, the hill of forgiveness, stands a row of life-size iron silhouettes of pilgrims, on foot, on horseback and with donkeys, walking into the wind, put up in the 1990s. Its inscription, in Spanish, marks the place where the path of the wind crosses the path of the stars. On a clear day the view runs back to Pamplona and the Pyrenees and forward over the plains of Navarre the way you are going.

The descent leads down through the villages to Obanos, and just before it, a short detour from the main path, to Santa María de Eunate, a small church that few pilgrims forget. Built in the twelfth century, it is octagonal, standing alone among the fields and surrounded by an open arcade, and nobody knows exactly why it was built or by whom. Theories involve the Knights Templar, a burial chapel for pilgrims, and much else.

Obanos is where the Camino Aragonés, the route that crosses the Pyrenees by the Somport pass, joins the Camino Francés, and from there it is a short walk to Puente la Reina, the queen's bridge. Its six-arched Romanesque bridge over the River Arga was built for pilgrims in the eleventh century, at the order of a queen of Navarre whose identity is uncertain, and walkers still cross it on their way west.

Holidays that follow the route

Explore's seven-night A Taste of Northern Spain: Catalonia and the Basque Country includes the landmarks of this stretch, with the Church of Saint Mary of Eunate, Obanos, Puente La Reina and Pamplona among its places, along with Bilbao, Getaria, San Sebastian, La Rioja Alavesa and Laguardia, Zaragoza, Agramunt and Montserrat. It departs in May, June, September and October.

Just You's seven-night Walking the Camino De Santiago, for solo travellers, follows the pilgrims' route across the north: its places run from Bilbao and Puente la Reina by way of Laguardia, Burgos, Astorga, O Cebreiro, Samos and Melide, to the Monte de Gozo, where pilgrims get their first sight of the cathedral towers, Santiago de Compostela and Fisterra on the coast.

Travelsphere's seven-night Flavours of Spain's Basque Country & La Rioja is a gentler food and wine tour, with Pamplona among its places, as well as Bilbao, Getaria, Hondarribia, San Sebastián, Laguardia, Logroño and Haro, and, across the French border, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Biarritz, Espelette and Ascain.

If you walk any part of it, walk from Pamplona to Puente la Reina. It is about a day on foot, and it shows the whole spirit of the Camino in miniature.