Every waymarked pilgrim route I could find in OpenStreetMap, 77,804 km of path, and 1,330 pilgrimage sites from Wikidata. The giant is the Way of St James: 41,674 km signed for Santiago de Compostela, spread over 22 countries, with more of it in Germany than in Spain.
Early in the ninth century, tradition holds, the remains of the apostle James were found in Galicia, and roads began to form towards his tomb. After 1492 Pope Alexander VI declared the Camino de Santiago one of the three great pilgrimages of Christendom, with Jerusalem and the Via Francigena to Rome. Five centuries later it was a quiet road: in 1985 the Pilgrim's Office in Santiago gave its certificate, the Compostela, to 690 people. In 2025 it gave 530,772.
The revival was not only Spanish. Across Europe, St James societies, hiking clubs and parishes have waymarked old and new routes with the scallop shell, until the Camino became a web reaching from Portugal to Ukraine. Volunteers have mapped much of it in OpenStreetMap, alongside the Via Francigena to Rome, the St Olav Ways to Trondheim, the Marian ways of central Europe and hundreds of smaller pilgrim paths. This page puts all of them on one map, measures them without counting any stretch twice, and adds the shrines and temples that Wikidata records as places of pilgrimage. It also says plainly what is missing, which is a lot of the world.
Lines: OpenStreetMap route relations tagged as pilgrimage routes, coloured by family, simplified for the web (the kilometres in the text come from the full geometry). Dots: Wikidata pilgrimage sites, coloured by religious tradition. Dashed rings: straight line distance from the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Click a line or a dot for details. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Sites: Wikidata, CC0. Outlines: Natural Earth. Optional relief tiles © Esri.
Most people picture the Camino as one road across northern Spain, the Camino Francés, about 800 km from Roncesvalles to Santiago. In 2024 nearly half of all certificate holders, 47%, walked it, and 32% started in Sarria, just over the 100 km minimum walk for a Compostela. But the routes signed for Santiago are far longer than that. In OpenStreetMap I count 41,674 km of them in 22 countries, and Spain holds only 24%.
Waymarked Camino de Santiago, by country
Unique kilometres of routes signed for Santiago, whatever the local name: Camino, Caminho, Jakobsweg, Droga św. Jakuba, Svatojakubská cesta, Jakobova pot. Hover a bar; click to fly there.
Germany has the most: 14,814 km of Jakobswege, 1.49 times Spain's 9,922 km. Poland follows with 5,289 km of Drogi św. Jakuba, then Austria (1,912 km), Croatia (1,347 km) and Czechia (1,180 km). Bavaria alone carries a network of 2,696 km. Two cautions. First, this measures what is waymarked and mapped, not where pilgrims walk: most Compostela holders walk only the last stretch in Spain, and in 2024 nearly a third started at Sarria. Second, France looks almost empty, with 462 km. Several of the great French routes, the Via Turonensis and the Via Tolosana among them, are relations missing from this download (section 07), and others are probably mapped as long distance hiking trails without a pilgrimage tag. The real French figure is much larger.
There is 1.5 times as much waymarked Way of St James in Germany as in Spain.
Measure every kilometre of Camino by its straight line distance from the cathedral in Santiago and the shape of the network appears. Only 13% lies within 500 km. Half of it is more than 1,659 km away, and the busiest band, 1,500 to 2,000 km, holds 41% of the total, most of it in Germany, Austria and Croatia. 74% is more than 1,000 km from the tomb of St James. Turn on the distance rings in the map to see it.
How far from Santiago is the Camino?
Waymarked Camino kilometres by straight line distance from the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, with the two countries holding most of each band. Hover a bar.
The farthest waymarked stretch in the data is the Camino Podolico in Ukraine, at Vinnytsya, 2,911 km from Santiago in a straight line; on foot it would be farther still. The northernmost reaches 57.4°N in Denmark, on the Danish pilgrim route through northern Jutland.
The Camino is just over half of all the pilgrim routes mapped. The rest fall into a few families.
Waymarked pilgrim routes by family
Unique kilometres. A stretch used by two families counts in both (1,591 km do), so the bars add up to a little more than the 77,804 km total. Hover a bar.
The Via Francigena (5,120 km) is the medieval road to Rome from Canterbury, documented by Archbishop Sigeric around 990 in 80 stages, some 1,700 km. In OpenStreetMap it is mapped as one system of 3,944 km, the longest in the data, because its variants, its extension south of Rome towards Apulia and Sicily's own Francigene count too. 74% of it is in Italy.
The St Olav Ways (3,011 km) lead to Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, the tomb of Norway's saint king. Wikipedia gives the main route from Oslo as about 640 km; the mapped network adds the Swedish St Olavsleden from the Baltic coast and the Østerdalen, Borg and Nordleden paths. 68% is in Norway.
The Marian ways (6,750 km) lead to shrines of the Virgin Mary. Most belong to the Mária Út, or Via Mariae, a network that runs from Austria through Hungary into Romania, Slovakia, Croatia and Bosnia: Hungary alone has 2,440 km. Portugal's Caminhos de Fátima add 743 km.
Everything else (22,862 km) ranges from the Lutherweg in Germany and the roads to Assisi in Italy to Sweden's pilgrim paths, Britain's revived saints' ways and, far from Europe, the Kumano Kodō in Japan and the Caminho da Graça to Aparecida in Brazil.
The longest mapped pilgrim route systems
Top-level OpenStreetMap relations with all their stages, branches and variants, each stretch counted once. "Tag" is the length the mappers wrote in the relation's distance tag, where there is one. Click a row to see it on the map.
Systems with many branches win that table. Counting single relations instead, with no child routes, the longest is the Camino de Santiago del Sureste in Spain, 923 km, followed by the Wanderroute Via Nova in Germany (852 km) and the Camino de las Asturias (552 km). Half of all single relations are shorter than 21 km: most mappers record a pilgrim road one stage at a time.
Wikidata lists 1,330 places it classes as pilgrimage sites, in 70 countries. Germany has the most (239, mostly Wallfahrtskirchen, pilgrimage churches), then Italy (225), Spain (163) and Japan (114). Japan's are almost all on one island: 108 sit on Shikoku, home of the 88 temple pilgrimage of the monk Kūkai, a walking circuit of about 1,200 km. Relative to population, Austria leads, with 5.4 sites per million people, ahead of Portugal and Czechia.
Pilgrimage sites by country
Wikidata items classed as pilgrimage sites. Switch between the count and the rate per million people (countries with 10 or more sites). Hover a bar; click to fly there.
Wikidata records a religion for only 677 of the sites (51%), and 94% of those are Christian, almost all Catholic. Reading the rest by their names (a "Wallfahrtskirche", a "Santuário", a "-ji Temple") gives 1,023 Christian sites, 115 Buddhist, 8 Muslim and 7 Hindu, with 175 still unknown. That split says more about who edits Wikidata, and in which languages, than about where the world's pilgrims go.
Religious tradition of the sites
Top: the religion recorded in Wikidata. Bottom: the recorded religion, or else one read from the site's name by simple rules. Hover a block.
Do the mapped roads lead to the listed shrines? Only partly. 332 sites (25%) lie within 5 km of a mapped pilgrim route, 34% of those in Europe. Most shrines in Wikidata are local goals, not the ends of long waymarked roads, and many of those roads lead to a single great goal such as Santiago, Rome or Trondheim.
The Pilgrim's Office counts the certificates it issues to those who walk at least the last 100 km, or cycle 200 km. The numbers, as Wikipedia tabulates them, show the revival: 690 in 1985, 99,436 in the Holy Year of 1993, 272,703 in 2010, a collapse to 54,144 in the first year of the pandemic, and a record 530,772 in 2025, 769 times the 1985 figure. Holy Years, when St James's day on 25 July falls on a Sunday, bring spikes; the next is 2,027.
Compostela certificates per year, 1985 to 2025
Pilgrim's Office figures as given in Wikipedia's "Way of St. James" article. Gold: Holy Years. Hover a bar.
Compare that with the biggest pilgrimages on Earth. The Hajj to Mecca drew 1,707,301 pilgrims in 2026; the Arba'een walk to Karbala in Iraq draws ten to twenty million people a year, many on foot from Najaf; and about 660 million attended the Kumbh Mela in India in 2025. Not one of those journeys appears on the map above.
This is a map of what volunteers have chosen to draw and tag, and they have mostly drawn Europe. 99.2% of the route kilometres are in Europe. Outside it there are just 564 km in 5 countries: the Caminho da Graça to Aparecida in Brazil (368 km), 141 km in Japan, mostly the Kumano Kodō, and a few short paths in Israel, India and elsewhere in Asia. The Shikoku circuit, 1,200 km, is not in the route data at all, only its temples. Wikidata knows the Darb Zubayda, the 1,300 km Abbasid pilgrim road from Kufa to Mecca, but no OpenStreetMap route draws it. The sites are less lopsided but still 73% European.
The route list came from 2,028 OpenStreetMap relation ids. 5 batches of 100 ids in all (4.9%) failed to download and are missing. Container relations in the data list 280 child relations that are not in the extract, and 17 containers have none of their children. Of the 41 Wikidata pilgrim route items (stations of the cross aside) that name an OpenStreetMap relation, 25 are missing, among them the Camino Francés as a whole, the Via Turonensis, the Via Tolosana, the Sanabrés and Catalan ways and the Romboleden to Trondheim. Some Spanish stages are here, but the final stretch of the Camino Francés into Santiago is not. Every figure on this page is therefore a lower bound for what OpenStreetMap holds.
Routes. 1,906 OpenStreetMap route relations tagged as pilgrimage routes (or linked to Wikidata pilgrim route items), downloaded from the Overpass API in 2026. I kept 1,893, leaving out 13: a road, a bus route, a ski piste, a fitness trail, network relations, and six that inspection showed are not pilgrimage routes (a Michigan forest trail named after the Pilgrim River, for instance). 124 kept relations are containers for others, mostly super-routes made of stages.
No double counting. The same path often belongs to several relations: a stage and its super-route, two routes that share a valley, a cycling and a walking version. I split every way into its point to point segments, with coordinates to four decimal places (about 10 m), and counted each segment once whichever relation and direction it came from. The raw sum of all relations' ways is 83,037 km; without duplicates it is 77,804 km, 6.3% less. Each segment's country is the Natural Earth country at its midpoint.
Families. A relation is Camino if its names (in any language), tags or Wikidata link point to St James or Santiago, or if it carries the scallop shell symbol (78 relations were placed by the shell alone); Via Francigena, St Olav and Marian ways by similar rules; anything else is "other". Stages without a telling name take the family of the route they belong to. The rules are in the code and every relation's family, and the reason for it, is in the data file.
Sites. 1,403 rows from a Wikidata query for pilgrimage sites, 1,330 distinct items, 160 without an English label. Country from Wikidata, checked against the coordinates. Tradition from Wikidata's religion where given; the name based reading is a rough guide only.
What this is not. A count of pilgrims, or of the routes people actually use. OpenStreetMap is uneven: some countries' volunteers map every waymarked path, others map few, and tagging habits differ (France's long distance trails, for one). Straight line distance from Santiago is not walking distance. Wikipedia supplies the historical facts and the certificate counts.