De Calixtinus is a tool for people planning to walk the Camino Santiago. What you do is enter your preferences - how fit you are, how long would would like to walk each day, what sort of facilities you want at day's-end, specific places where you want to stop and so on. De Calixtinus then attempts to build a globally optimised set of days that best match your preferences. To do this, it may stretch out a day's walk to the next town, so that you can get to a place with food at the end of the day, or shrink a day, so that the next day can break before you have walked too far. This process operates over the entire route, so the planner may stretch or shrink a day a bit to make things better many days further on.
The planner works by minimising penance, a catch-all term for the effort spent travelling. The basic idea is that everything is converted into equivalent kilometres of walking. Actual travel is converted into a perceived distance that takes account of climbs and descents, fatigue and so on. To this distance, adjustments are added for particularly long or short distances, whether the place where you sleep meets your needs, whether there is a restaurant in the town where you are staying so that you can eat, and a variety of other adjustments. De Calixtinus tries to minimise the total penance accumulated over the entire trip.
The panner also attempts to include rest days in the plan. Typically, for every 5-6 days of walking, the planner will find a suitable rest point and schedule a day off. You can use the rest day to recover, refit, re-supply and spend a day seeing the sights before travelling on.
Welcome to De Calixtinus.
If you are planning to walk the Camino Santiago, this site allows you to develop a set of daily stages tailored to your level of fitness and preferences in terms of accommodation, food etc. The panner is designed to give you a globally optimal set of stages, stretching some a bit and reducing others, to give you the best overall trip.
To begin, press the Start button below.
De Calixtinus uses cookies for session tracking and to keep a persistent copy of your current travel and route preferences.
De Calixtinus does not keep any other personal information, or share information with other entities, other than as saved plans.
De Calixtinus saves generated plans for revisiting and sharing with others. These plans are publicly viewable by anyone with the unique link. The generated plans contain no personal information or identification
This is intended to be a helpful tool for people planning their trip. It provides a suggested itinerary that you can choose to ignore any time you feel like it.
De Calixtinus is (usually) fast enough to allow you to revisit things en-route, starting from where you currently are. One of the reasons that it keeps your current set of preferences in a cookie is so that you can breeze through things you don't want to change if, for example, you didn't quite make your goal and what to re-plan mid-camino.
De Calixtinus doesn't really distinguish between an interesting place to stop, full of sights and entertainment, and a boring, dusty waypoint in the middle of nowhere. Or a bar that is sometimes open for a couple of hours each day or a full-dress restaurant. Or a small corner shop and a full-blown supermarket.
De Calixtinus uses the metric system, both internally and for input and display. A possible future enhancement is to allow the user to specify their preferred unit system but, right now, metric it is.
De Calixtinus is still under development
Just because "Computer Says So!" doesn't mean it's a good idea. So use your own judgement and check other sources of information. The output from this program is no substitute for either careful planning or casual resilience in the face of adversity.
I've done my best to be accurate about the data but ... if you're relying on something to be true, check with other sources, as well. Things change: places to stay come and go, temporarily shut down or get filled up; roads get blocked; on Sunday everything shuts down and you need to plan accordingly.