Pilgrim Routes

Fountains and facilities on pilgrim routes

Walking days are planned around water and washing. Both are on one map, offline if you need it.

  • Drinking water
  • Toilets
  • Showers
  • Laundry
The Fontavio map with the drinking water filter on, showing water points across a city.

Many walkers, long stages, thin services between towns, and fountains whose reliability travels by word of mouth and out-of-date route notes: pilgrim routes concentrate exactly the water problem every long walk runs into.

Fontavio maps drinking fountains, toilets, showers and laundry across Europe, US and Canada, including the countries the major routes cross. It is a general map rather than a route guide, which means it does not know your stage plan, but it does know what is in the villages along it.

Offline matters here more than almost anywhere. Download the country before you start and the map keeps working through the stretches where there is no coverage and no reason to expect any.

It is also the sort of map that improves fastest when walkers use it. A fountain confirmed as running in July is worth a great deal to whoever walks past it in August, and confirming one takes a single tap.

The things that matter

01 PRO

Offline maps

Pick an area on the map and download it. The base map, the places and their details all come with it, opening hours and reviews included, so everything keeps working with no signal at all. Photos are the one thing left out, to keep the download small. Built for valleys, borders and prepaid data.

02 PRO

Water along your route

Pick the water stops and facilities you want along the way, then open the lot in Google Maps as one trip. For offline route planning, download also Google Maps from that area.

03

Confirmed by the people using it

Every place carries a badge for whether a person has confirmed it works. One tap confirms it, one tap reports a problem, and repeatedly wrong edits limit an account.

04

Look somewhere up before you go

Search any city or address and the map jumps there, so you can plan tomorrow tonight instead of working it out on arrival.

Look up a city before you go

Search any city and the map jumps there. These pages show samples of the available data and statistics for cities.

Pilgrim Routes: common questions

Does Fontavio follow the Camino routes themselves?
No. It maps facilities, not waymarked routes, so it complements a route guide rather than replacing one. What it adds is current, confirmable information about whether the water in a village is actually there.
Will it work without signal or roaming?
Yes, with an area downloaded before you set out. The base map and the places both come with it, so that area works with the phone in flight mode.
Is coverage good along the main routes?
Northern Spain, France and Portugal all have solid open-data coverage of public fountains, and it improves wherever walkers add to it. Every place says whether a person has confirmed it, and new places are marked unverified until someone confirms them.

More in the full FAQ.

Other ways people use it

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