Sharing a room with strangers is the whole point

You will share a room with strangers tonight. That's the whole point.

The albergue is the part of the Camino nobody fully describes. You book a bunk online, arrive sweaty and tired, and find yourself in a dormitory with twelve people you've never met — different countries, different ages, different reasons for being here.

By 9pm, someone is already asleep. By 10pm, at least three people are snoring. The lights go out collectively. Whoever got the top bunk regrets it. Nobody has any personal space whatsoever.

And somehow, it becomes one of the things you miss most when you get home.

Something about the dormitory strips away the social armour people normally wear. You can't perform a version of yourself when someone has watched you limp in the door, eat a banana on your bunk, and fall asleep mid-sentence. The albergue makes you human in a way that a private hotel room simply can't.

Morning is its own ritual: headtorches on at 5:30am, the collective choreography of packing quietly in the dark, the unspoken etiquette of not waking whoever managed to sleep through the alarms. By 6am, people you've never spoken to are sharing route advice over instant coffee.

Some pilgrims hate the lack of privacy. Most find they stop caring after day two. And a few discover that sleeping badly in a room full of strangers was somehow the best sleep of their year.

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