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With GPS to Santiago de Compostela

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What you will find here:

1. NEW! The GR10 from Saint Jean Pied de Port to the Coast at Hendaye
3. GPS in France; coordinates of the GR65 to Moissac
4. There doesnt seem to be much else for GPS in France - can you help?
5. GPS in Spain; from Roncesvalles to Santiago
6. Any questions? - try these helpful sites
7. Editors for GPS tracks

Waypoints and Tracks in France

1. The GR65 from Moissac over the Pyrenees to Roncesvalles

• Here is our 2006 track from Moissac over the Pyrenees to Roncesvalles. The file is in format (*.kmz), so if you have Google Earth it should open for you automagically. If that doesnt work, you could try this (format *.kml). Or you could save the file to your own disk and try opening that. And if you havent got Google Earth, then here is a static preview:-
  
  The numbered circles correspond to the red numbers 1 (l'abbatiale de Moissac) to 100 (col Mendi Chipi) in the maps of the GR65 Topoguide.
  If you want to use the Google Earth file on your gps, nota bene that the data are completely raw, uneditted and undocumented. In particular -
  • There are four short segments of track where we deviated from the GR65 Topoguide route.
  • There are three minor zig-zags in the recorded track; due to gps artefacts.
  • There are some gaps in the recorded track; due to satellite drop out, to shortage of gps memory, and to failure of one bed and breakfast establishment to honour our booking.
  • Nine of the Topoguide waypoints are missing, due to above reasons, or forgetfulness.
  I intend to polish the dataset and post as a gps-ready file for others to use on their walk from Moissac. This may take some time (there are 6558 data points). If you can recommend a neat programme for editting track files and waypoints
Some suggestions for gps track editors have just come in (but I have not yet tried them).
• Meanwhile, here is a gps-ready file of waypoints 1 to 97 of the GR65 TopoGuide. I made this file from IGN's Carto Exploreur 3 CDROM for Aquitaine, plus a bit of perl to convert to gpx format, and uploaded it to my gps before setting off from Moissac. This turned out to be very useful. The accuracy is mostly acceptable;
  • 10 wayoints are within +/- 40 m of the position estimated by Garmin eTrex on the ground;
  • 20 are within +/- 60m;
  • 40 are within +/- 120m;
  • 75 are within +/- 500m;
  • 10 are off by 1km or worse. I have not yet checked why.

2. The GR65 to Moissac

• Here is our track (2005) along the GR65 as far as Moissac, captured by Garmin eTrex and visualised by Adam Schneider's GPS Visualizer:-
  
  You can download the file in Google Earth format here.
• The original posting that started all this has the tracks in other formats
• (But see the account of our various gps mapping problems)



3. Other maps of the GR65 in France

• The only other maps that I know of for the GR65 to Saint - Jean - Pied - du - Port are the cyclist's maps at À VTT sur les chemins de Compostelle. The maps seem to be scans, perhaps of Michelin 1:200 000 maps, with the GR65 added. "Portage" and "sévère montée" sections are indicated too. Some Michelin (?) gridlines are shown, but there are no coordinates, so they are not much use for gps.



4. NEW! (August 2007) The GR10 from Saint Jean Pied de Port to the Coast at Hendaye

• This year (2007) we walked from St Jean Pied de Port down to the coast, so as to pick up the Camino del Norde at Hendaye.
  I am not posting our gpx and kmz (Google Earth) files for instant download, because I think that many Camino walkers would find the GR 10 from Saint Jean to Hendaye far too difficult. There are several traverses - the GR 10 Mediterranean to Atlantic TopoGuide calls them "passages delicats" - where its all too easy to fall off the cliff onto the rocks in the valley below. For example
  
  The company Tour Aventure Trekking calls the above stretch "L'étape à caractère sportif ... à travers les falaises de grès rouge ..."
  
  But the scenery is magnificent, and now that you have been duly warned, if you for my gpx and kmz files, of course I'll send them to you.



• I'd also be interested to if you have walked this sector of the GR10 already. Not everyone agrees that it is dangerous. One correspondent writes I don't think it is risky and frankly the quote doesn't tally with my experience. I also have a sensitivity to heights but manage to control it - I just don't go where I don't think I can cope, and that certainly was not the case on the Hendaye-St JPdP part.



• My correspondent goes on "You do need to be able to read maps and use a compass as Basque country can be wet and cloudy. I completely agree. We used the IGN 1:25,000 maps 1346 OT, 1345 OT, and 1245 OT, version "compatible GPS", with Eric Werme's UTM Grid Overlay (1:25,000) to read GPS coordinates. I modified Eric Werme's XY numbering of the grid, copying the "Mini Carte de Report des Coordonnées UTM" of le Vieux Campeur, Paris, so that the Overlay looks like this -
  
  
  I think its a must-have, so I've put a copy (pdf) here for downloading. You can play with the grids while you are waiting for my gpx and kml files to arrive. Please note that permission is granted to reproduce these grids for personal use only. For all other use, contact Eric Werme, 2 Summit Rd, Plymouth, NH 03264-1306, USA (original copyright notice).
  
  There are four grids per A4 sheet. Print on a transparency and chop the sheet into four. Keep one in your wallet, pocket book or purse.

There doesnt seem to be much else

Can you help?

These are the only gps coordinates that I have been able to find for the Chemin(s) de Saint Jacques in France. If you know of any other links, or if you have raw data sets (gps tracks, routes or waypoints, in any format),

Waypoints and Tracks in Spain

From Roncesvalles to Santiago

Once you have crossed the Spanish border, there is a much bigger choice of gps data.

• Odilon Ferreira Junior has the absolutely best track files through Spain at his GPSTrackMaker site. (And GPSTrackMaker is itself a pretty good bit of GPS software)
• Eduardo Vincent made Odilon Ferreira Jr's GPSTrackMaker files into Garmin maps and loaded the maps here (in spanish) (Eduardo Vincent's original posting was as a comment on Janice Sutherland's blog GPS Waypoints for the Camino).
• Grant Spangler posted three Google Earth files to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ultreya/ (there is a carbon copy at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Santiagobis/message/16844 )
  1. - Camino_Frances.kmz Grant Spangler says "uses little yellow arrows, and is quite accurate in the Lat/Long presentation. The cities are in order, starting at Roncesvalles, and ending in Santiago. Good attention to some of those obscure little places you walked through."
  2. - Camino_de_Santiago.kmz Grant Spangler says "uses yellow flags to make the Way, but is moderately inaccurate in the placement of the markers. It DOES have a very nice dialogue you can read by clicking the flag."
  3. - Camino_de_Santiago_PUNTOS.kmz Grant Spangler says "is a very large series of actual waypoints punched in from a GPS. The PUNTOS are not all numerically in order, so auto flying from one point to the next works poorly. The accuracy is very good, but no commentary is attached."
• At http://www.gpstracks.nl you can download a route all the way from from the Netherlands ("De route start bij de St. Jacobshoeve in Vessem"); in Google Earth or in OzieExplorer format.
• At http://groups.msn.com/ElCaminoSantiago/general.msnwthere are some nice profile maps of the ups and downs of the Camino in Spain; but I didnt find anything that is gps-enabled here.
• Arturo J. Murias has a nice bi-lingual (spanish and english) facility at http://www.godesalco.com that generates files of sectors (distances, heights, villages, lodging facilities, stages, and even sun and moon calendar), (but not gps coordinates), for:
  1. - Le Puy-en-Velay to Roncesvalles (Via Podensis)
  2. - Roncesvalles to Santiago de Compostela (Camino de Santiago)
  3. - Sevilla to Santiago de Compostela (Via de la Plata)

Any questions?

Try these:-

• Discussion group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Santiagobis/messages
• Bulletin board at http://www.santiago-compostela.net/bulletinen.php
• Answers to frequently asked questions at The Confraternity of Saint James.
• And last but not least why bother with a GPS anyway?
• C'est à dire pourquoi se compliquer la view avec un GPS?

Editting GPS Tracks

I wrote above If you can recommend a neat programme for editting track files and waypoints please drop me an email. The gps tracklog editor I am looking for would have 2 windows. Window One would show track points in tabular, "Excel", format and Window Two would show the same tracklog in map format (i.e. against an X,Y grid). Edits should occur in real time, so as the user scrolls down the "excel" table in window One, the trackpoints in window Two should light up in turn. Edits in window One should show up as same-time changes in window Two.
Replies are beginning to come in:-

• Dr Ian Currah wrote a proof-of-concept to show how to do this in Excel / Open Office.
• Professor Ari Jolma drew attention to two Open Source editors
  1. QGIS
  2. MapWindow
  and he also posed the question on his wiki.
• Blogspot posted Collaborative Maps via EditGrid "Creating your own maps via Google Maps is getting easier by the day. Using the online spreadsheet EditGrid it is possible to simply enter Longitude and Latitude alongside a placename and view the data via Google Maps".
• On OpenStreetMap (talk Digest, Vol 25, Issue 43; Thu, 7 Sep 2006 18:44:33 +0100 ) Robert Scott mentioned GPSMan GPSMan is a stand-alone Tcl/Tk program by Miguel Filgueiras at the Universidade do Porto.

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uri http://users.skynet.be/watermael/gps/50358.html
-- Original file 50358.html --
-- Dated 2006-09-02T10:53:00 --