# How to Plan a City Walking Route You Will Actually Finish

**Most walking routes fail on arithmetic rather than ambition. Six kilometres is about seventy minutes of walking and most of a day of actual sightseeing, and almost nobody plans for the difference.**

You walk at about 5 km/h. You do not sightsee at about 5 km/h. Once you are stopping to look up, waiting for a gap in the crowd in front of a façade, reading a plaque, taking the photograph, taking the photograph again because someone walked into it, and standing still for a minute working out which of the four streets is yours, your effective pace drops to somewhere between 2 and 3 km/h.

That single number is what separates a route that works from a route that has you sitting on a kerb at half past three deciding which three stops to cut. Everything below follows from it.

## Start with the arithmetic

Take the time you actually have, subtract lunch and the two coffees you will want, and multiply what is left by 2.5 km/h. That is your route length. Not your walking capacity — your route length, stops included.

Five hours of daylight, minus an hour for eating, gives four hours, which gives you **about 10 km at the absolute outside and 6 to 7 km comfortably**. If your list of stops does not fit inside 7 km, the list is wrong. It is not a question of being fitter.

Two adjustments worth making before you commit:

- **Gradient costs more than distance.** A rule cyclists and hillwalkers both use is that climbing 100 m of elevation costs roughly the same as walking an extra kilometre on the flat. [Lisbon](https://neywo.com/destinations/portugal/lisbon/lisbon.md) is built across a set of hills over the Tagus, and a 6 km route there is a 9 km route anywhere else.
- **Heat costs more than gradient.** [Seville](https://neywo.com/destinations/spain/andalusia/seville.md) routinely passes 40°C in July and August, and the city sensibly stops moving in the afternoon. In that weather your 7 km becomes 4 km and two of the hours belong to somebody else.

## Pick a radius, not a list

The instinct is to start from a list of the things you want to see and join them up. That is how you end up crossing a city three times.

Invert it. Put a point on the map, draw a circle around it with a **radius of about 800 m**, and see what falls inside. A circle that size gives you a walkable loop of roughly 4 to 5 km once the streets stop being straight lines, which is a comfortable half-day with stops. Then ask what is missing, and whether it is worth moving the centre of the circle rather than stretching the route to reach it.

In a lot of European cities the circle does almost all the work, because the interesting part was built before anyone had to accommodate a car. [Rome](https://neywo.com/destinations/italy/lazio/rome.md)'s historic centre is around 3 km across and holds roughly 2,500 years of continuous building, stacked. You cannot walk it out in a day, but you also cannot walk in a straight line for ten minutes without hitting something.

## Cluster, then connect

Inside your circle, group the stops that are within about five minutes of each other and treat each group as one thing. A route is then four or five clusters joined by walks, rather than fifteen individual errands.

This matters for a reason that is not obvious until you have got it wrong: **backtracking is the thing that makes people quit.** Walking a kilometre to something new feels like progress. Walking the same 400 m for the second time feels like failure, even though it is shorter. Plan the clusters so the connections between them are streets you have not used yet.

The connections are also where you should stop optimising. A route through a city is not a delivery round. If the direct line between two clusters is a four-lane road and the indirect one is 200 m longer through a market, the market is the correct answer.

## Choose a start point you can actually find

Start somewhere large, obvious, and connected to public transport. The first ten minutes of a walk are the ones where you have no mental map yet, so they should ask nothing of you.

A big square works. A station works. A single named building on a corner works badly, because you will spend the first fifteen minutes discovering that it is behind you.

It also helps if the start is visually decisive — somewhere that feels like arriving. [Edinburgh](https://neywo.com/destinations/united-kingdom/scotland/edinburgh.md) is a good example of the principle in its geography: the city is two cities, a medieval Old Town on a ridge and a Georgian New Town on a grid below it, and starting at the point where you can see both at once tells you more in thirty seconds than a paragraph will.

## Build the day around one climb

Viewpoints are worth the effort and they are worth it once. Put the climb where you have the legs for it — usually the first two hours, occasionally at the end if the view is a sunset view — and then plan the rest of the day downhill from it.

Two climbs is a route with a mistake in it. Four is a route that will not be finished.

## Leave the gaps in on purpose

A route where every stop is significant is exhausting, and it flattens the significant stops into each other. You need the quiet stretches for the good ones to register.

So alternate deliberately. A dense historical cluster, then a residential street with nothing on it. A cathedral, then twenty minutes of a park. A gallery, then a café where you sit down and stop being a tourist for a while. The empty parts are not filler — they are what makes the next thing land.

Practically, that means writing into the route:

- **One sit-down stop every two hours**, whether or not you think you will want it.
- **A toilet plan.** Cafés, department stores, museums and railway stations, in that order of reliability. This sounds trivial until it is four o'clock in a city with no public conveniences and you are making decisions based on it.
- **Water**, and in southern Europe in summer, a lot more of it than you expect. [Rome](https://neywo.com/destinations/italy/lazio/rome.md) has hundreds of _nasoni_ running drinkable water all day and most visitors walk past them buying bottles.

## Have a wet version

Every route needs a second version that works in the rain, and it is easier to decide it in advance than at nine in the morning while it is happening.

The wet version is usually the same route with the indoor stops moved to the middle and the viewpoint dropped. In [Lisbon](https://neywo.com/destinations/portugal/lisbon/lisbon.md) it is also a different surface question: _calçada portuguesa_, the polished limestone paving, is genuinely slippery wet, and the sensible wet-weather answer there is the flat riverside rather than the hills.

## Know when not to plan it yourself

Planning a route is worth doing when you have the evening before, a map, and a reason to care about the shape of the day. It is not worth doing at 9:40 in the morning when you have an hour and a half before a train.

That is the case the [three ways into a city](https://neywo.com/ways-to-explore.md) are built around. A researched **walk** is the version someone else has already sized and sequenced, which is what you want the first time you are somewhere. **Build** takes the constraint you actually have — the minutes, and where you are standing right now — and puts a route inside it, which is what you want for the awkward gaps. And **roam** throws the route away entirely: no order, no end, every narrated place you pass tells its story once as you reach it, which is the right answer for a neighbourhood you have no plan for at all.

The other thing worth handing off is the commentary. A route you have planned yourself still leaves you standing in front of things you cannot explain, and the alternative — looking each one up on your phone as you reach it — puts your eyes on a screen at exactly the moment the building is in front of you. [Audio guides that start on their own when you arrive](https://neywo.com/blog/how-location-aware-audio-guides-work.md) exist to solve that specific problem. You can [hear real samples](https://neywo.com/guide-examples) before you take one anywhere.

## The short version

1. Multiply your available hours by 2.5 km/h. That is the route, stops included.
2. Add a kilometre of notional distance for every 100 m of climbing, and cut hard for heat.
3. Draw an 800 m circle before you write a list.
4. Group stops into clusters; never walk the same street twice.
5. Start somewhere big and obvious.
6. One climb, early.
7. Alternate dense and empty. Sit down every two hours.
8. Decide the wet version before it rains.

Everything on that list is a way of admitting that you will move more slowly and want to stop more often than the version of you doing the planning believes. Plan for the traveller you actually are and you will finish the route — which is, in the end, the only test of whether it was a good one.

Neywo has a free written guide for [every city it covers](https://neywo.com/destinations.md), and the app turns them into audio that plays as you reach each place, in 11 languages. Start with [how a self-guided audio tour actually works](https://neywo.com/how-it-works.md) if you have not taken one before.

## More from the blog

- [How to Turn a City Walk Into a Scavenger Hunt](https://neywo.com/blog/city-scavenger-hunt.md)
- [Day Trips by Coach: When the Organised Bus Is Worth It](https://neywo.com/blog/day-trips-by-coach.md)
- [Exploring a City by Bike: Where It Works and Where It Does Not](https://neywo.com/blog/explore-a-city-by-bike.md)
- [Guided Bike Tour or On Your Own? How to Decide](https://neywo.com/blog/guided-bike-tour-or-on-your-own.md)
- [How to Choose a Walking Tour App: Eight Questions That Matter](https://neywo.com/blog/how-to-choose-a-walking-tour-app.md)
- [The Best Time to Learn a City Is on the Way There](https://neywo.com/blog/learn-a-city-on-the-way-there.md)
- [One Free Hour in a City: How to Spend It Well](https://neywo.com/blog/one-free-hour-in-a-city.md)
- [See a City by Public Bus: The Better Hop-On Hop-Off](https://neywo.com/blog/see-a-city-by-public-bus.md)
- [What to Do Near Your Hotel: Reading the Streets You Sleep On](https://neywo.com/blog/what-to-do-near-your-hotel.md)
- [How Location-Aware Audio Guides Work (And Where AI Fits In)](https://neywo.com/blog/how-location-aware-audio-guides-work.md)
- [How to Get More Out of a City Walk: 9 Practical Habits](https://neywo.com/blog/how-to-get-more-out-of-a-city-walk.md)
- [The 10 Most Walkable Cities for a Weekend on Foot](https://neywo.com/blog/most-walkable-cities.md)
- [Self-Guided Audio Tour vs Guided Walking Tour: How to Choose](https://neywo.com/blog/self-guided-audio-tour-vs-guided-walking-tour.md)

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