I love this type of question! Choosing a camino is always so hard, but such a fun way to spend some time. I’ll give you my reactions based on the things you mentioned in your first post. BTW, just in case you haven’t seen them, a bunch of forum members had a lot of fun during covid confinement making very detailed threads for most of the routes you mentioned (maybe too detailed even for a planner like you, Robo!). We did one for the Lana (
part 1 and
part 2), the
Madrid, the
Levante, and the
Mozárabe. Actually I can’t find a forum planning thread on the Mozárabe, though I thought we did one. But the thread I’ve linked to puts out some ideas about shorter Mozárabe stages.
The remoteness — If by remote you mean far from villages and towns, the Lana offers a few days through gorges that I would describe as remote. But for the rest, I think you are always in close distance to ”civilization.” None of these have anything like some of the days on the Olvidado or Salvador, where you are pretty much alone out there in the mountains and where cell phone coverage is spotty. But all of the caminos you mention are very untraveled, so you will have plenty of walking alone time even though the camino is not remote and you’re never very far from a highway or road, or the next town or village.
A few interesting towns along the way — Here I’d pick the Lana or the Levante. The Levante has a very large number of stops in towns that have beautiful plazas, churches, occasionally museums (like Dulcinea’s supposed home). The Lana also stops in some beautiful places, and there are some Roman ruins and restored monasteries that are slight off-route detours, but I’d say the Levante has more of this. The Mozárabe also has a lot of nice castle towns, which gives you plenty to do in the afternoon. Some of those castles are just beautifully restored.
Those
wide open landscapes, big skies and wonderful walking paths.For me, the Levante wins, or the Mozárabe — so many days on the Levante walking through huge open fields of green, with a castle perched on a hill that you could see for many kms and thought you’d never get there. Mozárabe has a lot of those days too, but the landscape is not as wide open. The Mózarabe has a lot of olive groves, the Levante (and the Lana to some extent) a bazillion vineyards. The Madrid also has lots of meseta so you’ll get those wide open landscapes there as well.
Not much road walking at all. I think the Madrid is the camino with the least amount of road walking, though it does have some walking on an asphalt bike trail at the beginning. This is probably due to the fact that the Camino de Madrid was constructed and routed relatively recently so it wasn’t a camino that followed ancient paths that became roads that became highways. The first four days on the Levante are almost exclusively asphalt, but once you get out of the Valencia suburbs the asphalt takes you through rice paddies and fruit orchards. But it is almost all asphalt to Xátiva. The Mozárabe has what I would say is the normal amount of road walking, but it adds the kicker of a few days through rocky river beds. We took the alternative mountain route to start the Lana, from Villajoyosa, but I have read that the first few days on the “regular” Lana have a lot of asphalt. This is inevitable, I think, when you leave from a big city that has lots of suburban development.
And
just enough infrastructure that I could keep below 25 kms except for a couple of days. I think that with the kind of careful planning that you do, you could do this on almost any of these routes. I did walk very long distances on the Levante, but that was just because I met two French peregrinos and we hit it off, and my choice was walk alone or walk with them. They were the only two I met until joining up with the Sanabrés in Zamora. But I think there were usually ways to break things up though. You’ve probably read about the exceptional hospitality on the Mozárabe, with its amazing set of albergues that take you all the way from Almería to Granada.
If having some pilgrim companionship is a factor for you, though you’re not likely to get much on any of these, I think the Mozárabe and the Madrid would be the most likely.
And if monumental cities are your thing, which I don’t think they are, you’ve got them on all of these routes.
Levante - Valencia, Toledo, Ávila, Zamora
Madrid - Segovia
Lana - Cuenca, Burgos
Mozárabe - Almería, Granada, Córdoba
Happy planning, I’ll be interested to see which one you pick.