Why People Go
Why People Go
In 1985, the Pilgrim’s Office in Santiago de Compostela recorded 1,245 people arriving on foot to claim their Compostela, the certificate given to those who complete the Camino. Last year, the count was 530,919. That is not a rounding error or a marketing statistic. A practice the modern world had all but set down was picked back up and exploded in popularity.
The obvious question is why. Not why pilgrimage exists, which is old ground, but why it is being chosen now, by people several centuries removed from the world that built it, in numbers that keep climbing every year the data is measured.
It Isn’t Obligation
The medieval pilgrim often walked under some form of compulsion, real or social. A penance assigned by a confessor. A vow made in illness. An expectation attached to rank or piety that made staying home the harder choice. Almost none of that applies to the person lacing up boots for the Camino this year. Researchers who study the current boom keep landing on the same explanation, and it has nothing to do with obligation. People are choosing pilgrimage because they want travel to give them something that ordinary travel doesn’t: meaning, reflection, a sense of having been changed rather than merely having been somewhere.
That distinction matters more than it might first appear. A practice chosen freely, for its own sake, by people with every other option available to them, tells you something a practice performed under duty never could. It tells you the thing itself still works.
The Space Between
The anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner had a word for the space pilgrimage opens up: liminality, a threshold state in which a person is lifted out of the roles that usually define them. A pilgrimage removes you from your title, your house, your calendar, and sets you down in a kind of in-between space where none of that applies. Most modern life is organized to prevent exactly this. Every hour is claimed by something. Every identity is reinforced daily by the people around you who know you as the boss, the parent, the person who always handles it.
Pilgrimage interrupts that on purpose. And what people report finding in the interruption is remarkably consistent across traditions and centuries: clarity about what actually matters, once the noise that usually crowds it out has been removed for a week. Grief that finally has room to move, because the walking gives it somewhere to go. A returned sense of scale, of being a small creature in a very old and very large story, which turns out to be less frightening than it sounds and more like relief.
Company on the Road
The other thing people consistently describe is a particular kind of companionship, one that seems to form faster and run deeper on pilgrimage than it does almost anywhere else in adult life. Strangers become close in days, not years. Some of this is the shared physical difficulty, the blistered feet and early mornings that any veteran of a long walk will tell you do more for intimacy than a dinner party ever could. But some of it is the liminal space itself. Two people with no title between them, walking toward the same unearned destination, tend to meet each other as they actually are.
This is not incidental to why pilgrimage groups stay in each other’s lives for years afterward. It is close to the whole point.
What You’re Actually Choosing
Put simply: people go on pilgrimage now for largely the same reasons they always have, stripped of the coercion that used to accompany the choice. They go to be interrupted. They go to remember, in the body, truths that get thin when they only live in the mind. They go to walk beside people they’ll actually know by the end of it, and beside the memory of everyone who walked the same road before them.
The next piece in this series looks at where people go to find this, the handful of places and routes that have carried this practice for centuries, and what each one actually offers a modern pilgrim who walks it today.
Stillpoint Travels leads small pilgrimage and travel experiences rooted in history, beauty, and presence.
More in this series:
2. Why People Go (you are here)