The curious case of Santiago de Compostela: From pilgrimage to sustainable urban mobility

I. The protean nature of pilgrimage: a tension between mobility and immobility

[N.B. This first part corresponds to an academic article enriched by the transversal perspective of LIS. It consequently corresponds to my take on the “reflective piece” insofar as it represents the many ways interdisciplinarity adds meaningful layers to otherwise specialised analysis. Reflective sections are clearly flagged with a mention of the names of the professors that have inspired them.]

To properly navigate from the general to the particular, we’ll start with a broad exploration of the various facets of pilgrimage by adopting an academic lens focusing on the evolution of pilgrimage studies through time. We’ll see that mobility, despite being an essential part of the phenomenon, has not always been the core dimension of interest to academics analysing pilgrimage.
Rémy Delage’s quasi-systematic article on the field will serve as our main point of reference throughout this step as it constitutes a convenient source reviewing two recent books by key authors Eade and Albera, themselves compiling international contributions to pilgrimage studies that go beyond anglophone research. ³
Social sciences have provided ample opportunities to study the convergence of religion, spirituality and mobility. The research field is made up of a wide variety of perspectives that have to be taken into account to paint an accurate overall picture of pilgrimage. One of those perspectives, however, has dominated all others until fairly recently: Anglo-Saxon research developed from the 1970s onwards with a focus on North America and Europe.
This hegemony owes a lot to the work of the Turner couple and their exploration of symbols, rituals & pilgrimage, a perspective which aligns well with the LIS approach and the teachings of both Bronwyn Tarr and James Carney. Pilgrimage can be defined as a “journey to a sacred place which lies beyond the mundane realm of the pilgrim’s daily experience”. ⁴ What the Turners add to this basic definition is an understanding of how the phenomenon takes place. To them, pilgrimage is akin to a rite-of-passage insofar as it represents an in-betweenness in the personal trajectory of the traveller, who experiences liminality during his journey. It clashes with common social structures and consequently corresponds to a form of “ritual anti-structure”: the pilgrim’s endeavour levels the playing field between fellow travellers and dissolves some of their differences to bridge their former identity with a new one that includes attributes shared by the communita, a spontaneous and unstructured group of equals sharing common experiences. ⁵

This resetting in scope seems natural today since our 21st century society holds globalisation as a fact and mobility as a hyper-valued imperative – something Richard Barrett has been keen on insisting upon during our visits with LIS – but it has not always been so. With the turn of mobility developed in social sciences from the 1990s onwards, pilgrimage studies have drifted away from a static focus. The Indian example is a convenient illustration of formerly missed opportunities: despite massive population flows directly related to pilgrimages within the subcontinent, Indianist anthropologists have disregarded travel during most of the second part the 20th century in favour of commentaries focused on communities in their village boundaries. When they did study pilgrimage, they either focused on the configuration of sacred sites or on the rites taking place in those locations with a counter-intuitively static and structure-bound perspective. In spite of that, pilgrimage in India has represented for a long time the sole opportunity for common people – and especially women – to travel beyond the frontiers of their daily lives. ¹⁰
For their part, the Turners experienced the opposite shortcoming by focusing mostly on pilgrimage as a “kinetic ritual” and forgetting the underlying structures it entails. The realignment of the two perspectives – mobility and immobility (of the journey itself but also the many implications of its starting & end points) – has become a standard in contemporary pilgrimage studies. This is especially important in our perspective considering that a city’s status as a pilgrimage destination heavily impacts its urbanisation, local economy and the way it conceives mobility within its bounds. Santiago de Compostela’s city centre, for instance, is firmly established as a pedestrian area with numerous roads literally paving the way for people travelling on foot. As a result, it is not the town hall, football stadium or university which stands at the heart of town but the cathedral, whose ramifications radiate throughout Galicia to reach much of Western Europe. Besides, from a symbolic standpoint, Santiago possesses a disproportionate amount of signs dedicated to walkers compared to other cities: among them, the scallop shell embodying Saint-James leads the way towards the town’s historical centre in every direction. It also provides a unique opportunity of analysing the scallop shell as a powerful and multivalent semiotic marker. Drawing on the lessons of James Carney & James Everest in addition to the works of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Pierce, we can comment on the shell in terms of its signifier, signified and broader polysemic nature. When it comes to the signifier, it constitutes no more than the physical shape or representation of the scallop shell, often worn as a badge by pilgrims or displayed on walls, paths or boundary stones. Moving to the signified, the marker is directional in nature at a denotative level as it reminds travellers that they’re walking the right path. 

II. Understanding the pilgrim : biographical motivations in walking the camino

 
[N.B. This part makes use of data and media content at my level by involving official statistics, academic surveys and my own interview of a pilgrim to provide insights into the role of sustainability in the personal motivations of pilgrims]

Those queries will allow us to articulate our general exploration of pilgrimage with a micro-level study of the biographical perspectives of individual journeys. Despite the precautions one needs to take before asking “why?” – lest we scare off honest answers from otherwise willing study participants – the question is already of singular interest to religious authorities. In Galician Spain, the Pilgrim Reception Office of Santiago de Compostela – one of three sacred sites of cardinal importance to Christianity – has made it compulsory for pilgrims to answer a short motivational survey and register beforehand if they want to receive their Compostella, the official certificate of arrival. Those that have registered but have declared neither religious nor spiritual motives shall obtain no more than a mere paper of welcome, a far cry from the original certificate issued in Latin from the Middle Ages onwards.
The question then is: are those surveys any reliable? And are the methods employed by the Catholic church relevant to properly understand the motivational dynamics behind pilgrims’ journeys? Sociologists R.C. Lois González and X.M. Santos Solla believe not: the “dataset provided by the Pilgrim Office is interesting but very limited despite improvements”. ¹⁷ Not only is the scope of proposed motivations narrow, the institution that issues it is not neutral and also discriminates pilgrims based on their answers when issuing certificates. The fact that either religious or spiritual motives need to be selected to obtain the original Compostella makes it probable it has steered many individuals away from certain answers.
In 2024, there were 499.239 pilgrims completing the Camino de Santiago (compared with 300.000 in 2017). 42% of them declared a “religious motive”, 35% chose a “religious or other motive” and 23% selected a “non-religious motive”; even if the survey concerns all of Santiago’s pilgrims thanks to its compulsory nature, the array of motives to choose from is lacklustre to say the least. ¹⁸ It also prevents us from understanding the place of sustainability and low-impact travel within the pilgrim’s rationale and decision-making. Yet, this initial statistical disappointment has the merit of spurring a methodological reflection on how to best grasp pilgrim motivations.
When exploring previous sociological attempts at understanding the latter, we observe two distinct approaches. The first one tries to elaborate on the Pilgrims Office’s own statistics with improved surveys offering respondents numerous motivational categories. Such a method has the benefit of allowing for a mix of quantitative and qualitative analyses but remains a difficult balancing act to perform. One of the most recent surveys of the sort has been issued by the Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, in Portugal. ¹⁹ An online questionnaire was distributed in 2015 to more than a thousand Santiago pilgrims, it garnered 1140 valid responses and captured motivations over 8 generic factors including 25 sub-items to be graded on a 5-point Likert scale. A promising protocol at first glance.

The second approach ideally complements surveys as it focuses on in-depth interviews of a select number of pilgrims. The best example of this approach was performed by German anthropologist Christian Kurrat for his 2015 doctoral dissertation and was synthetised in a 2019 article. ²¹ The idea was to leverage ground theory to induce a typology of pilgrim profiles through 30 narrative interviews of German travellers having completed a camino of more than 250km (100km being the minimal distance recognised by the Pilgrims Office to obtain a Compostella). The respondents were asked to relate their whole life stories with minimal guidance to foster coherence and detail. The database was then vertically and horizontally coded to ensure the emergence of thematic commonalities and distinctions that warranted the creation of particular profiles. Interviewees were characterised based on four main codes : the “source pattern” or general cause behind their pilgrimage, the communicational forms and objectives at play during their journeys, the meaning they gave to the effort of walking (what Kurrat calls “corporeality”) and, lastly, the importance attributed to their home environments while travelling (family, friends, work…).
Despite its obvious quantitative limitations, this method successfully isolated five main types of travellers: balance pilgrim, crisis pilgrim, time-out pilgrim, transitional pilgrim & new start pilgrim. ²² Considering the possibilities for comparison it offered, Kurrat’s process seemed worth emulating during our own interview.

Narrative interviews are more challenging than they appear and asking a respondent to relate his personal takes and life story with minimal input requires an experienced interviewer. For the sake of efficiency, the process we used was streamlined to offer questions that echoed Kurrat’s codes, enriched them and progressively mounted in complexity.
Based on Kurrat’s typology and the prior knowledge we held of the respondent, several assumptions could have been made regarding his motivations and position among the types. The interviewee is a 65 year old male born in Spain who lived the majority of his life in France. His journey begins in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and comprises close to 800km of travel on foot ending at the Santiago cathedral. He has recently transitioned into retirement (which could have naturally situated him among “transition pilgrims”) and lost his father less than a year ago (a detail that could have located him in the “crisis pilgrim” category). He has entered his senior years and has decades of life to look back to (a feature shared among many “balance pilgrims”).

Miracles aside, I believe that this man [Christ] could have existed, that he came up one day and took stock of what was happening around him and said “enough!”. I’m not a very religious person so, to me, he was a revolutionary of sorts that paid for his ideas with blood because he challenged the status quo and talked truth to power. My pilgrimage felt like a way to express my support to the values he championed at a time when the world seems to have lost its way. (…) The more time passes and the worse things seem to get. Being born in the early sixties, I used to think that the opposite was true but between climate change, Covid and wars sprouting left and right, I’ve been experiencing quite a bit of cognitive dissonance lately. And I felt like walking the path would set me straight.

Interestingly enough, the interviewee has one major difference with Kurrat’s respondents: he was born in Galicia barely a hundred kilometres away from Santiago. It felt appropriate to ask him whether his journey ever felt like travelling back home but this conjecture was swiftly brushed aside. To him, neither his birthplace nor the recent death of his Galician father had anything to do with his endeavour.
While on the trail, he initially didn’t feel like he had much time to mull any further his reasons for walking the camino, being overly focused on bearing the pain of the pilgrimage’s physicality. He recalls:

On the first day, we faced the hardest part of the whole **** trip – during a storm, mind you – I felt like I was going to drop dead on the ground. I could not think of anything beyond keeping one foot in front of the other. I could not talk, something that would linger throughout the first third of the way. With the storm, it really feels in retrospect like I was going through the Deluge.

Over time, however, communication came naturally (much like for “time-out pilgrims”). As the pain faded away, he started entertaining conversations with fellow pilgrims about everything and nothing. The path turned into a communal experience. Sometimes, he would meet former companions further down the road and catch up. But, by his own admission, the most singular feature of his “communication form” had nothing to do with other travellers and everything to do with Saint James. He says:

Along the way, you meet pilgrims every few hundred meters – with a much greater density the closer you get to Santiago – but you also meet statues of Saint James at regular intervals, so I started to have those inner talks with him… with myself, I mean. It was both amusing and very convenient to clear my head and reflect on my journey.

What that curious phenomenon highlights is the anthropomorphising of this pilgrimage via the figure of Saint James. Unlike other pilgrimages that lead to specific locations, the Camino de Santiago doesn’t merely end in Santiago, it literally means the path of Saint James. It seems entirely plausible that this “special relationship” with the saint is not unusual among pilgrims walking the trail, a fact worth enquiring further.

Among the reflections spurred along the trail, he recalls the increasing importance taken by nature in his thoughts:

When you spend so many hours outside during the day, you can’t help but notice things that usually escape you. It just percolates. As I was getting closer and closer to the landscapes of my birthplace, I started getting a weird sense of déjà vu. This might seem like an odd thing to say considering that I’m from there and obviously knew the place but… I eventually understood what was bothering me. A few details were off. From my childhood, I remember Galicia & Asturias as vibrant places filled with wildlife, insects… things like that, but it sometimes felt way emptier in reality than in my recollections. Very few insects… It was like a slap in the face, a tangible sign of what we do to nature. But it also made my trip more meaningful and I felt proud to be walking up there, as opposed to taking a plane.

In addition to his rekindled connection to nature, our respondent insists on the central place held by the family he left at home. Similarly to “balance pilgrims”, he underlines that the path to Santiago represented an outlet to express feelings and priorities otherwise shrouded by the vicissitudes of daily life:

I’m a stoic and reserved man so the pilgrimage was an opportunity to tell my family I loved them, especially my wife that might not hear it enough. They are everything I have. That’s why I extensively communicated about my journey while travelling. I called them and wrote every other day my “story” on an app thread specifically designed to been accessible to my family members, friends and close former colleagues.

What is certain to our interviewee is that his motivations to do the pilgrimage again will have less to do with the ones that spurred his first camino and everything to do with the experience itself:

I’m very happy I did it but it doesn’t feel like it changed me. I don’t feel more religious. (…) I don’t have an answer about the future of mankind. But I will do it again. After the first part of the journey, when I had to walk like a robot to keep afloat, I started loving it. Seeing amazing landscapes, meeting interesting people, and feeling good: the well-being that came from walking after the pain. From now on, the best reason to do the camino is the camino itself. I will be back!

When putting this biographical interview into perspective with Kurrat’s work, we realise that despite the relevance of individual life event triggers (death, retirement, self-chosen break, burnout…) in understanding the motivations of pilgrims in undertaking the camino, it would be worth adding a layer to the analysis dealing with the collective trajectories in which travellers are involved (climate change in particular) to more adequately represent all the nuances of pilgrim motivations.

III. Bridging past and present: Santiago’s optimistic urban mobility prospects

[N.B. This last part corresponds to the urban mobility-focused academic piece required in the guidelines and is fully in-line with the Unsuperficials’ overarching theme.]

This urban model isn’t exempt of challenges but Santiago de Compostela benefits from various advantages. In addition to its profound cultural and spiritual significance, to its religious relevance in Christendom and, more recently, to its political status as the seat of Galician institutions (Xunta de Galicia, regional parliament…), the city has a distinct geographical advantage. It is found in a central position with respect to other Galician towns of the region’s Atlantic axis. This network of municipalities extends from Ferrol in the North to the Portuguese frontier – even reaching Porto further South – and is articulated around a high speed trainline and the AP-9 highway linking the Galician metropolitan areas of A Coruña and Vigo. 

Now that sustainable urban mobility matters have been fully evaluated and designed in Santiago de Compostela, the only thing left is for implementation to successfully take over. This is a challenge that makes the regional capital of Galicia a location of peculiar interest for us to keep track of on a long-term basis in the spirit of the 11th UN SDG on sustainable cities. Pilgrimage, anyone?