Faith · 8 min
What a pilgrimage is for when you do not believe
Three hundred thousand people a year walk to Santiago. Most of them do not describe the reason as religious, and the Camino has absorbed that without much difficulty.
The Camino de Santiago is a working pilgrimage that has been continuously walked since the 9th century, briefly nearly died in the twentieth, and has since become one of the busiest long-distance walking routes in the world. Around a third of the people who now complete it record a non-religious motivation.
This causes less friction than you would think. The infrastructure is ancient and indifferent: the albergues take whoever arrives, the stamps go in whoever's credencial, and the cathedral gives the pilgrims' mass to a nave full of people in walking boots without asking any of them what they believe.
What the route does supply, to anybody, is a structure that modern life has almost entirely removed. You get up, you walk, you arrive, you eat, you sleep, and you do it again. The decisions are small and finite. After four or five days most people report the same thing, which is that the noise stops.
The last hundred kilometres from Sarria is the minimum distance for a compostela and is consequently crowded — school groups, tour parties, people with luggage transfer. Purists complain. The complaint misses that this has always been a mass phenomenon: the medieval Camino was crowded, commercial and full of people cutting corners, and there were guidebooks warning about bad innkeepers by 1140.
If crowds are the problem, the answer is not to be superior about Sarria but to walk a different route. The Camino Primitivo from Oviedo is harder and emptier. The Via Podiensis from Le Puy is a month long. The English Way from Ferrol takes five days and almost nobody uses it.
The same logic applies elsewhere in Europe. Meteora's monasteries are linked by monks' footpaths that almost every visitor drives past. Glendalough at eight in the morning is a monastic city in a valley; at noon it is a car park. Canterbury still has a walkable pilgrims' road from Winchester.
None of that requires belief. It requires arriving the slow way, which is the only part of pilgrimage that was ever really the point.
The practical note: two of the places in this piece are working religious communities. Covered shoulders, quiet, and no photography where it is asked for. That is not a lot to give.