Abstract
The Royal Monastery of Guadalupe has been one of the most important religious destinations in Spain since the 14th century, when the black wooden sculpture of the Virgin Mary (sculpted in the 1st century AD) was found. It was declared a World Heritage Site by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization (UNESCO) in 1993 and is presently a tourism attraction of international interest. It is visited by more than 60,000 tourists annually, including pilgrims and other people interested in the cultural and natural heritage of the area. The aim of this study was to decipher ways that religiousness is experienced by tourists with different motivations, i.e., to better understand how religion is linked to tourism through embodied notions of godliness in different modalities of tourism. A total of 242 visitors were interviewed in the summer of 2017. They were asked about the main motivations for their visits, which were classified into five groups (religious, cultural, environmental, social, and educational reasons) and used as latent variables in a path structural equation model (SEM). The model showed strong predictive power (R2 = 87.5%) reporting a significant positive influence of religious, cultural, and environmental motivations on religious tourism in this region.
Highlights
The village of Guadalupe (Extremadura, Spain) has been widely regarded as one of the most important pilgrimage destinations for Catholicism ever since King Alfonso XI of Castile ordered the construction of the Royal Monastery in 1337 [1]
The partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) method seems to be ideal to measure these variables through variance
The model conveyed in this paper has considered religious tourism (RT) as a dependent variable
Summary
The village of Guadalupe (Extremadura, Spain) has been widely regarded as one of the most important pilgrimage destinations for Catholicism ever since King Alfonso XI of Castile ordered the construction of the Royal Monastery in 1337 [1]. It is commonly accepted that the Monastery was constructed in the same place where Gil Cordero found the wooden sculpture of the Virgin Mary [4]. This image was sculpted in the workshop of Saint John the Evangelist in the 1st century and has the peculiarity of being coloured in black [5]. For the latter reason the Virgin of Guadalupe is known by Christians worldwide as the Black Virgin, Lady, or Madonna [6]
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