Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Abstract

Tourism is an economic activity capable of promoting the development of regions, creating wealth and contributing to the preservation of heritage. Thus, the tourism sector in general, and in particular, the new typologies of tourism that take advantage of cultural resources, such as religious tourism, have in recent years become the focus of attention by economic, political and scientific agents. Religious tourism started the moment man began to move due to a question of belief, that is to say, with a religious manifestation, the pilgrimage, being a pilgrim a tourist with religious motivation. Currently, according to UNWTO estimates, between 300 and 330 million tourists visit the main religious sites every year. Taking into account the increasing interest in the subject of religious tourism and pilgrimage, a review of the academic literature on this type of tourism is carried out in this chapter by means of a descriptive bibliometric study of articles, books and of book chapters included in the multidisciplinary Scopus (Elsevier) database until the year 2016. Thus, through an advanced search for terms, we selected a representative set of 199 documents that form the ad-hoc base of the analysis. In view of the results, it is concluded that despite an uncertain start at the beginning of the 80s, from the year 2006 the interest for this discipline experiences a rapid growth with more than 80% of the work published during the 2006-2016 period. When publishing, the authors opt for specialized journals in the tourism sector in the areas of Social Sciences and Business, Management and Accounting or Arts and Humanities.