Sacred Trees, Mystic Caves, Holy Wells: Devotional Titles in Spanish Rural Sanctuaries

Jaime Tatay

doi:10.3390/rel12030183

Abstract

This paper explores how local, lived religion has creatively linked spiritual insights and popular devotions in ecologically valuable settings helping generate and preserve the rich Spanish biocultural heritage. Focusing on a selection of Sacred Natural Sites (SNS), mostly Marian sanctuaries, it shows that local “geopiety” and religious creativity have generated “devotional titles” related to vegetation types, geomorphological features, water, and celestial bodies. It also argues that, despite mass migration to urban centers, the questioning of “popular religion” after the Second Vatican Council, and the rapid secularization of Spanish society over the past fifty years, a set of distinctive rituals and public expressions of faith—some of them dating back to the Middle Ages—have remained alive or even thrived in certain rural sanctuaries. These vernacular devotions, however, do not necessarily announce the advent of the postsecular. Finally, it suggests that Protected Area (PA) managers, regional governments, custodians, anthropologists, tourism scholars, and theologians should work together in order to analyze, interpret, and help solve the management challenges highly popular SNS face.

Highlights

Despite the rapid and complex secularization process of Spanish society over the past five decades (Pérez-Agote 2007, 2012; González-Anleo et al 2021), certain spiritual traditions, pilgrimages, and rituals have remained surprisingly alive or even experienced a significant revitalization (Maldonado 1996; Lois González 2013). Some of these devotional practices date back to the late medieval or the early modern period, others have a more recent origin, and many are linked to Marian hermitages, chapels, shrines or monasteries considered Sacred Natural Sites (SNS) (Wild and McLeod 2008) in or near Protected Areas (PAs) with high ecological value (Tatay-Nieto and Muñoz-Igualada 2019)
Allison and John Studley, that, despite the historical shortcomings of spiritual movements and religious institutions, “local people can extend an ethic of care to their biophysical surroundings, through the mediation of personified deities” (Allison 2015, p. 502) and lay participation can play a key role in the ritual protection of SNS (Studley 2018)
SNS set in PAs—El Rocío, Covadonga, and Montserrat—to illuminate the role some devotions and rituals may have played in their conservation status and religious vitality

Summary

Introduction

Despite the rapid and complex secularization process of Spanish society over the past five decades (Pérez-Agote 2007, 2012; González-Anleo et al 2021), certain spiritual traditions, pilgrimages, and rituals have remained surprisingly alive or even experienced a significant revitalization (Maldonado 1996; Lois González 2013). Despite the profound changes which have occurred in European Catholic countries since Vatican II, some SNS have defied both the secularization of society and the clericalization of religion by means of cultivating a broader understanding of the sacred while generating lively rituals and devotional lay practices rooted in local, folk culture. Spanish SNS and their surroundings serve today as “multifunctional spaces” (Cànoves et al 2012) or “servicescapes” (Higgins and Hamilton 2019) where a complex mix of spiritual, cultural, therapeutic, and leisure activities take place (Schnell and Pali 2013) Their nature-related symbolism and the conservation potential of the lively devotional practices that take place in and around these sites remains, under-researched. This is certainly the case of highly popular sanctuaries such as El Rocío (Andalusia), Montserrat (Catalonia), Guadalupe (Extremadura) or Covadonga (Asturias)

Research Methods

Local Religion and Marian Sanctuaries in Natural Settings

The de Basacomplex