Abstract
The Way of St. James in Spain is the main European pilgrimage route. Currently, it is a cultural, tourist, monumental, spiritual, and sports route. For this reason, the paper aims to discuss the concept of the “Polysemy of The Way”, by analysing how the new pilgrims’ motivations are creating an inclusive and complex space, which is making a shift from religious space to a multifaceted tourism reality. We study the characterisation and interaction of the new actors involved in its development, maintenance and promotion. As a result, its original “space of faith” is now a “live heritage space”, thanks to the rehabilitation of routes, monuments, and landscapes. The combination of these motivational and spatial transformations enhances the factors of post-secular pilgrimage, such as slow mobility, the liminality and the sense of community, which the same actors assume as priorities for territorial management.
Highlights
According to several authors (Cazaux 2011; Coleman and Eade 2004; Collins-Kreiner 2010a, 2010b; Eade and Sallnow 1991), pilgrimage is a complex and shifting phenomenon, with different implications at religious, political, social, and territorial levels
As we indicated in the introduction, we should underscore that the meaning of faith in The Way diversified in recent times
The profile of the contemporary pilgrim emerges as an increasingly secular traveller in search of an unprecedented relationship with themselves, nature, surroundings and other pilgrims. This multiplicity of meanings sketches a picture of a Way that is no longer only a religious pilgrimage, one of an exclusive manifestation of a space of faith, but rather a complex and open polysemic space in which faith, tourism, and heritage do coexist
Summary
According to several authors (Cazaux 2011; Coleman and Eade 2004; Collins-Kreiner 2010a, 2010b; Eade and Sallnow 1991), pilgrimage is a complex and shifting phenomenon, with different implications at religious, political, social, and territorial levels. The academic field of pilgrimage routes relies on studies that, while reconstructing their past, add value and interpret the changing discourses that each era amounts to. Following this trend, the present study aims to highlight the complexity of the physical, and and above all, the social space (Lefebvre 1974) generated along the line (Ingold 2007) of The Way of St. James. Since the Middle Ages, the city of Santiago de Compostela, together with Rome and Jerusalem, represented one of the main destinations of Western Christianity. The city of Santiago, became the Christian bulwark on the western borders, a barrier against the Arab advance that at the time controlled all of southern and central Spain (Barreiro Rivas 1997) (Figure 1)
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