The present study intends to be a pastoral approach to the tension between the profane and the sacred, in the broad context of popular piety, its external components (ritual expression, aesthetic, which we can perceive) and underlying elements (a deep sense, an experience, an experience of faith that escapes our perception). It is in the most remarkable manifestations that are the pilgrimages to the sanctuaries. An evangelization of popular piety is necessary, but this is not a matter of changing rites or external practices, but rather of improving the attitudes and motivations that underlie them, for which the formation of the people involved is necessary. Without aiming for an exhaustive analysis, the study focuses on some of the most important characteristics of popular piety (history as "salvation history", the marked festive and celebratory dimension, the importance of time, space, narration and iconography religious, among others), in which the balance between the profane and the sacred occurs.

After the presentation of the concepts of "tourism" and "tourist", where it is specifically reflected on religious tourism, two "universal" concepts of "pilgrimage" and "sanctuary" are presented and reflected, with particular expression and incidence in Christianity. In the sanctuaries, besides the pilgrims and their motivations, pastoral agents or managers of a religious destiny are fundamental, since it is they who welcome the pilgrims (re) orient their intentions. Since pilgrimage is a religious experience, sanctuaries are the goal or preferred destination of pilgrims (so are the visitors and tourists who can become pilgrims in the sanctuary), so they must respond to the material and spiritual needs of those who is moving.

The solemnities of Holy Week in Braga are nowadays affirmed as a decisive moment of collective life in the city. It is a fact that the memory of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ would already be annually replicated, in more or less clear-sighted ways, since Christianity took root in the city. Its most relevant manifestations are the processions, recreations of the Christian public ceremonial, which reveal themselves as crucial moments. However, other relevant ceremonies subsist, especially those that are part of the so-called bracarian rite or the practices associated with the paschal celebration. With a time course that justifies a dedicated approach, these ceremonials reveal an essence that clearly goes beyond the limits of belief and is today within a clear cultural scope. However, the affirmation as the main tourist product, that is, generating a remarkable economic impact, is a recent conquest and observed a course begun in 1933. Although it is a set of practices and manifestations of religious scope, its actors do not embrace this universe, but approach all sectors of society.

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After some considerations about the evangelizing capacity of art, this study presents what the Church's doctrine says about the subject. And it's no small thing! They are the first and second moment of the article. In a third moment, it reflects on the artistic heritage, from the categories of mediation, fruition and encounter, to conclude that “conscious of its symbolic dimension, which brings us back, in its significance, beyond the really visible, through an intimate experience of the artistic heritage of the Church generates a possibility of intimate dialogue, where the true encounter with the transcendent is established: with the love of the Father revealed in the face of the Son - the end of all evangelization. Allowing each  person to say, today, as St. Augustine, in his intimate: ‘Afternoon I loved you, O Beauty so old and so new. ... Behold, they are habitable within me, and I outwardly seek Thee!’”.

The “Holly Week of Braga” condenses, in the liturgical practices and devotionals, secular heritages. There are rites and processions that, in the same way of spiritual “pearls”, inlaid in the renewed liturgy by the Second Vatican Council. Developed in past cultural idiosyncrasies, they remain with such vitality that make us think. Anachronic on one hand, full of time on the other hand, they ‘sensitize’ faith’s memory of a Cristian community that preserve them as a privileged manifestation of her identity. According the method of study of comparative liturgy, we have analyzed rites of liturgical celebrations from Palm Sunday (blessing, palm procession and entrance on the cathedral door) and Easter Triduum: foot washing on the evening mass on Holy Thursday; adoration of the holy cross and Theophoric Procession on the Good Friday; Easter light, Accendite rite and resurrection procession on Holy Saturday.

The article starts from a challenge: to relate the touristic dimension of Holy Week with its theological dimension. The proposed way implies the use of the operative category of hospitality. Exploring the fundamental anthropological dimension of this category, which allows its identification as a theological category, it is considered that the tourist activity may possess deep theological meaning. Starting from this observation, it is related to the human and Christian identity as memory of the passion, in her including the consciousness of the vulnerable and suffering human condition.