Secular pilgrims: why ancient trails still pack a spiritual punch

Where kings and abbots walked, tourists now follow. Are these increasingly popular trips just another holiday or are we getting more religious?

The numbers are striking and puzzling in our secular, sceptical age when organised religion in the west is in steep decline. In the early 1980s, the annual tally of those walking the Camino, the thousand-year-old Christian pilgrim route from France to Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain, had dropped to a few thousand at best. By 2019, before Covid got in the way, it was almost 350,000.

And this countercultural, modern-day resurrection of pilgrimage is not just limited to the Camino. As we dare this Easter to start making holiday plans again, plenty of pilgrim paths and destinations offer a chance to step back and get a perspective on the trauma we have lived through these past 12 months.