Another topic this newsletter will focus on is the explosion of interest in religious pilgrimage routes, often in Europe, but also found in the Andes, the Himalaya, and Japan.
Many of these routes are centuries old, but had fallen into disuse until their recent revival.
The revival of the Camino in particular is largely due to the efforts of one man: Don Elias Valiña Sampedro (1929 - 1989), the parish priest in O Cebreiro, a town about 100km from Santiago de Compostela. In the 1200s, an estimated 500,000 pilgrims traveled the Camino each year. The pilgrimage route fell into disuse following the Reformation and the Enlightenment, and did not see a noticeable uptick until Don Elias’s tireless efforts to promote the Camino in the 1980s.
Don Elias singlehandedly began the revival of the “French Way” (Camino Frances) that leads from St. Jean Pied de Port on the French-Spanish border to Santiago de Compostela. In 1984, he drove the length of the route and personally painted many of the yellow signs that now mark the official “French Way” Camino path.
Multiple caminos have since been revived or rediscovered, tracing pilgrim paths from across Europe to Santiago de Compostela.
These efforts (and promotional material like the 2010 movie The Way, starring Martin Sheen) resulted in an explosion of interest. In 1980, only a few thousand pilgrims walked the Camino. In 2019, 347,585 walked it - an astounding increase in just 30 years.
Kumano Kodo
There are only two UNESCO World Heritage Pilgrimage Sites: the Kumano Kodo trail in Japan, and the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
Via Francigena
The spillover effect from the popularity of the Camino has influenced the rediscovery of other ancient pilgrimage paths.
One of the most popular of these is the Via Francigena - the “way of the Franks” - which is the route from Canterbury Cathedral in England to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
Via Slavica
Much less well-known - to the extent that we found almost no English-language material on it - the Via Slavica leads from multiple Central European cities such as Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest to Vienna, and from there to the Marian shrine of Mariazell and onward through Slovenia and Italy to Rome. We found very little material on this, except for a homemade travel video documenting a Mr. Udo Heinz Kusak’s bicycle trip along the Via Slavica from Gorlitz to Rome.
Beyond these ancient paths, the renaissance in pilgrim routes has inspired some localities to create new traditions.
In the far southwest of Ireland, the Kerry Camino is a three-day walk that connects the towns of Tralee and Dingle in County Kerry’s Dingle Peninsula.
Locals launched the Kerry Camino in 2012 and dedicated it to the Irish saint Brendan the Navigator, a 6th century monk who legend tells may have discovered North America. This path ends at the church of St James in Dingle, from which medieval Irish pilgrims would have embarked to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago.
Via Alpina Sacra
In 2018, Catholic priest Fr. Johannes Schwarz hiked what he dubbed the “Via Alpina Sacra,” a nearly 3000 mile route through the Alps from Slovenia to France that he designed in order to visit over 220 Catholic shrines, churches, and monasteries across Slovenia, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, and France. That hike is the length of the American Pacific Crest Trail but with twice the vertical gain. We haven’t seen anyone else complete that for pilgrimage purposes but it sounds like a tradition waiting to be born!
Here’s an interview in English of Fr. Johannes on the “Sacred Steps Podcast” - a podcast we recently discovered that’s entirely dedicated to walking pilgrimages.
That podcast rabbit hole led us to the host Kevin Donahue’s coverage of two more pilgrimage trails - the California Missions Walk and England’s Pilgrim’s Way.
An Englishman named Will Parsons is among those who are promoting the ancient pilgrimage paths in Great Britain. In a 2015 essay, he noted that the English Reformation dissolved the monasteries that used to provide cheap accommodations for pilgrims, making modern pilgrimages too expensive. His solution is to create a network of pop-up camping accommodations, and to realize that vision he co-founded the British Pilgrimage Trust.
As we learn more about the people and organizations promoting and recovering pilgrimage, we will keep you updated. Until then, buen camino!