Growing numbers of people walk the Camino de Santiago and other sacred routes without any religious motivation. What are they seeking, and what do they find?
María Ramírez was thirty when she left everything behind to walk the Camino de Santiago. She was escaping a failed relationship and a life that no longer felt like her own. She was not Catholic. She was not looking for God. She was not even sure she believed in anything. And yet, on the third day of walking, she made herself a promise: she would return every year. Now, at forty-five, she leads groups of pilgrims across Spain.
Her story is not an exception. It has become a pattern. The numbers make that increasingly clear.
The scale of a historic shift
In 2025, more than 530,000 people completed the Camino de Santiago – a historic record, up 6 percent from the previous year and 90 percent from a decade earlier. According to official data from the Pilgrim’s Office in Santiago de Compostela, around 233,000 pilgrims, or 46 percent, declared purely religious motivations. Another 170,000 combined faith with cultural, personal, or spiritual interests. Fewer than 98,000 – less than one fifth of the total – identified fully non-religious motivations.
Yet these figures tell only part of the story. The more significant change lies in the growing range of meanings that pilgrims attach to the journey. A 2019 study published in Sociology of Religion compared the motivations of atheist and religious pilgrims on the Camino. Its conclusion was striking: the overlap was nearly complete. Both groups sought connection with nature, self-understanding, and existential meaning. The only clear differences concerned religious community and explicitly devotional motivations.
Equally notable, in 2024 international pilgrims outnumbered Spanish pilgrims for the first time, representing 58 percent of the total. Americans became the second-largest national group after Spaniards, with nearly 44,000 pilgrims in 2025. Thirty years ago, when the Camino remained largely a local and Catholic phenomenon, such a development would have seemed unlikely.
Secular spirituality: a new language for old needs
Jacqui Frost, a Purdue University researcher specializing in well-being among the non-religious, has observed that many practices once associated with religion are now being reframed in secular terms. Meditation, yoga, and even forms of collective gathering modeled on church all suggest that many people remain interested in ritual and shared meaning without necessarily subscribing to a traditional faith.
This helps explain the rise of what some call secular spirituality: a way of engaging transcendent or transformative experiences without reference to divinity or doctrine. From this perspective, pilgrimage becomes a flexible framework into which each person places a different meaning. The structure remains recognizable – the road, the effort, the arrival, the temporary community of strangers moving in the same direction – but its content varies widely from one pilgrim to the next.
In this understanding, secular spirituality emphasizes inner life rather than a relationship with the divine. It centers on the search for meaning beyond religious institutions, through one’s relationship with the self, with others, with nature, and with whatever one regards as ultimate. That description closely matches the outlook of many contemporary pilgrims.
What non-religious pilgrims are looking for
Sharon Hewitt, from Newfoundland, Canada, walked eight days of the Camino in 2016 with two friends. “I didn’t do it for religious reasons,” she explained, “but there is overlap. Much of religion is about discipline, just like the Camino. After a difficult night, you still get up and keep going.”
This is ritual without theology: the act of putting one foot in front of the other as a contemplative practice, independent of formal belief.
Others walk in response to grief, major life transitions, or the aftermath of trauma. The Camino offers something close to what psychotherapy describes as a holding environment: a space in which difficult experiences can be processed outside the pressures of ordinary life. The slow rhythm of walking, the simplicity of the daily routine, and the company of strangers who know nothing of one’s past all help create conditions for deep reflection.
As one Portuguese pilgrim told Intrepid Times, there is a kind of “magic” in the Camino, though not as something external. The journey brings forth what is already within. That insight – that the outward journey is also an inward one – links religious and non-religious pilgrims alike.
Thin places and the experience of the sacred without doctrine
For centuries, religious pilgrims have spoken of “thin places”: sites where the boundary between the earthly and the transcendent seems less fixed. Santiago Cathedral, Canterbury, Mount Sinai, Jerusalem. Yet this experience does not necessarily require formal belief.
According to the Hartford Seminary, more than half of visitors to York Minster– including many who identify as non-believers – report feeling moved enough inside the cathedral to light a candle or leave a written prayer.
Peter Stanford, author of Pilgrimage: Journeys of Meaning (2021), notes that walking in the footsteps of earlier pilgrims – whether on the Camino or at any ancient site of pilgrimage – has a way of settling deep within a person. This is not necessarily conversion or sudden faith. It is resonance with something larger than oneself, an experience that exceeds the simple categories of religious and non-religious.
Will Parsons, author of On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain (2024), writes that pilgrimage is a way of creating meaning through travel. It belongs to spiritual traditions, but it also includes many secular walkers. Ultimately, each person defines pilgrimage on their own terms.
A hybrid form for the twenty-first century
A 2025 academic study published in Quaestiones Geographicae examined the evolution of the Camino de Santiago as a hybrid of religious pilgrimage and spiritual tourism. Data from 2003 to 2024 show a steady rise in non-religious and mixed motivations, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Camino is becoming something distinct: neither conventional tourism nor classical devotion, but a third form that responds to broadly shared needs for meaning, connection, and transformation.
One recent analysis of 2025 Camino statistics observed that what has changed is not the disappearance of spirituality, but the plurality of meanings attached to the journey. The contemporary Camino functions as a flexible framework in which religious devotion, personal transition, physical challenge, and reflective travel coexist. That may be the most accurate description of what pilgrimage has become in the twenty-first century.
Pilgrims without a final destination
The new generation of pilgrims does not necessarily walk toward a shrine. Many are walking toward themselves. The route matters more than the destination; the process more than the arrival. It is a form of spiritual search that requires no predefined beliefs, only a willingness to listen—to oneself, to others, and to the world.
And perhaps, in the end, this is not entirely new. Medieval pilgrims who set out for Santiago, Rome, or Jerusalem were certainly concerned with the salvation of the soul, but they were also seeking something more immediate: a break from ordinary life, an experience of movement, a sense of belonging to a larger community.
As one contemporary walker put it: “I don’t know what happens when you die. Until then, all I can do is enjoy the journey.” It is easy to imagine a twelfth-century pilgrim saying something similar, even if in different words.
