Why people walk

The following quote is from the book, The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago: The Complete Cultural Handbook, by David Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson, who started walking the Camino in the 1970s and have led many student groups along the pilgrimage route. (The painting is by Margot Hutcheson.)

"You are part of a corpus of literally millions of pilgrims who have been drawn to this shrine. Some were moved by the spirit. Some by politics. Some came to enrich themselves on the pilgrim trade. Some came to be healed in the body. Some were sentenced to walk to Compostela in lieu of serving time in prison. Some had their expenses underwritten by their villages to go to pray for rain or relief from plague. Since the Middle Ages did not recognize the legitimacy of tourism or vacations, but did endorse pilgrimage, some came for the pleasure of travel, or to get away form the wife or the farm, or for the mere adventure of it. Often pilgrims left home for one set of reasons and discovered quite another set along the Road."