Religious Tourism and Spaces

Religious tourism and sacred spaces sit at the intersection of faith, mobility, and place, drawing together geographers, planners, and social scientists who want to understand why millions of people each year travel specifically to encounter the holy, the ancestral, or the spiritually resonant. Researchers examine how sites like pilgrimage routes, shrines, and temples are shaped by—and in turn reshape—the identities of both visitors and host communities, often in tension with commercial development and secular governance. A central puzzle is how to interpret the blurring boundary between religious and secular motivation: when a person walks the Camino de Santiago or visits Bodh Gaya, are they a pilgrim, a tourist, or something the existing categories cannot quite capture? Postsecular geography has pushed the field toward taking seriously the persistence of religion in ostensibly secular modernity, raising ongoing questions about whose sacred meanings get recognized in urban planning, heritage policy, and the management of contested holy sites.

Works

94,499

Total citations

210,206

Keywords

Religious TourismPilgrimageSacred SpacesSecularismSpiritual TourismPostsecular Geographies