Religious Tourism: The Way to Santiago

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
to religious sites, and by which motivations are they influenced to choose a religious
site as their tourist destination.
Another objective is to analyse the nature of the consumers of religious tourism by
demographic and economic variables such as nationality, sex, or accommodation
during the stay.
Getting to know the history of Santiago de Compostela and have an overview from
all the different routes that made Santiago one of the most important places of
pilgrimage is another objective from this research.
Ending with some recommendations is another objective, mainly because of the lack
of research in religious tourism, an area which is considerably increasing nowadays
as it will be seen in the research.
Santiago is one of the three more important pilgrimage places for Christianity
together with Jerusalem and Rome, therefore the results of the research will show
how does the number of no believers increase or decrease according to a quantitative
research in this specific destination.
1.5 Hypothesis
The first hypothesis of this research is: most of the people who travel to a sacred site
or to a place of pilgrimage are religious in their majority, and travel because of
religious motivations.
This hypothesis is based on the tradition of the religions where, in most of the cases,
the pilgrimage to a sacred site is needed. Spain is a country where an 83.5% consider
themselves catholic and where a 22.6% prays God every day (Religion Statistics,
Spain, 2005).
David Mashhadigholam Rojo 4