Walking the Way Together: How Families Connect on the Camino de Santiago

In Walking the Way Together, Kathleen Jenkins offers an up-close study of parents and their adult children who walk the Camino de Santiago together. A Catholic visitation site of medieval origins with walking paths across Europe, the Camino culminates at the shrine of Saint James in the city of Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia, an autonomous region of Spain. It has become a popular point of religious tourism for Catholics, spiritual seekers, scholars, adventurers, and cultural tourists. In 2019, well over 300,000 people arrived at the Pilgrims Office seeking a certificate of completion; they had walked anywhere from one hundred to over eight hundred kilometers. Jenkins brings alive family stories of investing in pilgrimage as a practice for strengthening kin relationships and becoming a part of each other’s emotional and spiritual lives. The social and spiritual encounters that either supported or inhibited these relational goals emerge as fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters describe walking for six hours or more each day over mountain, rural, and urban paths. They are stories of pleasant surprises, disappointments, lessons learned, and the far-reaching emotional power that the memory of ritual failures and successes can carry. Ultimately, they show the potential for pilgrimage to foster and maintain intimate ties in today’s fragile world, to build an engaged social consciousness, and to encourage reflection on digital devices and social medium platforms in the pursuit of spirituality.