Location
Monserrat
Start Date
26-6-2026 3:30 PM
End Date
26-6-2026 5:00 PM
Description
Across Europe, numerous historic pilgrimage landscapes no longer function as dominant religious destinations, yet devotional practices persist in fragmented, latent, or reinterpreted forms. Pilgrimage however appears to be undergoing a process of transformation within postsecular communities, where spiritual meaning coexists with heritage tourism, community identity, and cultural landscape management. Building on religious tourism studies, pilgrimage is understood as mobility toward sacred sites as well as a ritual process embedded in tradition, motivation, and lived experience (Griffin & Raj 2017). Contemporary scholarship emphasises that pilgrimage preserve the experiential and relational practice linking people, landscape and belief systems, while fighting the tourist consumption effect.
This paper proposes a process-based approach: pilgrimage emerges when heritage landscapes are activated, rather than competitively promoted as destinations. The UNESCO World Heritage landscape of Monte San Giorgio and the neighbouring town of Mendrisio (Insubria region, Switzerland–Italy) provide a revealing case study. Historical devotional traces including millenary Beato Manfredo Settala devotion (pani del beato), ancestral mountain devotional routes (via ai monti), ex-votos, and cross-border Sacri Monti traditions demonstrate continuity between sacred geography and human mobility.
Although formal pilgrimage participation has declined, ritual presence persists through traditional practices, slow mobility, and heritage interpretation. Within the SECreTour framework, the study argues that cultural landscapes may become contemporary pilgrimage environments, when heritage activation reconnects ecological awareness, community memory and spiritual experience. This paper contributes to religious tourism research by shifting attention from the obsolescence of economic and social competition between sites toward the idea of pilgrimage as living cultural process, offering a model for sustainable ad cross-border heritage tourism in Europe.
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Included in
K3) From Sacred Landscape to Pilgrimage Environment: The Case of Monte San Giorgio and Mendrisio
Monserrat
Across Europe, numerous historic pilgrimage landscapes no longer function as dominant religious destinations, yet devotional practices persist in fragmented, latent, or reinterpreted forms. Pilgrimage however appears to be undergoing a process of transformation within postsecular communities, where spiritual meaning coexists with heritage tourism, community identity, and cultural landscape management. Building on religious tourism studies, pilgrimage is understood as mobility toward sacred sites as well as a ritual process embedded in tradition, motivation, and lived experience (Griffin & Raj 2017). Contemporary scholarship emphasises that pilgrimage preserve the experiential and relational practice linking people, landscape and belief systems, while fighting the tourist consumption effect.
This paper proposes a process-based approach: pilgrimage emerges when heritage landscapes are activated, rather than competitively promoted as destinations. The UNESCO World Heritage landscape of Monte San Giorgio and the neighbouring town of Mendrisio (Insubria region, Switzerland–Italy) provide a revealing case study. Historical devotional traces including millenary Beato Manfredo Settala devotion (pani del beato), ancestral mountain devotional routes (via ai monti), ex-votos, and cross-border Sacri Monti traditions demonstrate continuity between sacred geography and human mobility.
Although formal pilgrimage participation has declined, ritual presence persists through traditional practices, slow mobility, and heritage interpretation. Within the SECreTour framework, the study argues that cultural landscapes may become contemporary pilgrimage environments, when heritage activation reconnects ecological awareness, community memory and spiritual experience. This paper contributes to religious tourism research by shifting attention from the obsolescence of economic and social competition between sites toward the idea of pilgrimage as living cultural process, offering a model for sustainable ad cross-border heritage tourism in Europe.