Planning the key to pilgrimage tourism

Must all roads lead only to Santiago de Compostela? Or Rome? Or Mecca? Jerusalem? Kailash? Varnasi? Nara? Of course not. Sri Lanka has important pilgrimages – the Pada Yatra, where thousands of pilgrims walk every year from Jaffna to Kataragama and Sri Pada, where for thousands of years pilgrims from all over the world have made the ascent up the sacred peak venerated by Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims alike. And it has a large number of sacred places – the Temple of the Tooth, the Sri Maha Bodhi, the Madhu shrine, St.Anne’s in Talawila, Jailani in Balangoda, Nallur and many more that are the objects of faith and devotion at particular times of the year.

The difference between the pilgrimages and sacred places in other countries and those in Sri Lanka is planning. Planning to safeguard the spiritual experience. Planning to conserve the environment. Planning to care for the needs of the pilgrims. Planning to realize the economic benefits of the pilgrimage for the villagers along the route, and for the various companies that bring in the pilgrims and provide accommodation and feed them all along their journey, from their arrival to their departure.

Whether we like it or not, pilgrimage tourism is big business, motivating tens of millions of tourists around the world and generating billions of dollars in income for pilgrimage sites. Increasingly, people book their travel by Internet, so the attention given on the Internet to pilgrimage destinations is a good indicator of interest in them.

While Sri Pada especially generates a great deal of Internet interest – because of its multi-faith appeal – unlike in Santiago de Compostela and other pilgrimage sites, neither the attention to Sri Pada or the relative lack of attention to the Pada Yatra does not translate into planned tourism in the same way. For example, see the depth of planning reflected in www.santiagotourism.com and in the site of the Catholic Archdiocese of Santiago, www.archisantiago.org.

There were about 180,000 people in 2004 who requested certification from the Catholic Church that they had made the Santiago Pilgrimage, which means that they attested that they had walked 60 miles or covered 125 miles by bicycle or on horseback. In the Sri Pada and Pada Yatra pilgrimages, the pilgrim has virtually no support network, there is little benefit to the villagers who host pilgrims, and the environment is not cared for along their paths. In Sri Lanka we are witnessing the continuing destruction of the sacred nature of the original jungle shrine in Kataragama, environmental damage along the Pada Yatra and lack of concern for the future of the Sri Pada pilgrimage.

In the first days of October, I helped inaugurate a photography exhibition on Sri Pada at Santiago de Compostela, which together with St.Peter’s in Rome and Jerusalem, constitute the three most important historical pilgrimage sites in the Catholic world. The exhibition was held at the Museum of Pilgrimages, showing photographs taken by Jessica Agullo, a Spanish photographer – both choices already reflect on the importance of planning and organization – with the assistance of Living Heritage Trust, a Sri Lankan NGO. The Living Heritage Trust hosts several sacred sites in Sri Lanka in their portal of 32 websites (www.livingheritage.org), but why is there no permanent Living Heritage Exposition space in our National Museums that celebrates our sacred spaces, when pilgrimages and sacred sites are so important to our people of all faiths? Those attending in Santiago were curious about Sri Lanka, full of respect and awe concerning our spiritual traditions, and desirous of visiting Sri Lanka to walk up Sri Pada.

I sometimes personally get inquiries from devotees from all over the world requesting assistance in performing religious rituals important to them. Recently a Sri Lankan from New York wanted to cover the Maha Maluwa of the Sri Maha Bodhi with lotus blooms. His question was how do I do this? Due to lack of organization, there is no easy answer to his question.

My visit to Spain and Portugal took me to numerous pilgrim sites, including Fatima. Fatima provides a vision of how far spiritual destruction can be taken. It was repulsive, where the lowest common denominator is catered to and where commerce has settled on every tree. Compostela, however, was a totally different experience. Declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, Compostela, where the Apostle James is said to be buried, is managed with a great deal of concern and sensitivity, despite its massive tourism. This is because strict rules and regulations preserve its sacred character. The spiritual nature of the pilgrimage is recognized and preserved, so the pilgrim is spared the sound of blaring loud speakers, ugly structures and ridiculous “religious” objects that are offered for sale. In Fatima, the tree on which the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to three peasant children was cut down soon after the apparitions were reported. It has been replaced by the ugliest of buildings, specially designed to extract hope and money from believers, turning the visit to Fatima into an insult to human intelligence.

Fatima has an interesting history. The simple countryside was converted into a grotesque parody of religiosity during the years of Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal, which only ended in 1968. Portugal needed a pilgrimage site to stimulate the Catholic faith, integrated into its governing mechanisms. At the end of World War II, the Salazar Government began stimulating Fatima in earnest, resulting in the construction of a sanctuary that met the regime’s requirements of political correctness.

Just miles away is the splendid Monastery of Batalha, built as the fulfilment of a prayer for victory on the battlefield where Portugal gained its independence from Spain in 1385. The monastery still bears witness to the exquisite refinement of earlier generations of Catholics. To step inside is to step into a world of the spirit – a pilgrimage in one step.

We already have mass pilgrimages in Sri Lanka in Sri Pada, the Pada Yatra, the Atamasthana, Madhu, St. Anne’s, Jailani and Nallur. These spiritual – and tourist – endeavours need care and planning. Creating a Sri Lanka Pilgrimage Information and Resource Centre is a useful, important step in this process.