What is the essence of religion? What does it mean to be “religious”? Much has been written and debated about these questions. The place, the manifestation, the sacred identi ed at a certain moment and time, and the ritual and participation in that sacred event – everything suggests a de nition which is incapable of re ecting the entirety of its meaning.
Since time immemorial, all religions have featured pilgrimage, the search for sacred places and the consolidation of pathways in tradition, gestures and imagination. Many of the places most strongly associated with memory and religious symbolism have a journey at the moment of their genesis. In almost all religions, the calendar is marked by the rhythm of visits to various holy sites.
In Christian traditions, records of pilgrimages to the Holy Land date from the second century onwards. Believers sought to visit places where the life and martyrdom of Jesus and his most direct disciples had taken place. Whether it is a journey to the origins in Jerusalem and other places that gured in the life of Christ, to the headquarters of the Church in Rome, or to local and regional sites, Christianity is a religion of journeys and pathways. Nascent Christianity also experienced a sense of pilgrimage from early on, perhaps inherited from that not too distant past. In the fourth century, Egeria wrote a description of her journey to the Holy Land between 381 and 384 (the most commonly accepted dates), which led to her being considered the rst Hispanic writer in Latin. She journeyed through the south of Gaul and the north of Italy before crossing the Adriatic Sea by boat. She arrived in Constantinople in 381 and from there left for Jerusalem, visiting Jericho, Nazareth and Capernaum. She left Jerusalem for Egypt in 382, visiting Alexandria, Thebes, the Red Sea and Sinai. She then visited Antioch, Edessa, Mesopotamia, the Euphrates River and Syria, from where she returned via Constantinople. There is no record of the date, place and circumstances of her death.
The Islamic presence in the Iberian Peninsula and the practice of facing, praying and moving towards the east would consolidate this fundamental idea that is still present in our language today in the verb “to orient”, which means, in its strict sense, to position a map in accordance with the cardinal points, but which also means to discover a path or to organise, a meaning which has its root in “turning east”, the exact opposite sense to how the geography of the peninsula was conceived as being situated in the West, or in the Algarve to invoke its Arabic root.
With thousands of years of tradition, the list of places of pilgrimage and cyclical festivities in Portugal is long and inexhaustible. Christianity, as can be seen in a tone of harsh criticism by St. Martin of Braga, Martinho de Dume, in his De Correctione Rusticorum (“On the correction of rural people”, 6th century), adopted a large part of pre-existing polytheistic cults, both those that had long been practiced in signi cant places since the Bronze Age, and those festivities in honour of rivers, springs and forests.
This heritage has given Portugal a unique colour and a wealth of traditions that runs through the country from north to south, from the interior to the coast, with a number of shades ranging between the pagan past and a Christianisation that was almost always super cial in its minor adjustments of outward appearance and nomenclature.
In any event, the Christian presence was made up of solemn moments with a highly o cial tone and a deep presence in the social fabric. This normalising religious presence seems often to have been tolerated or accepted because it made a given moment more remarkable, adding a sense of sacredness. However, this presence frequently had a tone of arti ciality as well, enabling us to detect the existence of real tension.
The places presented here were selected for their representativeness, whether geographic or thematic. Indeed, the main criteria were geography and typology. Some are among the best known and most visited; others are more minor in scope and renown. This itinerary presents a certain global vision that enables us to encounter phenomena with ancient marks of continuous worship.
