**1. Introduction**

Creative and cultural media are common communicational tools conveying social and cultural messages; their content is diverse and a ffects the perceptions of their targets, contributing to the production of gendered cultural identities [1–3]. Among them, the focus of this study was movies, which are assumed to be cultural documents and social sources of information, whose spaces can be unconsciously elaborated [4,5]. The audiovisual industry has become increasingly interested in cultural routes because their landscapes provide authentic locations for film productions that, as a result, share territorial, visual, and textual discourses [6]. The cinema serves as a form of promotion and can lead to local development due to all the associated activities [7]. In this context, rural areas are unique scenarios for cinema, providing an opportunity to enhance their territorial identity due to its popularity. Therefore, film-induced tourism can play a pivotal role in promoting endogenous local economic awakening of selected rural areas [7,8]. For rural communities, becoming a film location can be a method of reinterpreting their vitality; due to the positive impacts of this growing creative industry, these locations may plan new sustainable economic trajectories by participating in an innovative and collaborative development model. The cultural and creative audiovisual industries satisfy di fferent aims, as they can contribute to promoting the values of the territory identity elements; all of them ensure visibility while contributing to the construction of attractive and unique tourist rural spaces [9,10]. For this growing importance, the present research draws attention to the production of filmic discourses, both textual and visual, associated with the rural context of the Camino de Santiago (Spain) (henceforth the expression used will be the Camino).

The Camino is the First European Cultural route, and one of the most important pilgrimage routes in the world. Its origin dates back to the 9th century, and follows the discovery of the remains of the body of the Apostle St. James, an event known as the *inventio* (that is the discovery of the relics of a martyr in a place where there is no previous tradition of their existence), and their official recognition in the 12th century [11]. The Camino is used to refer to a network of routes walked or ridden by a large number of pilgrims to travel to a small city in the north of Spain: Santiago de Compostela. These routes would bring thousands of people from all over Europe; that is why the Camino played an important role in the construction of Western European culture during the Middle Ages; as Goethe once stated, "Europe was made on the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela". A major pilgrimage movement emerged, reaching its heyday in the 12th and 13th centuries [12]. After many years of intense pilgrimage movements, in the 15th century, the number of pilgrims walking the routes to Santiago de Compostela started to decrease, and the pilgrimage to St. James entered into a continuous decline, which lasted until the 19th century [13]. The urban historical center of Santiago and some routes of the Camino have been appointed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS). In 1993, the French route was first declared a WHS; then in 2015, the northern routes (consisting of four routes: the Original Camino, the Coastal Camino, the Basque Country-Rioja Inland Camino, and the Liébiana route) received the same international accolade. Since 1993, the Camino has been strongly promoted by the regional government. This process of recovery was conceived as a path to the socio-economic enhancement of the rural space [14]. Many of the actions aimed at conditioning the rural areas of the Camino were financed by the Structural European Funds LEADER I and II (the French acronym stands for: "liaison entre actions de développement de l'économie rurale", in English it means: links between the rural economy and development actions) and PRODER (Operational Programme of Development and Economic and Economic Diversification of Rural Areas) [15,16]. Since then, the Camino pilgrimage space has assumed a tourist function [17]. The necessary services, infrastructure, and equipment (for instance, hotels and public hostels) have been constructed and provided along the route [18,19]. In the following passage, Rubén Lois González and Xosé Santos Solla [20] summarize the main changes occurring along the route: "old paths and walkways have been repaired, bridges have been rebuilt, water sources have been purified, ancient monuments and populations have been regenerated and repopulated, native trees have been planted and signs have been placed in a set of repeated cultural or pilgrimage itineraries" (p. 5). Indeed, the 1993 Holy Year (the Holy Jacobean Year is essentially a Jubilee year, which only covers the city of Santiago de Compostela. It is also called Jacobean Years and is celebrated every 6, 5, 6, and 11 years when the feast of Saint James on the 25th of July falls on a Sunday) marked the conversion of both Santiago and the Camino into major Spanish and international tourist destinations [14,18]. This *Plan Xacobeo 93* led to the take-off of the tradition of pilgrimages to Santiago, assumed as the most well-known brand in Galicia and easy to sell on the European and world markets. Since that year, the Holy Years have turned Santiago and the Camino into two of Spain's most popular tourist destinations [12,19]. As a consequence, the growth in the number of pilgrims arriving to Santiago has been continuous, from 99,436 in 1993 to 347,578 in 2019 [21]. This is due to the fact that the city of Santiago and the Camino have turned into a polysemic space in reference to the plurality of meanings, functions, and motivations that nourish these spaces [17,21,22]. Motivation is one of the fundamental elements of the Jacobean pilgrimage [12]. Nowadays, the most common spiritual motivation is embodied in items such as "health", "religious motivation" or "pilgrimage", so the Camino is a sort of therapeutic route [23], as the movies will show. In fact, as in reality, the characters will do it for a "keen realization of personal wounds or missing elements in one's everyday life. Divorce, death, losing one's job, alienation from one's body, work, self or society are often the reasons for these wounds or lacks. The second element consists in experiences of renewal or transformation. Therapy as it is experienced on The Way is very often a gradual process in which you open up to the suffering in your soul while you move" [24] (p. 267). The Camino clearly offers experiences related to emotions, and perceived spirituality is linked to the visited environment, as well as to the emotional processes experienced during the journey.

Until now, few studies have explored the relationship between the Camino and cinema [25–29], and none has investigated this issue in gendered terms. Their interest mainly focused on considering cinema as a touristic resource that is able to project a local image onto an international scale. However, with this research, I aimed to examine movies as sources of information providing patterns about social and cultural behaviors so as to renew the dialogue between cinematic production and gendered roles along the pilgrimage route, which is mainly characterized by rural areas. As gender analysis in tourism can focus on one or both sexes to explore the social construction of roles and behaviors [30–32], the research aimed to reveal the way in which behaviors and roles respond to social constructions of gender. The aim of this study was to reconstruct a cinematic discourse based on the symmetry or asymmetry in gender cinematic representations that mainly occur in the rural space of the Camino. The paper is structured into four sections. Section 2 provides a brief literature review concerning the key theoretical pillars of the paper: cinema and gender. Since film language is complex, this paper proposes one of the possible movie interpretations that works as an interpretative hypothesis of the work [33]. To this purpose, Section 3 presents the qualitative approach that was used to highlight the cultural and ideological components and the social relations. Section 4 presents the resulting interpretative activity that supports the existence of a latent ideological framework that might be associated with this space, producing impacts and e ffects on a target public, which is becoming increasingly interested in productions related to the Camino. The findings highlight the concept of social and relational sustainability as a way to achieve equal gender treatment when creating media discourses, as pointed out in the final Section 5.

#### **2. Literature Review**

According to Bernard Lane [34], rural tourism includes "farm-based holiday but also comprises special-interest nature holidays and ecotourism, walking, climbing and riding holidays, adventure, sport and health tourism, hunting and angling, educational travel, arts and heritage tourism, and in some areas, ethnic tourism" (p. 9). In addition, rural tourism deals with the recovery of traditional architectural heritage, the managemen<sup>t</sup> of natural and cultural resources, and the involvement of the local population in tourism development, and is motivated by the pursuits of tourist attractions associated with relaxation, countryside, traditional culture, and escape from everyday life [35,36]. Thus, considering these multiple activities and motivations, walking the pilgrimage route can be considered an alternative form of rural tourism; apart from the pilgrimage infrastructure, pilgrims use rural tourist facilities. Pilgrims spend a good part of their time walking through di fferent rural landscapes. Both pilgrimage and rural tourism are aimed at increasing the positive social, economic, and environmental impacts of tourism [37]. Due to the rich natural and cultural heritage that can enhance territorial identity and create an attractive brand for the territorial competitiveness [38], Camino rural landscapes are ideal locations for narrations of personal problems and concerns, feelings and emotions, and hopes and expectations. Given these premises, the present section provides a brief review of the key theoretical pillars of the paper: cinema and gender. This choice is justified because the cinematic sources are used here as the main research material, and gender is the interpretative theorem of the selected sources.
