**6. The Rehabilitation and Evolution of the Portuguese Coastal Way**

In recent years, Portuguese regions have been developing efforts to include several Jacobean routes in their territories, promoting their certification, thus allowing the respective municipalities to stand out in the Portuguese contemporary tourism framework. However, the responsibility of these areas and the respective agents of the territory, namely the municipalities, is increased since they benefit from the potential that the routes offer them, but also require from them. Unfortunately, some of these routes do not have conditions to receive pilgrims, and others have no historical justification for being considered Jacobean routes.

The pilgrims, currently in large increasing numbers, as we mentioned, help to improve the economy of the territories they pass through, also contributing to greater visibility and notoriety of those places. Dissemination is carried out through testimonials or sharing, both in social networks and through the relationship with other pilgrims and with the communities themselves.

They also promote and disseminate not only the routes to Santiago, but also the cultural heritage and, above all, the built religious heritage. Chapels and churches associated with the Portuguese Way have been systematically subject to rehabilitation, restoration, conservation, and enhancement projects.

The most emblematic case is the Portuguese Coastal Way. This Way started to be walked in the 18th century, getting lost in time, but in recent decades, its memory has been forgotten. However, it has recently been rehabilitated, significantly increasing the number of pilgrims that walk it (as we mentioned and as we see in Table 1), after an intense campaign of promotion and the creation of accessibility in its various aspects, because of the union of ten municipalities from Porto to Valença, passing through Matosinhos, Maia, Vila do Conde, Póvoa de Varzim, Esposende, Viana do Castelo, Caminha and Vila Nova de Cerveira. As an integral part of the valorisation project, new signage equipment directional and informative—was also implemented along the path in order to make it more uniform and fluent in its signalling.

The Portuguese Coastal Way is 149.5 km long and has 462 heritage monuments present in the 10 municipalities through which it passes. The 51 places of religious worship, churches, and chapels that we studied in terms of accessibility have been improved. At the beginning of the path, in Porto, the *Nossa Senhora das Verdades* Chapel was adapted to become the Interpretation Centre for Pilgrims of the Coastal Way. The creation of this interpretation centre helped to rehabilitate and give new use to a ruined architectural structure, now with new functionality and usefulness. In the chart in Figure 5, we can observe the evolution in the number of pilgrims according to the chosen variant of the Portuguese Way.

**Figure 5.** Evolution of the number of pilgrims according to the chosen route variations from 2018 to 2022. Source of data: Municipal Department of Cultural Heritage Management of Porto.

From the analysis of the chart in Figure 5, we can infer that the steady increase in the number of pilgrims between 2018–2022 was only interrupted by COVID-19. When the effects of the pandemic began to be overcome, the influx of tourists registered an exponential increase. There is also a predominance of the Coastal Way in all the years of the interval. These numbers differ from the statistics presented in Table 1. The demand for the Coastal Way is based on the presence of the sea, which is probably one of the pull factors for a pilgrim who does not have a purely religious motivation but a spiritual or even nonreligious one. By "pull", we refer to the attractiveness of the destination (Martínez-Roget et al. 2015; Marujo 2015).

## **7. Conclusions**

The present study sought to answer the research problem of knowing whether religious motivations still constitute the main push factors of pilgrims on the Santiago Way. The analysis of the secondary data from the Pilgrim's Office made it possible to highlight the predominance of purely religious motivations. Although there is a prevalence of religion, there is a clear tendency for motivations of a cultural, spiritual, and sports nature to gain relevance. This same perception was expressed in the testimonies of the seven stakeholders of the Portuguese Way who were the subject of the interview.

The result of the interviews also underlined the ecumenical role of the Portuguese Way of Santiago, travelled by many different pilgrims of different religions whose motivation is, above all, a spiritual character.

The emergence of "turigrims" and "bicygrims", detected in the extant literature, is supported by the quantitative and qualitative data collected. Nevertheless, religious motivations still constitute the main motive of the Jacobean pilgrimages originating in Portugal.

This study has some limitations. Firstly, the fact that many pilgrims who go to Santiago do not go to the Pilgrim's Office to receive the Compostela, which increases the authenticity of the sample. This circumstance may also influence the data collected at the *Verdades* Chapel. In relation to the qualitative data, more than 10 h of interview recordings were garnered. All of them have given rise to extensive research material which, without a doubt, will allow this investigation to continue in subsequent articles.

In any case, the qualitative data present some novelties regarding the ecumenical nature of the way and even the emergence of lay pilgrimages.

Another noteworthy aspect is the fact that the data from the Pilgrim's Office and the *Verdades* Chapel do not coincide regarding the variants of the route chosen by the pilgrims. Here we can see a preponderance of the Coastal Way, which contradicts the data from the Pilgrim's Office, where the Central Way is hegemonic.

Future research could try to explain this apparent incongruence and find out how statistics are being collected and how they can be more faithful to the motivations of the universe of pilgrims who come to Santiago de Compostela.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, F.M.S., J.L.B., M.P.O. and I.B.; methodology, F.M.S. and J.L.B.; formal analysis, F.M.S., J.L.B., M.P.O. and I.B.; investigation, F.M.S., J.L.B., M.P.O. and I.B.; data curation, F.M.S. and J.L.B.; writing—original draft preparation, F.M.S., J.L.B., M.P.O. and I.B.; writing—review and editing, F.M.S., J.L.B., M.P.O. and I.B. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest. The citizens interviewed have given their consent for their opinions to be made public, however, we have chosen to preserve their identity or to specify which institution they belong to.
