The ‘Dual’ Camino a Santiago pilgrimage as a differentiating tourism attribute

Pilgrimages are often reduced to tourism logistics, and the ‘pilgrim-tourist’ label risks obscuring distinctive experiential and identity processes occurring along the Camino de Santiago. Building on the concept of a dual path – an external/physical journey and an internal/spiritual one – we compare guided (a priori, closed-list) and spontaneous (a posteriori, open-ended) motivations captured from the same individuals before departing and after completing the Camino. Using 361 face-to-face pre-Camino surveys in Oviedo and 199 matched post-Camino self-administered surveys, we find that motivations shift from external (nature, heritage, culture) to internal (silence, well-being, and self-knowledge), while religiosity remains relatively stable. Self-identification transitions from ‘mixed pilgrim-tourist’ to ‘primarily pilgrim.’ The implications for theory (post-secular spirituality; identity malleability) and management (protecting the conditions that enable inner transformation) are discussed.