Contemporary Pilgrimage: Visualizing the Sacred Between Devotion and Tourism

This article examines how contemporary pilgrimage reconfigures the experience of the sacred at the intersection of devotion and tourism. Moving beyond traditional conceptions of pilgrimage as a purely religious practice, it approaches sacred spaces as dynamic social and visual territories shaped by mobility, media, and collective imagination. Through visual ethnography and the Photovoice method, participants document and interpret their encounters with sacred sites, revealing how photography mediates spiritual emotion, ritual engagement, and touristic perception. The study focuses on the Santuário de Nossa Senhora da Paz in Portugal, applying the six reflective stages of the SHOWED model — See, Happening, Our lives, Why, Effect/Do, Date — to analyze how faith, tourism, and cultural identity converge within contemporary sacred spaces. The resulting images capture a hybrid landscape in which devotion, leisure, and heritage preservation coexist, reflecting post-secular dynamics of belonging, peace, and transcendence in a globalized and digitalized world. By visualizing the sacred through participants’ lenses, this research highlights how contemporary believers and visitors co-produce the sacred, transforming pilgrimage routes, shrines, and religious festivals into vibrant spaces of negotiation and shared meaning. The Photovoice approach facilitates a participatory and critical understanding of how sacred spaces are experienced, represented, and re-signified—illuminating the ongoing interplay between faith and spectacle, authenticity and commercialization, tradition and change.