There are many criteria that scholars have attempted to establish as to what makes a pilgrim a pilgrim. Alan Morinis established that a pilgrim is anyone who considers themselves as such. However, just as with anything, certain standards are established by which people judge the extent that another is a pilgrim. I witnessed a few different encounters on my Camino that have led me to question these standards.

 On beautiful wooded day on the Portuguese route, I spoke to a father and son from a small village in southern Spain. I asked the son (Alex, a short man in his late 20s) where him and his father started their Camino, to which he answered “we started in Tui.” I found myself comparing his journey to my journey in my head and thought to myself that his Camino was not as hard as mine. He had missed out on the difficulty of walking from Porto to Tui. As I continued talking to him, he shared with me that his father had been wanting to do the Camino his whole life, and took this opportunity with his son as his only chance. He said “I was going to go alone, but when my father found out I was going, I couldn’t say no.” It dawned on me that Alex’s father had spent his whole life dreaming of the Camino, while I had only heard about it this year. Alex’s father was going on the pilgrimage for religious reasons, which was another way he had me “beat.” This interaction unveiled some of the complexities of comparing one’s status as a pilgrim with another. If I had not spoken to Alex for longer, I might have been left believing myself to be the more “authentic” pilgrim. After analysis, attempting to rank our statuses just made me feel silly in my head.

 However, I know I am not the only one measuring other pilgrims worth’s by arbitrary details of their journeys.

 In a cafe in Villanova, it was brought up that one of the pilgrims we had been traveling with, Tracy, had decided to stay in a nicer hostel that night with a private room. To this information, someone in our group answered innocently “we don’t consider that a hostel, we consider that a hotel.” This struck me because I realized we were abiding by the secret criteria of the Camino that a pilgrim must suffer to truly be a pilgrim. We have no way to measure the suffering, introspection and impact another person’s pilgrimage has on them, yet we still seem to get caught up in the culture of looking at these details. Does staying in nicer accommodations really make a pilgrim any less of a pilgrim?

 On one of the last days of the Camino to Finestair, I was stretching on the lawn of our albergue listening to a man poorly play popular hits on his guitar. He seemed very drunk, and someone had told me he was drinking before we even arrived at the hostel hours earlier. He started to get more agitated, maybe because he wasn’t getting any attention or tips from anyone. This then escalated to him yelling “this is is terrible, this isn’t Santiago, f*cking tourists, no culture, no feeling” whereupon he looked at me and said “you too, you’re one of them.” This man had just called me a tourist, when I knew in my heart that I was a pilgrim. He had just called the entire albergue, reserved entirely for pilgrims in this tiny farm town where no tourist would think to go, tourists. Maybe it was because he saw people dining in the albergue cafe, or he attributed their lack of involvement with his playing as apathy. To him, a pilgrim is someone who is nice to him, someone who can appreciate his music and SUFFER (ie, not relax in cafes of on the lawn of an albergue). It struck me that this mans interpretation of whether or not I was a pilgrim was only wrong because I consider myself to be a pilgrim.

Camino friends, author on far right

So ultimately, it is the pilgrim that determines whether or not they are a pilgrim, and though there are established characteristics that pilgrims might have in common, they certainly do not define their experience, or their identity.