How many Protestants are on the Camino de Santiago?

When you start a new ministry, such as our Anglican Camino Chaplaincy here in Santiago, everyone asks the same questions: Is there enough interest in this kind of ministry? Is it worthwhile? Are there enough pilgrims that might be interested in this? Or, better said: ‘How many Protestants are actually on the Camino de Santiago and in Santiago de Compostela itself?

From the very beginning it became clear that the Anglican Camino Chaplaincy is indeed a ‘catch-all’for pilgrims from a variety of different church backgrounds and countries. It is not a ‘The Brits Abroad’ chaplaincy! A typical Sunday congregation can be easily contain people from 6 different countries and 6 different home churches. I remember having worshipped with and led worship for: Lutherans from Sweden, Protestants from Germany, Anglicans from South Africa, United Church of Christ members from the USA and, yes, Church of England members from the UK and many, many more.  We will only see most of these worshippers once, and they will be on their way to their homes in a day or two. Apart of the ones that volunteer here for a longer period of time or live here. We are delighted to see them over and over again!

Over the last two years it became very clear that this is a multi-national and multi-denominational ministry that just happens to be led by the Church of England but unites people from all kind of backgrounds and countries. The chaplaincy is under the auspices of the Church of England, which has managed pastoral services to English-speakers in Spain for almost 200 years and is under the supervision of their Bishop in Europe and its suffragan bishop, +David Hamid, that is directly responsible for this project.  And just for the record, while our main focus is on ministering to pilgrims, visitors to the city and residents of it are just as welcome! The door is open for everyone!

A few bits of clarification:

First, the terms Protestant and Protestant Churches are used in this blog post to encompass everybody, including, but not limited to, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Old Catholics, Baptists, United Church of Christ, basically all Christians that are NOT Roman-Catholic NOR Orthodox.  My heartfelt apologies to those of my fellow Anglicans who don’t like to be called Protestants btw 😉

Also, it is difficult to say which percentage of pilgrims comes from a certain church background AND still practice their faith in that same church environment.

For example, Spain is a predominantly Catholic country, but not everybody that self-identifies as Catholic actually ever darkens the door of a church here 😉

On the other hand, countries like Canada, the USA and South Korea might send more pilgrims, proportionally, as they heard about the Camino first in a ‘religious’ context and are practising members of their respective churches.

As far as I know (please correct me if you have more information!) only one of the main starting points collects information about the church affiliation of pilgrims and that is Roncesvalles on the Camino Francés.

The problem is that I can’t find these statistics anywhere. Apparently they go into a black hole in the Government of Navarra. If somebody could take a spaceship there and dig them out, that would be very much appreciated!

But even if that would happen one day, only 5,541 pilgrims (1,69% of all pilgrims in 2018!) started their Camino in Roncesvalles that year. So, that information would have to be extrapolated with a huge grain of salt as the total number of pilgrims registered by the Pilgrim’s Office here in Santiago in 2018 was: 327,378!

A pilgrim friend of mine had a better idea.  He looked at the top 15 groups of pilgrims by country in 2018 as registered by the Pilgrim’s Office here in Santiago and then applied their ‘home country’ denominational ratio to them.

For example: with 144,141 Spanish pilgrims arriving in Santiago in 2018, and because Spain is a predominantly Roman-Catholic country, only 1.2% of the population have declared themselves being protestants in the last census. Which gives us a guesstimate of 1,729 Spanish protestant pilgrims on the Camino.

In my own experience, I would say the number is in reality far lower as a lot of Spanish protestants belong to non-denominational Churches which really haven’t developed a tradition of pilgrimage to Santiago – yet. In fact, I have only met perhaps two handful of Spanish Protestant pilgrims over the last twenty years…  And, in any case, they wouldn’t be necessarily be interested in an English language ministry.

The next biggest (by country) group of pilgrims comes from Italy with around 216 Protestant pilgrims.  Again, Italy is a predominantly Catholic country.

After that we have Germany, which does indeed have a higher percentage of Protestants and so we got likely 6,451 Protestant pilgrims from Germany in 2018.

Next in line is the USA, the first predominantly English-speaking country in the list, with a likelihood of having contributed 8,262 pilgrims.

And so it goes on, if you would like to see the rest of the numbers, please download the PDF from the link at the bottom of this blog post.

And if we look now at the top English-speaking countries from which the pilgrims come from, the total numbers get even smaller:

• USA – likely 8,262 Protestants from different churches
• Great Britain – likely 1,990 Protestants from different churches
• Ireland – likely 943 Protestants from different churches

To cut a long story short and taking in account the 15 Top countries where pilgrims come from we get a guestimate of 28,271 Protestant pilgrims in this Top 15 group. And the total of all pilgrims from these Top 15 countries is 286,934.

Summary: As a careful guesstimate, between 10% and 15% of all pilgrims that arrived 2018 in Santiago, and who went to the Pilgrim’s Office for their Compostelas, were Protestants.

Which gives us the following numbers:

• Pilgrims in total- 327,378
• Possibly Protestant Pilgrims: ~32,737 and ~49,105

And if we take into account the number of pilgrims who come from English-speaking countries or a country where English is widely spoken as a second language, the number of pilgrims that might be interested in an English language service offering drops again.

So, my personal guesstimate is that around 15,000 and 20,000 Protestants from a variety of different churches AND that speak English as a first or second language, arrived last year in Santiago.

So, yes, having a Anglican Camino Chaplaincy here in Santiago de Compostela makes an awful lot of sense!

Any thoughts or questions? Please leave them in a comment below! Many Muchas Gracias and Buen Camino wherever you are Peregrin@s!

And if you want to have a look at the original numbers my pilgrim friend crunched and which sources of information he used– and he emphasizes that this is a methodologically imperfect exercise, have a look at this >>>PDF File<<< Click to download …