World's most visited religious destinations

By Rob Baedeker

updated 12:40 p.m. ET Dec. 17, 2007

Among the many holy places and religious destinations Holly Hayes has visited, the spired monument in Cologne, Germany, is among her favorites. “To stand in front of the astonishing, soaring Gothic architecture at Cologne Cathedral is to begin to understand majesty,” she says.

Hayes, a self-described “religious historian who loves to travel,” is the founder and editor of the Web site Sacred Destinations, and while she says her interest in holy places is “more cultural and architectural than spiritual,” she felt something special at Cologne.

“It was Christmas Mass there,” she recalls, “and the huge nave was packed full of worshippers bundled up in their winter coats. Watching the solemn processions and listening to the Latin readings in the magnificent medieval surroundings, I felt transported back in time, as if I were participating in a small way in a very long, unbroken tradition of faith and history.” Approximately six million visitors come to the Cologne Cathedral each year. Some come to the church out of historical or cultural interest, others out of religious devotion. Still others to take a picture of a place they read about in a guide book.

We’ve gathered visitation figures for 20 of the world’s top religious destinations, and while it’s clear that the world’s sacred sites draw millions upon millions of visitors, travel to shrines, churches, temples, mosques or other holy place can come from a mix of motivations.

“On one end of the spectrum you have religious devotees who go to have a spiritual experience; and on the other you have the curious who want to see a Buddhist temple, for example, and are interested just from a cultural or historical perspective,” says Dallen Timothy, professor in the department of geography at Brigham Young University and author of Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys.

“A lot of religious organizations, and countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel, with huge groups of pilgrims, refuse to call them tourists,” he says. “But the distinction between tourist and pilgrim is a false dichotomy,” he argues. “Religious travel is one of the biggest forms of tourism in the world.”

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The ForbesTraveler list seems to confirm this: Every year, massive numbers of travelers visit the sites of saints’ and prophets’ tombs, or to partake in annual celebrations at holy shrines. At the Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine, in Mexico City, where the Virgin Mary is believed to have appeared in the 16th century to a poor peasant, estimates for annual visitation to the basilica run as high as 20 million. According to a 1999 Vatican Council report, it was the most-visited Catholic shrine in the world.

At Sabarimala, a Hindu pilgrimage center in southern India, visitation estimates vary from five million to as high as 60 million annually. Juan Campo, a professor in the religious studies department at the University of California Santa Barbara, was recently in Sabarimala during pilgrimage season, and guesses that the actual number might be closer to 10 million. “It’s a large shrine located in the mountain area,” he says, “and people come there primarily from south India. But you also have south Indians who work abroad, and they’ll return home to participate in the pilgrimage. It’s a constant influx of people.”

Aliza Shlabach / istock According to the World Heritage Center, "three sacred sites—Yoshino and Omine, Kumano Sanzan, Koyasan—linked by pilgrimage routes to the ancient capital cities of Nara and Kyoto, reflect the fusion of Shinto, rooted in the ancient tradition of nature worship in Japan, and Buddhism, which was introduced from China and the Korean Peninsula." The sites draw reportedly draw 15 million visitors annually.

Campo also studies pilgrimages to Guadalupe and Islam’s holiest site, Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. No matter the differing faiths, nearly all pilgrims “will say that at some point [they had] an experience of intimate contact with the divine—some sense of a sacred experience that they remember very clearly.”

Hayes agrees. “Regardless of their position or form [there] is a direct connection with the holy, the spiritual, and the supernaturally powerful. Pilgrims seek places where gods or saintly humans have walked and miracles have occurred, in the hopes they might participate in it and/or benefit from it themselves.”

In Lourdes, France, where in 1858 a 14-year-old girl reported multiple visions of the Virgin Mary, that benefit comes in part from spring water that is said to possess healing powers. An estimated five million pilgrims a year come to follow the injunction of the message written above the spring: "Wash your face, drink this water and pray God to purify your heart.”

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