World's most visited religious destinations

Suzanne Kaufman, professor of history at Loyola University of Chicago and author of Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine, says, “When one visits Lourdes today, one is confronted with two remarkable sites: crowds of desperately sick pilgrims drinking, bathing and praying at the Catholic shrine, and equally large numbers of customers shopping at hundreds of piety shops that line the major boulevards leading to the pilgrimage site.”

Kaufman says the mass-marketing of Lourdes was in full force even a hundred years ago, when “the Augustinian Fathers of the Assumption, a Paris-based religious order, made Lourdes the site of their national pilgrimage. With the help of the railway and the Catholic popular press, the Assumptionists transformed Lourdes into a site of mass pilgrimage, bringing hundreds of thousands of devout Catholics to the shrine.”

The ease and luxury of transportation, of course, is part of what distinguishes the modern pilgrim from faithful journeyers in the past, who may have trekked long distances on foot to pay homage to their god. “The word ‘travel’ comes from ancient word ‘travail,’ which means hardship,” explains Dallen Timothy. “It used to be that the trail or pathway was more important than the destination. The original notion of pilgrimage, regardless of religious tradition, was that getting there was more important than the destination.”

Today, Muslims can book 5-star Hajj packages and Christians can join luxury cruises in Greece to follow in the footsteps of St. Paul. Religious destinations and pilgrimages have become more commodified. Says Timothy, “Every religion does it.”

But while the journey aspect of pilgrimage may be greatly diminished, Holly Hayes says, “I'm not sure this means the essence of pilgrimage has been lost in modern times. If a medieval pilgrim were offered a trip to their destination on an airplane—even in economy class—I find it hard to believe many of them would refuse. That's because, I would argue, the most important thing is to visit the shrine, to be close to the holy and the supernatural.”

Jeremy Edwards / istock Varanasi, India Hinduism's holiest city is located on the banks of the Ganges and legend has it that the Hindu deity Shiva once lived here. An estimated one million pilgrims flock here each year to wash away sins in the sacred river—or to die in it. Passing on in Varanasi promises liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

For a closer look at the numbers of faithful—and curious—and where they flock, take a journey through our slide show. As the wildly divergent estimates for Sabarimala attest, data on visitation to religious destinations can be less than reliable, as can the definition of “religious destination”—which, in some broad definitions includes places like Civil War battlefields or religious gatherings. The periodic Hindu convergence, Kumbh Mela, for example, rotates among four locations.

With an estimated 70 million in attendance, the most recent Kumbh Mela would top our list, but we’ve chosen a more conventional definition: looking at physical sites that are part of present-day religions (which excludes heavily visited sites such as the Egyptian Pyramids or the Parthenon in Athens). We’ve gathered figures from tourist boards, the sites themselves, scholars, reputable media sources and, where possible, a combination of these.

Although they are listed in approximate order, according to the best sources available, we are not giving religious destinations hard-and-fast number-rankings. Other sources for these estimates may surface, which we will monitor and—if persuasive—will adjust accordingly.

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