What happened? & Camino Pilgrims

[Rosina Lila]

Hello,
Sometimes distractions like broken bones or crashed hard-drives keep us from
communicating as we'd like.   But, never fear, the gang is here.

The Santiago Archdiocese reports that the number of pilgrims who completed
the pilgrimage and received the Compostela in 1999 were 154,600 (rounded).
This number was more than 5 times that of 1998 because 1999 was a Holy
Jacobean year. The number of pilgrims was also 64% more than in the previous
Holy Jacobean year, 1993. During July, August and September 101,900 pilgrims,
or 66% of the total, completed the pilgrimage.  The number of pilgrims during
the other months ranged from 3,000 to 13,000, except for January (only 280)
and February (649).

Religious and religious/cultural reasons for the pilgrimage were cited by
151,400 pilgrims, or 98% of the total; of these, 74.5% declared their motive
to be purely religious and 23.5% stated a religious/cultural purpose. The
remaining 2% declared their reason to be cultural or other(?).

128,000, or 83% of the pilgrims, walked; 15.5% went by bicicle and the
remaining 2.5% went by horse or other means (including wheel chairs!).

86,305 of the pilgrims were men, 68,284 were women, and 24 "unknown".

91,230 of the pilgrims were between the ages of 20 and 50; 15,885 between 50
and 60;, 6,001 between 60 and 70 and 690 were over 70 years old.

38% of the pilgrims were students, and the rest were spread over all sorts of
professions and occupations.  Curiously, the number of teachers (9,197)
almost equaled the number of housewives (9,527).

The overwhelming majority of the pilgrims (87.8%) were from Spain; the second
largest national group was from France (4,016)  followed by Germany, Belgium,
Portugal and Holland.  4,186 of us hailed from America, of these 2,544 were
from Latin America and 1,642 from the U.S. and Canada; (all things
considered, a very meaningful number, in my view, since we do have to cross
the Atlantic in more ways than one).

The above numbers include only those pilgrims that finished the pilgrimage
and received the Compostela; it does not include those who gave up, or didn't
get the pilgrim's passport, or didn't know how or whether or where to get the
Compostela.

Lastly, the Archdiocese anticipated that the number of pilgrims for 2000, a
Roman Jubilee Holy year would exceed 200,000.

Those of you who may want to know the figures with greater specificity can go
to the Archdiocese's web page (which has lovely music... changed
periodically).  Go to:
www.archicompostela.org
when the webpage comes up, click on "peregrinos'"' and when that comes up
click on "estadisticas", and then you will find a selection of things to see.
 If you are not Spanish-confident, all you'll need is a Spanish-English
dictionary because most of the classifications are one word.

And, of course, if there's something you'd like to understand further, I will
be happy to translate.

Fondly,

Rosina