689 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 S.D. Brunn (ed.), The Changing World Religion Map, DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-9376-6_34 Chapter 34 Tourism and Religion: Spiritual Journeys and Their Consequences Noga Collins-Kreiner and Geoffrey Wall 34.1 Introduction Many years ago, while visiting south-central Nigeria, the second author was taken to visit the Oba’s (King’s) palace, which was a large compound with mud walls that were adorned with impressive designs. He was then taken to a sacred grove where a natural spring emerged amidst the trees in what was otherwise a dry place. On com- pleting the visits, the guide stressed how different this experience was from that available in the western world. Superficially, this was the case for the palace struc- ture and sacred grove were distinctive symbols of the local culture. However, at another level, there were remarkable similarities with many visits by tourists made elsewhere to the centers of secular and spiritual power, which are sometimes sepa- rate and elsewhere the same place. Thus, in London one might visit Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abby and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Also, as an undergraduate student in England, he learned about Lourdes, the catholic shrine in France (Wall 2010). The evolution of the pilgrimage site and the steady accumulation of hotels and other facilities for visitors were described. Notes from the lecture state that one million pilgrims visited Lourdes in 1931 and 2.75 million in 1962, roughly evenly divided by train and road travel. There were 392 hotels in the town with 25,000 beds and 563 special trains were arranged to bring people to the shrine. Over half of these trains came from elsewhere in France, but many came from other countries. For someone familiar with British seaside resorts, N. Collins-Kreiner (*) Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Centre for Tourism, Pilgrimage and Recreation, University of Haifa, Haifa 31095, Israel e-mail: nogack@geo.haifa.ac.il G. Wall Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada e-mail: gwall@uwaterloo.ca