From Varanasi to Mecca, how pilgrimages changed 19 cities around the world

British religious historian Kathryn Hurlock’s new book, Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World (Profile Books/Hachette India), shows us how 19 different pilgrimage sites transformed the very cities they are located in, shaping their streets, economies, identities, and futures.

In India, the Ganges River, especially the stretch through Varanasi, the city of death, offers something both universal and personal. Bathing in its waters is said to purify sins. One of the most important of all pilgrimage cities on the Ganges, Varanasi, overlooking a large sweeping bend of the river lined with 88 ghats, is believed to be one of the oldest permanently inhabited cities in the world.

“The oldest is probably the fifth-century Manikarnika Ghat but most were rebuilt in the eighteenth century. Varanasi is the home of Shiva, god of destruction and the deity who helped the goddess Ganga bring her river to earth, and is believed to be the centre of the world (specifically, the Manikarnika Ghat claims that honour), making it the one place among the thousands of pilgrimage sites in India that a Hindu really must visit at least once,” writes Hurlock.

Varanasi: The city of death

Varanasi’s sacred status, she writes, owes as much to its geography as to its spiritual legacy. Its location on a natural ford of the Ganges helped it grow into a dense, thriving hub for local and travelling pilgrims. By the 19th century, it had become known as the “Holy City of India,” with cremation at the Manikarnika Ghat drawing the faithful seeking moksha. Pilgrimage became an organised economy: families of paryatak mitra competed fiercely for clients, Brahmins managed rituals, and around one-fifth of the city’s population were priests —evidence of how central pilgrimage was to Varanasi’s identity and livelihood.

But even as the city grew sacred, the river that gave it life has been steadily dying. From the clean glacial source at Gangotri to the polluted banks of Varanasi, the Ganges has become choked with untreated sewage, industrial waste, and cremated remains. Despite high-profile promises like Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2014 vow to clean the river, meaningful change has stalled, worsened by declining glacier flows and cultural beliefs that the Ganga, as a goddess, is incorruptible. With the river’s flora and fauna in sharp decline and health risks rising, the future of this sacred waterway — and the spiritual life it sustains — hangs in the balance.

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Hurlock writes that it was as early as by the turn of the 20th century that people became acutely aware of how polluted the river was becoming. “One angry correspondent to The Lancet, England’s leading medical journal, called the Ganges ‘a vast sewer receiving the sewage of all the sewered towns on its banks’. Much of the pollution came from Kanpur, where tanneries and textile mills pumped their waste directly into the river. Since then the volume of pollutants has only increased as the numbers of pilgrims, residents and businesses of all kinds have grown.”

“Untreated sewage (over eighteen billion litres of it each day), chemical waste, heavy metals from ash and run-off from agriculture that washes over six million tons of contaminant a year into the water combine in a toxic soup. Levels of coliform bacteria are dangerously high. By the time it reaches Varanasi, the Ganges is effectively an open sewer. At that point up to 40,000 bodies, some of them only partially burned because people cannot afford the fuel for effective cremation, are put into the river each year,” she adds.

Haridwar, Prayagraj, Ujjain, and Nashik

What this means for the Ganges and its pilgrims, underlines Hurlock, is concerning: “At the riverside city of Rishikesh in 2016 Swamsai Chidanand Saraswati contemplated the state of the river and the harm being done to the goddess considered a mother by many. He issued a stark warning: ‘If Ganga dies, India dies.’ What will happen to the pilgrims then? As with other pilgrimage places central to community identity — Bear Butte for Native Americans, Amristar for Sikhs, Mecca for Muslims — threats to access for pilgrims could have repercussions far beyond the river itself.”

Cities like Haridwar, Prayagraj, Ujjain, and Nashik, which host the Kumbh Mela, have been completely transformed to serve the flow of pilgrims. At peak, these cities handle up to 30 million visitors at once, requiring entire parallel cities to be built, complete with toilets, transport, food, and health services.

Mount Tai (Tai Shan) in China has been visited for millennia by both emperors and commoners. It’s where rulers once climbed to claim the Mandate of Heaven — a divine stamp of legitimacy — and where ordinary people still hike to pray for health, peace, and good harvests. It’s a mountain that shaped China’s political theology as much as its trail paths.

Moving west, we land in Delphi, ancient Greece’s pilgrimage capital, where pilgrims sought advice from the oracle of Apollo. Unlike other sacred sites that served gods of war or fertility, Delphi’s draw was information — answers to questions posed by generals, kings, and farmers, etc. Pilgrimage here influenced statecraft, politics, and foreign policy. The ancient stones still stand, surrounded now by a modern town that survives on historical tourism.

Cities made sacred

Four cities in the book lie at the heart of the world’s most important religious traditions. Jerusalem, holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, is a city of layered devotion, and tension. Its old lanes wind past the Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Dome of the Rock. It is a sacred crossroads and a contested space. Over centuries, Jerusalem’s layout, economy, and identity have all been configured by pilgrims. For every prayer uttered, there are questions of who controls the site, whose past is honoured, and whose future is being imagined.

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Mecca, in contrast, is singular in its religious purpose. Every year, millions of Muslims gather for the Hajj, circling the Kaʿbah in what is not just a devotional ritual but one of the world’s largest coordinated movements of people. To manage this, Saudi Arabia has turned Mecca into an ultra-modern pilgrimage city: new airports, multi-level mosque complexes, and skyscraper hotels have risen in the service of faith. The sacred is now surrounded by the sleek. Call it pilgrimage by design, if you will.

Rome, the seat of Catholicism and home to some of Christianity’s most iconic churches, has seen pilgrims streaming into the city to visit the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul over centuries. The city responded with routes and rituals, and the Vatican became the centre of doctrine as well as of urban and architectural development.

Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) has a more layered story: it began as a Christian city, became Orthodox, was seized by Crusaders, and was then taken by the Ottomans, who remade it as an Islamic capital. Each of these historical churn brought new pilgrimages, new power struggles, and a new religious skin laid over an ancient core.

Sacred, personal, and political

From empire and theology, Hurlock’s book shifts to the more personal. Iona, a small island off Scotland’s coast, was once the burial place of kings and a centre of early Christian monasticism. Today, it is the heart of the ecumenical Iona Community, a quiet pilgrimage site for those seeking reflection. Though remote, its influence is global.

Karbala, in Iraq, is the site of the largest Muslim pilgrimage in the world: Arbaʿeen, which falls 40 days after Ashura. Each year, tens of millions of Shia Muslims walk hundreds of miles to honour the martyrdom of Imam Husain. Despite its scale, Karbala retains a deeply intimate feel. Families make the journey together, and along the route, local people offer water, food, and rest. It’s a pilgrimage of grief, love, and solidarity, just as personal as Iona, though vastly different in size and politics.

Then we go deeper into the Americas. Chichén Itzá, once a Mayan spiritual site, and Bear Butte in South Dakota, sacred to Native American tribes, represent pilgrimage that was once violently interrupted. European colonisers dismissed or outlawed these beliefs. However, today, both sites have reclaimed spiritual importance. At Bear Butte, prayers and offerings continue, despite government attempts to limit access.

Elsewhere, colonisation created the very sites it sought to control. In Muxima, Angola, Portuguese settlers built a church where enslaved Africans were forcibly baptised. Today, Muxima draws peaceful Christian pilgrims, but its legacy is heavy: faith mixed with forced conversion, spirituality built on historical trauma.

Amritsar, by contrast, shows what happens when sacred space is chosen rather than imposed. Land was purchased, not taken, to build the Golden Temple. The temple has since become the symbol of Sikh identity, welcoming all visitors and feeding thousands daily through the practice of langar — free communal meals prepared and served by volunteers.

Modern paths, new meanings

The final six sites in Hurlock’s book explore the full range of what pilgrimage means today. Lourdes, in southern France, is one of the most famous Catholic pilgrimage sites in the world. It’s orderly, supported by priests and medical volunteers, and focused on healing.

Visitors arrive with wheelchairs, candles, and hope. In contrast, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, also in France, hosts Roma and Traveller communities who come to honour Black Sara. Their celebrations — full of music, bonfires, and late-night revelry — stand apart from the serenity of Lourdes. Both are pilgrimages, both are acts of faith, but they show how belief can take wildly different forms.

In Rātana Pā, New Zealand, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, pilgrimage takes on a political face. In both places, people continue to honour charismatic 20th-century figures — Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana and Eva Perón — whose lives still stir debate. Their followers blend religion, politics, and identity.

Visiting their graves or communities is both a way of expressing devotion and of staking a political claim. In Rātana Pā, the site has become a key location for Māori identity and political negotiation. In Buenos Aires, Perón’s tomb is less a monument than a site of ongoing memory.

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The final chapters explore movement itself. The Shikoku pilgrimage in Japan links 88 temples in a 750-mile loop. It’s walked, cycled, driven, each mode raising debates about authenticity. Likewise, the Camino Francés to Santiago de Compostela in Spain draws seekers from around the world. Some come with religious intentions, others for personal healing.

The city as a spiritual machine

Across these 19 places, Hurlock maps the paths of the devout and the ways in which cities, communities, and countries bend around them. Roads are built. Laws are changed. Hotels spring up. Borders shift. Faith does not only live in books and rituals, it lives in the geography of the everyday.

When pilgrims move, cities move with them. This is the simple, powerful truth behind the book. Pilgrimage has been a global force: it built economies, preserved cultures, fuelled protests, justified empires, and sparked urban revolutions.