40% increase in pilgrim numbers in February?

Bradypus said:

An article in El Correo Gallego reporting a substantial increase in pilgrim arrivals recorded in Santiago so far this year compared with the same period in 2022.

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What it is is that the Correo Gallego reports a press event given by the director of Turismo de Galicia.

Oh boy and how they missed their chance for a great headline if they’d had a look of their own on the revamped statistics page of the Oficina del Peregrino. Because they could have seen that while the number of Spanish pilgrims decreased by 3% in February 2023 compared to 2022, the number of foreign pilgrims increased by a whopping 100% for the same period of comparison. And when you include February 2019 in these comparisons, yet another different picture emerges …

I think that the bottom line is this: The more people (“”tourists””) travel overall - globally, within Europe, domestically -, the more people will walk a Camino in Spain. Major expection: Easter week, long weekends due to national Spanish holidays and summer months in Holy Years.

Bradypus said:

I've just looked at the 2019 February figures for a pre-Covid comparison. 2,119 that month. So this February's figures are still a significant increase but not the dramatic 40% of the article headline.

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That was the first thing I did, too.

Total figures for February 2018, 2019, and 2022 are all in the 2000-2200 range.

For these months, total figures for Spanish pilgrims show a yearly increase and now a stagnation while for foreign pilgrims there is a significant drop in February 2022 and a significant increase in February 2023, always compared to the previous year.

I am not convinced that this is particularly predictive for total figures of the current year … maybe for May and September though … the preferred months for foreign pilgrims, especially the first two weeks of these two months.