Quite a bit to unpack here!
Some of these top down initiatives, like the Rota Vicentina, have been very successful, but some of the officially promoted routes that
@jungleboy and
@Wendy Werneth have walked seem to be sputtering a bit. Would you agree with that,
@jungleboy? The Geira is a bottom-up initiative that hasn’t gotten much/any official support, but seems to be breaking onto the scene a bit.
Yes, I would agree on all fronts. The RV has indeed been very successful and without having statistics at hand I would assume that it has greater numbers of walkers than any Portuguese camino except for the standard routes from Porto. I think they have just promoted the coastal/beauty aspect very well. To segway to your next point, the recent efforts of the Caminhos do Alentejo e Ribatejo have been to provide a link route from their Caminho Central to the RV, so perhaps trying to cash in (relatively speaking) on the success of the RV as a way of providing an entry point to their own routes. In an interesting conversation I had once, I was made aware that the creators of the southern routes admit that don't really know how to actually promote them, and to whom. I think they thought it might be an 'if you build it, they will come' type of situation but it turned out that they built it and no one came.
And that’s with competition from the “official” route whose name escapes me, but which sort of seems to be sputtering a bit too.
Minhoto (Miñoto) Ribeiro.
Unless there is some serious momentum behind a route which is given concrete expression by providing pilgrim infrastructure then it is likely to remain little more than a line drawn on some official maps. I think the Portuguese government have probably been watching the remarkable growth in numbers on the existing Camino Portugues variants and have calculated that there is still some room for expansion. Portugal's slice of the Camino cake has been getting much bigger in recent years.
I agree, but what I'm not seeing is that despite this increasing slice of cake, that pilgrims really want to expand out of the standard routes from Porto. I don't think more routes is the answer. There are already plenty of routes in Portugal but the pilgrim mainstream has no idea about them. Pilgrims walking the Francés or another route in Spain might hear of the Portuguese camino (as if there were only one), and then might become aware that there's a coastal and inland option, and that's about it. I think those same pilgrims see doing a camino in Portugal as a one-off alternative to a Spanish camino, or at most going twice to experience both central and coastal. Meanwhile the CPI, the new southern routes, the Torres, the Geira and the Zamorano-Portugués have almost no one on them.
As examples,
@trecile and
@Camino Chrissy come to mind. They are 'serial pilgrims' so they are the type of people who would be good targets for walking some of these other Portuguese routes. But AFAIK, despite both having walked repeated caminos in Spain, they have only done one trip each in Portugal. It would be interesting to see their thoughts if they read this. Do you see Portugal as a 'one and done' pilgrim destination? Are you interested at all in the more remote Portuguese routes or would you rather just go back to Spain and walk there?