Every year since 1998, American Pilgrims on the Camino or its predecessor organizations has hosted an annual Gathering of Pilgrims. These events are opportunities to enjoy the company of old friends, to meet new ones and to relive the experience of the Camino.

The 2009 Gathering of Pilgrims

Walk in Spirit

Tuesday, March 10 through Tuesday, March, 17, 2009
Albuquerque, New Mexico!

American Pilgrims on the Camino
Albuquerque Gathering
March 13 - 15, 2009
Best Western Rio Grande Inn
Old Town Albuquerque

Spiritual Retreat
March 15 - 17, 2009
Spiritual Renewal Center
Albuquerque
(Transportation provided)

Hospitalero Training
March 11 - 13, 2009
South Valley Economic Development Center
Albuquerque

This will be sole opportunity for hospitalero training in the United States during 2009!

Join past and future pilgrims in exploring the deeper and higher meanings that lie within the Road to Santiago. The 2009 Gathering of Pilgrims will engage your body, mind and spirit as we share stories, thought-provoking presentations and festivities to celebrate the pilgrim in all of us.

Watch this page for details in the Fall of 2008!

The 2008 Gathering of Pilgrims is now a pleasant memory but all who attended have mentally formulated walks on the "other" Caminos!

For its 11th Annual Gathering of Pilgrims, American Pilgrims on the Camino convened at the historic Old Mission Santa Barbara in California, March 4 through 11, 2008. While our focus remained the Camino de Santiago, in 2008 the theme of Other Roads led us to wander, at least in the mind, other paths with presentations on the Via Francigena (Germany to Rome), the Via de La Plata (Seville to Santiago), the Tibetan Buddhist Mount Kailash Kora, the 88-Temples Buddhist pilgrimage on the Japanese island of Shikoku and several that required time travel to consider pilgrimages of ages past.

You can read a reminiscence of the Santa Barbara Gathering.

You can also get some sense of what you missed by browsing through the beautiful program. 2.1MB

The American Pilgrims on the Camino offers a hearty ¡Muchas gracias! to our friends from the Xacobeo organization in Galicia, Spain who provided generous funding for the Old Mission Santa Barbara Gathering. You might consider visiting their web site (by clicking on their logo). It truly is an outstanding resource for pilgrims, particularly for the portions of the various routes in Galicia.

We are looking for suggestions of and opinions about guidebooks for routes to Santiago, as well as for other pilgrimage destinations. Our principal goal is to assemble as complete a list of such guides for as many routes as possible. And, while we know of many, we would like to enlist your help to fill in the holes and to help compile this list. This information will eventually be available here on the web site and will be integrated into our page of Camino-related books.

So please help us to help other pilgrims select the guide that will work best for them! To participate in this project, simply click on the link to the form, On this page you can either complete the form online or you can download a PDF copy that can be printed, completed with a pen or pencil and then mailed to us. You'll find all the instructions there!

You can go to the questionnaire page and complete the form online or you can download a PDF copy from that page.

Hospitalero training by American Pilgrims is conducted in conjunction with the annual Gatherings. The next session has been scheduled for Tuesday, March 10 through Thursday, March 12, 2009 in Albuquerque, New Mexico! Consider giving back to the Camino!. Those who have gone on from walking the Camino to serving as hospitaleros say that this experience if anything is even more rewarding than the Camino itself. For some insight into the sense of fulfillment, there is an interesting YouTube video about service that has snippets of interviews with the late Don José María of San Juan de Ortega, Don Jesús Jato of the refugio Ave Fenix and the Confraternity's Marion Marples.

If you are interested in seeing a bit about the nuts and bolts of hosting a refugio, the Confraternity of Saint James has made its training workshop presentation available to us. This is of course specific to Refugio Gaucelmo in Rabanal but it should serve give you idea of the toil and pleasure of the experience. 3.1MB