The Long Way Round
In 2025, 530,987 people completed the Camino de Santiago on foot. None chose the route because it was the quickest way to reach Santiago. In the fastest age in human history, something curious is happening — people are choosing the long way round.
The departure board flickers.
A flight is delayed by forty minutes.
Around the gate, phones rise almost in unison. Some travellers refresh airline apps. Others calculate missed connections. A few pace the terminal. Almost no one looks beyond the glass, where another aircraft lifts quietly into the evening sky.
Modern travel has taught us to celebrate arrival.
The faster we reach our destination, the more successful the journey seems to have been.
Yet something curious is happening.
In 2025, 530,987 people completed the Camino de Santiago on foot. None chose the route because it was the quickest way to reach Santiago. Speed was precisely what they were leaving behind.
Why, in the fastest age in human history, are so many people choosing the long way round?
The Return of Time
In 2025, more than half a million pilgrims completed the Camino de Santiago. Unsplash
The Camino has existed for more than a thousand years, but its recent revival reveals something distinctly modern.
In 2003, around 74,000 pilgrims completed the route. Just over two decades later, that number had grown to more than half a million.
The increase is remarkable not because walking is new, but because faster alternatives have never been more accessible.
This is not a rejection of technology. Most pilgrims book flights online, navigate with smartphones and share photographs instantly. What they seek is not the absence of modern life. It is the temporary absence of haste.
The scallop shell has guided pilgrims for over a thousand years. Unsplash
The anthropologist Victor Turner described pilgrimage as a threshold where ordinary structures begin to loosen. Occupations matter less. Schedules soften. Strangers who would otherwise pass unnoticed begin sharing meals, stories and silence.
Turner called this experience communitas — a fellowship that emerges simply because people are travelling the same uncertain road.
Turner called this experience communitas — a fellowship that emerges simply because people are travelling the same uncertain road.
Perhaps that is what many modern travellers are searching for. Not greater distance. A different way of paying attention.
Thinking at Walking Speed
A decision that resisted hours at a desk quietly settles somewhere between footsteps. Unsplash
There is a reason difficult conversations often feel easier after a long walk.
A decision that resisted hours at a desk quietly settles somewhere between footsteps.
The writer Rebecca Solnit has argued that walking gives thought a physical rhythm. Ideas do not arrive fully formed. They appear gradually, much like a landscape revealing itself around a bend in the road. Movement slows the mind just enough for attention to deepen.
Similarly, Alain de Botton has observed that the quality of a journey depends less on geography than on the state of mind we bring to it. Two people may stand in exactly the same place while seeing entirely different worlds.
Perhaps walking does not make us wiser. It simply gives wisdom enough room to catch up.
Every Speed Edits Reality
From a train, landscapes unfold. From a bicycle, distance acquires texture. Unsplash
We often describe slow travel as a lifestyle. It may be something more fundamental.
Every speed reveals a different version of the world. From an aircraft, geography becomes visible. From a train, landscapes unfold. From a bicycle, distance acquires texture. On foot, places become intimate.
The Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa has written that meaningful architecture is understood not only through the eye but through the body — through movement, sound, weight and touch. Travel follows the same principle.
The pace at which we move determines what we are capable of noticing.
The pace at which we move determines what we are capable of noticing.
At cycling pace, distance acquires texture that no aircraft window can offer. Unsplash
You cannot smell pine forests from thirty thousand feet. You cannot hear church bells drifting across a valley through the window of a high-speed train. You cannot discover a neighbourhood café because your itinerary left room for getting lost. Nor do you begin conversations with strangers because everyone is hurrying towards the next departure gate.
Speed does not simply shorten distance. It edits experience.
What Speed Cannot Replace
The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express: neither selling transportation nor selling speed. Venice Simplon-Orient-Express
None of this diminishes what fast travel has made possible. Families separated by continents can gather within a day. Medical supplies reach disaster zones in hours rather than weeks. Ideas, cultures and commerce move across the world with unprecedented ease.
Speed has enlarged human possibility. The question is not whether faster is better. The question is whether faster is always enough.
Perhaps that is why slower journeys are quietly returning. When the overnight Paris–Berlin train ceased operating after public subsidies ended, many assumed another chapter of European rail travel had closed. Instead, independent operator European Sleeper revived the route within weeks. Since launching in 2023, it has carried more than 230,000 passengers, supported in part by thousands of individual shareholders who believed overnight rail still had a future.
At the other end of the travel market, the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express introduced a new overnight route between Paris and the Amalfi Coast in 2026, with fares beginning at around €10,000.
These journeys could not appear more different. One is practical. The other belongs to a world of polished timber, pressed linen and carefully crafted hospitality. Yet both are responding to the same desire. Neither is selling transportation. Both are selling time.
Luxury, perhaps, is no longer defined only by exclusivity. It is increasingly defined by the freedom to linger.
Luxury, perhaps, is no longer defined only by exclusivity. It is increasingly defined by the freedom to linger.
What We Bring Home
The souvenirs that remain longest are rarely the ones purchased in airport terminals. Vecteezy
The souvenirs that remain longest are rarely the ones purchased in airport terminals.
They are the notebook filled during a train journey. The café discovered because of a missed connection. The stranger who became a friend somewhere between two villages. The stone slipped into a coat pocket on a quiet shoreline.
Travel changes us not because we stand somewhere new. It changes us because, for a while, we learn to notice differently.
The poet T. S. Eliot suggested that the deepest journeys allow us to return home seeing familiar places with renewed attention. Perhaps every meaningful journey is an exercise in returning. Not to a different address. But with different eyes.
Perhaps the greatest luxury is not arriving first, but becoming someone slightly different before you arrive.
Perhaps the greatest luxury is not arriving first, but becoming someone slightly different before you arrive.
Closing Reflection
Some journeys are measured in kilometres. The ones that remain with us are measured in attention. Unsplash
The departure board updates again. The gate opens. Passengers gather their bags and walk towards the aircraft. Outside, another plane disappears into the clouds. It will arrive on time. Whether the journey will be remembered is another question.
We have spent centuries making travel faster, lighter and more efficient. Those achievements deserve admiration. The greater challenge may be learning not to shorten our experience of the world simply because we have shortened the distance between places.
Some journeys are measured in kilometres. The ones that remain with us are measured in attention.
And perhaps that is why, despite every technology designed to shorten the road ahead, we still find ourselves searching for the long way round.