Long pilgrimage routes are physical infrastructure as much as religious tradition. They persist because identifiable organisations maintain waymarks, accommodation and the documents that define who has walked them.
Waymarking is the route
A pilgrimage path across open country exists only as a sequence of markers, since much of it follows ordinary tracks and roads shared with everyone else.
Markers are painted, replaced and occasionally moved by volunteer associations working with landowners and local authorities.
Where marking lapses, the route effectively disappears within a few seasons, which is why disputes over signage carry more weight than they appear to.
Accommodation defines the daily stages
Distances between hostels determine how the route is walked, since a pilgrim must reach a bed by evening.
Those stages become fixed in guidebooks and then in expectation, so a network of buildings ends up dictating the rhythm of the journey.
Opening a new hostel or closing an old one changes the stages for everyone, which is why such decisions are made collectively rather than commercially.
Credentials establish who counts as a pilgrim
Most established routes issue a document stamped along the way, presented at the destination to receive a certificate.
The system determines eligibility, typically requiring a minimum distance on foot and stamps demonstrating that the distance was actually covered.
It also produces the only reliable record of who walks the route, which is what allows anyone to plan capacity at all.
Local authorities have their own interest
Routes pass through small settlements where pilgrim traffic supports shops, cafes and accommodation that would otherwise close.
Municipalities therefore invest in paths, signage and facilities, and compete over which variant of a historic route is designated as the main one.
Those interests align with pilgrims most of the time and diverge where volume itself becomes the problem, particularly in the final stages near a destination.
Revival is more common than continuity
Several major routes fell into disuse for long periods and were reconstructed in the twentieth century from documents, church records and surviving paths.
Reconstruction involves choices, since medieval pilgrims took many paths and a modern route selects one and marks it.
What is walked today is therefore a curated version of a historical practice, maintained by people who are usually explicit about that, and no less used for it.