Cartography of Hospitality on Pilgrimage Routes: The Mapping Hospitals Project

Abstract

By combining digital methods with textual sources, the Mapping Hospitals project seeks to study hospitals located in Galicia in the mid-eighteenth century that offered accommodation and care to pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela, with a twofold purpose. On the one side, we aim to approach hospitals as a whole. That is, we are not focused on individual architectures that stand out due to its historical or artistic features, but on the network of buildings that provided charitable hospitality in a time period when this pilgrimage was not as important as in the Middle Ages, but it did existed. On the other hand, we propose to create a digital map to offer open access to the project outcomes to all people who may be interested. The digital map tries to become not only a means of dissemination, but also a tool for an ongoing research towards new discoveries around hospitality and pilgrimage in the St. James Way by means of computer-aided analysis and interactive web-based presentation.