- The Orlander community brings together fifty people from Spain, Mexico and the United States in a historic march.
- The start of the tour from Sarria strategically coincides with the Pope’s official visit to Spain.
- The project seeks to reconnect dissident identities with spirituality and emotional well-being without dogmas.
The Orlander emotional well-being community starts the first LGTBIQ+ Camino de Santiago in Spain tomorrow in Sarria with 50 international participants. The initiative coincides with the pope’s visit to the country, opening a safe space to reconnect with shared spirituality through the traditional Jacobean route.
A spiritual reconnection far from institutional rejection
The beginning of this journey coincides in time with the public debate generated by the presence of the pontiff in national territory. While the media spotlights point to institutional events, this group of fifty pilgrims proposes an alternative aimed at self-discovery and internal healing. For a large part of people belonging to queer identities, traditional religious environments have historically been a space of exclusion, singling out, and psychological suffering during their life development.
This reality has caused many members of the group to decide to definitively distance themselves from any practice linked to faith or inner search. However, the organizers detect a change in the current trend where adults claim their right to transcendence. The Camino de Santiago is thus presented as a tool stripped of rigid dogmatic readings, ideal for going through a process of active introspection in a natural environment free of prejudices.
Stop asking for permission to inhabit the transcendent
The proposal led by Orlander, considered the largest support and well-being network aimed at gay men on the national scene, aims to definitively break this legacy of isolation. The shared march allows attendees to explore its mystical dimension on their own terms and without the need to fit into the rigid molds of any specific ecclesiastical structure.
“Many of us were taught as children that this was not for us, that faith and the spiritual belonged to those who pointed us out. Recovering that terrain as adults, on our own terms, is a way to stop asking for permission,”says Fabri Orlandi, founder of Orlander.
The technological disconnection and the slow pace of daily stages make it easier for debates to emerge that usually do not find a safe place in common leisure environments. The project claims shared physical effort as a catalyst to weave real, stable and deep support networks between participants.
Deep ties versus systematic exclusion
The promoters of the march point out that LGTBIQ+ realities continue to suffer invisible expulsion dynamics in fundamental areas of society such as grassroots sports, family structures or community rituals. In the spiritual realm, this void manifests itself silently, generating a paradox where the existence of an intense social agenda does not always ensure the creation of significant interpersonal ties.
The exercise of walking in a community for several consecutive days becomes an act of peaceful resistance and visibility. By detaching the Jacobean experience from official trends, Orlander establishes a precedent in integrative tourism and collective mental health care.
The experience ends in the Plaza del Obradoiro in Santiago de Compostela, consolidating a new way of understanding the historical and spiritual heritage from respect for emotional-sexual diversity. The movement demonstrates that the answers to life’s fundamental questions also belong to those who were forced to stand aside.
