El Camino

Every year, over one and a half million people cross the marshlands of the Doñana National Park in southwestern Andalusia on foot, on horseback, in ornate wooden wagons, drawn toward the town of El Rocío, home to a small female figure venerated for over seven centuries. This is one of the largest and most intense popular pilgrimages in the world, yet it remains almost unknown outside Spain.

But this festivity is older than Christianity. Beneath the Catholic surface lives something telluric, primal: a collective surrender to a Great Mother whose pull transcends doctrine, borders, and generations. I went to document her pilgrims: the people who walk days through sand and heat not out of obligation, but out of an inexplicable, inherited need to return.

For a Spanish woman who has lived in Germany for years, this pilgrimage is also a reckoning, with roots, with belonging, with the body's memory of a land it left behind. These images were made from the inside, with the intimacy of someone who knows what it means to be called home.