Surfing therapeutic landscapes: Exploring cyberpilgrimage

The therapeutic landscape (TL) concept recognises that places and settings encompass physical/built, symbolic and social environments that all relate, in combination, to achieving renewal, healing or, at the very least, a sense of well-being. These relationships have been observed repeatedly in the case of material, real-world religious/spiritual pilgrimages and have been shown to be conducive to healing. Employing the TL concept, this phenomenological research specifically explores the experience of cyberpilgrimage, the phenomenon of embarking on pilgrimages over the Internet. A sample of four devotional Catholic cyberpilgrimage websites are explored to shed light on whether they contain elements of the three characteristic TL themes: physical/built, symbolic and social environments. It is found that the websites do, in fact, reflect the TL themes, although differently in manner and extent.