Dantas, Eugênia MariaNascimento, Cláudia Regina Tavares do2025-10-142025-10-142025-06-30NASCIMENTO, Cláudia Regina Tavares do. Caminhando eu vou para Canindé/CE: espaço vivido na romaria Dom Joaquim em honra a São Francisco das Chagas. Orientadora: Dra. Eugênia Maria Dantas. 2025. 191f. Tese (Doutorado em Geografia) - Centro de Ciências Humanas, Letras e Artes, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, 2025.https://repositorio.ufrn.br/handle/123456789/65855Popular religiosity in Brazil is prominently expressed in religious festivals and pilgrimages dedicated to patron saints, configuring practices that transcend the strictly religious sphere and take on cultural, social, and territorial dimensions. Within this context, this thesis aims to analyze the pilgrimages held during the festivities honoring Saint Francis of the Wounds in the city of Canindé, Ceará, from a cultural geography perspective. The choice of Canindé is justified by its importance as the second-largest pilgrimage center in the Northeast, attracting thousands of pilgrims and visitors, resulting in temporary transformations in the city's physical, social, and economic makeup. The spatial framework encompasses the approximately 131- kilometer route between Fortaleza and Canindé, with an emphasis on the experiences of pilgrims who make the trek on foot. The timeframe encompasses the festivities of Saint Francis of the Wounds, held between September 24th and October 4th, in the years 2023 and 2024. The research adopts a qualitative approach with a phenomenological orientation, seeking to understand how subjects experience and attribute meaning to the procession and religious celebrations. The investigative process was based on open-ended interviews, conducted through spontaneous dialogue, without a rigid, previously established model. In total, 80 people were interviewed, from a universe of 160 pilgrims participating in the Dom Joaquim Pilgrimage. Members of the Braga family, descendants of the Pilgrimage's founders, represented by José Gomes Braga, Levi Braga, and his wife, Sílvia Braga, were also interviewed. The analysis is based on central concepts of cultural geography, such as lived space, place, and landscape, which allow us to understand the construction and experience of sacred spaces in devotional practices. Furthermore, the discussion is enriched by the concepts of sacred, profane, and hierophany, contributing to the interpretation of the symbolic dynamics that permeate the festivities. The results indicate that the pilgrimage is configured as a spatial practice of faith, identity, and belonging, continually reinterpreted by the individuals involved. The Canindé pilgrims' journey thus reveals itself as a phenomenon of strong symbolic density, in which lived space is produced by faith, memory, and relationships with others. It is a sacred practice inscribed in bodies, landscapes, and relationships, rooted in Brazilian popular culture and experienced as a symbolic rite of passage, in which the external crossing reflects an internal movement of spiritual transformation.pt-BRAcesso AbertoReligiosidade popularRomariasSão Francisco das ChagasGeografia culturalEspaço vividoCanindé (Ceará)doctoralThesisCIENCIAS HUMANAS::GEOGRAFIA