Lourdes was one of the places we had particularly wanted to see during this part of our journey through south-western France. We arrived by motorhome while travelling with our dog, which immediately made the visit slightly more complicated because ordinary dogs are not allowed inside the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes. This meant that visiting the religious complex required a little more organisation than usual, but Lourdes is such an unusual place that we still wanted to experience it rather than simply continue towards the Pyrenees.
The Sanctuary itself is enormous and completely different from what we had imagined from photographs. At its centre is the Grotto of Massabielle, the small rocky cavity where fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous reported seeing the Virgin Mary for the first time on 11 February 1858. Bernadette came from an extremely poor family and had gone to the area with her sister and a friend to collect firewood. Over the following months she returned repeatedly to the grotto and reported a total of eighteen apparitions, the last taking place on 16 July 1858.
One of the most important moments occurred on 25 February, when Bernadette said that the Lady told her to drink from a spring and wash herself there. She scraped at the ground and muddy water initially appeared before gradually becoming a flowing spring. That water still supplies the fountains and baths of the Sanctuary today. The famous “piscines” are therefore not swimming pools but small bathing places used by pilgrims as a religious gesture. The water itself is not claimed by the Church to possess unusual chemical properties; its importance comes from its connection with the apparitions and the faith of the pilgrims who come here.
The Sanctuary subsequently grew around the grotto on an extraordinary scale. Above it stands the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, while below is the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary, and nearby the enormous underground Basilica of Saint Pius X can accommodate tens of thousands of people. Yet despite all these monumental buildings, the small grotto remains the real centre of Lourdes. People pass silently in front of the rock, touch its polished surface, light candles, pray or simply stop for a few moments beside the spring.
What surprised us almost as much as the Sanctuary itself, however, was the city surrounding it. Lourdes has been shaped by more than a century and a half of mass pilgrimage, and entire streets were built to accommodate enormous numbers of visitors. Hotels, souvenir shops, restaurants and religious shops fill the streets leading towards the Sanctuary. But while walking through the city we also noticed a striking number of hotels that were closed, shuttered or appeared to have been abandoned for some time. Some looked as though they had once been substantial establishments catering to large organised pilgrimages but were now completely silent.
It gave Lourdes a strange atmosphere. Around the Sanctuary there were pilgrims, coaches, religious groups and visitors from many different countries, yet only a few streets away there were buildings that seemed to belong to another era of tourism. Lourdes once developed an extraordinary amount of hotel accommodation for the huge organised pilgrimages of the twentieth century, but the way people travel has changed, many of the older hotels have struggled to modernise and the Covid period dealt an additional blow to an economy heavily dependent on pilgrims. Some of the closed buildings we saw may be awaiting renovation or new owners rather than being permanently abandoned, but the contrast was nevertheless impossible to miss.
That contrast became one of the things we remembered most about Lourdes. On one side there is one of the most visited Catholic pilgrimage sites in the world, with an extraordinary concentration of churches, processions, candles and people coming specifically to pray at the place where Bernadette said she saw the Virgin Mary. On the other there is a city whose enormous tourism infrastructure clearly reflects a very different period, when organised pilgrimages filled hundreds of hotels year after year.
Travelling with the motorhome meant that our experience was different from that of a conventional pilgrim arriving on an organised tour. Yet perhaps that also allowed us to notice more of Lourdes as a real city rather than seeing only the Sanctuary.
Whatever one’s personal beliefs, Lourdes is difficult to dismiss as just another tourist destination. The story of a poor fourteen-year-old girl in 1858 transformed a small town at the foot of the Pyrenees into a place known throughout the world, and more than a century and a half later people are still gathering around the same grotto and drinking from the same spring. For us, Lourdes was memorable not only because of the religious history and the Sanctuary itself, but also because of the strange mixture of intense pilgrimage, enormous architecture, everyday tourism and the silent old hotels that reveal how much the city has changed over time.
