Lourdes

In 1858 a poor, asthmatic 14-year-old named Bernadette Soubirous reported that a young lady in white had appeared to her in a rocky grotto beside the river outside her town in the French Pyrenees. Over five months she described 18 visions, and the lady eventually named herself the Immaculate Conception. The Catholic Church recognized the apparitions as appearances of the Virgin Mary in 1862, and Lourdes became the most famous Marian shrine in Europe. Its draw is above all the sick: each year tens of thousands of ill and disabled pilgrims come, many with volunteer helpers, to pray at the grotto and bathe in water from the spring that Catholics believe Mary revealed to Bernadette.

The sanctuary covers a wide stretch of the Gave de Pau river valley at the foot of the Pyrenees, below the town's medieval castle. At its heart is the Grotto of Massabielle, a shallow, blackened rock hollow where a statue of Mary stands in a niche, candles burn day and night, and the spring is piped to taps and baths. Above it rise two churches stacked one over the other, the neo-Gothic Basilica of the Immaculate Conception and the Byzantine-style Rosary Basilica, framed by sweeping ramps. Across the esplanade, the vast concrete Underground Basilica of Saint Pius X holds about 25,000 people. Nightly torchlight processions with candles and sung Aves fill the esplanade from spring to autumn.

Bernadette later became a nun at Nevers, where she died in 1879, and she was canonized in 1933. The town's first chapel opened in 1866, and the sanctuary grew into a complex of 22 places of worship. The Lourdes Medical Bureau examines reported cures, and the Church has recognized 72 healings as miraculous out of more than 7,000 cases examined since 1858. Lourdes receives about 3 million pilgrims a year, and Pope Leo XIV visited in September 2026 as part of a trip to France. The shrine has faced repeated flooding of the Gave, notably in 2013, and more recently a debate over mosaics by an artist accused of abuse, which were covered during the papal visit.

• Fátima
  The Portuguese hillside shrine built where three shepherd children reported Marian visions in 1917 another Marian shrine
• The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe
  Mexico City's great Marian shrine and the most visited Catholic sanctuary in the Americas another Marian shrine
• Pyrenees
  The natural border between France and Spain, with Andorra tucked in its heights located at the foot of
• France
  Europe's most-visited nation, from the Atlantic to the Alps located in
• Santiago de Compostela
  The Galician cathedral city at the end of the Camino, where pilgrims honor Saint James sacred to the same faith
• St. Peter's Basilica
  The Renaissance basilica over the tomb of Saint Peter, principal church of the papacy sacred to the same faith