A couple of years ago we visited this town of just over 13,000 at the foot of the Pyrenees in the country´s southwestern Occitanie region (in the Occitan language the town´s name is Lorda). It´s best known, of course, for the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, built between the 1860s and 1900 (with another church added in the 1950s) over a grotto called Massabielle in which a 14-year-old peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous supposedly chatted with the Virgin Mary 18 times in 1858. Besides the grotto, the sanctuary includes three basilicas: Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception (the biggest), Our Lady of the Rosary, and St. Pius X.  

The town attracts four million pilgrims a year, among them the sick and infirm looking to pray to Mary for cures and chug "Lourdes water" from the spring in the grotto, which supposedly has curative properties (nope, been scientifically debunked, but to little avail). It goes without saying religious tourism is the main industry here, with all sorts of restaurants, hostelries, and religious paraphernalia shops thronging the streets of the old quarter (we had lunch in a nice little South Asian joint called Lourdes Madha Sri Lankan and Indian Restaurant).  

By the way, that castle up on the hill is the town´s other major landmark, the Château Fort de Lourdes, dating back to the 11th century but originating during Roman times.

David Paul Appell