Lourdes: The Grotto, the Basilicas and the Torchlight Procession

Required Activities

• Walk the line past the Grotto of Massabielle, where in 1858 Bernadette Soubirous said she saw a lady the local clergy identified as the Virgin Mary — the Church recognised the apparitions in 1862 — and touch the rock as the pilgrims ahead of you do; about 20,000 people a day pass this rock in the pilgrimage season

• Take a candle and walk the whole double avenue from the Saint-Michel gate down to the esplanade du Rosaire in the evening torchlight procession, and watch the Ave Maria come round again in a different language each verse as the esplanade, 130 m by 85 m, fills behind you

• Go into all three basilicas and compare what each was built to hold: the Immaculate Conception above the grotto, finished in 1871 for about 700 people; the Rosary below it, consecrated in 1901 for 1,500; and then down the ramp into the underground Saint-Pie-X, built for the centenary of the apparitions in 1958, a nave 191 m long and 61 m wide like an upturned ship's hull, with René Margotton's gemmail Chemin de lumière along it

• Climb to the Château Fort on its rock over the town — an English garrison held it after 1361, and it was a royal and then a state prison until the 1900s — and go round the Musée Pyrénéen that Louis and Margalide Le Bondidier put into it in 1921, the largest collection of Pyrenean folk life anywhere; in the castle chapel, find the furnishings rescued from the parish church of Saint-Pierre when it was pulled down in 1904

• Ride the funicular up the Pic du Jer and from the summit pick out the whole shape of the pilgrimage below you: the loop of the gave de Pau, the grotto on its left bank, the three basilicas stacked above it, and the castle rock on the other side of the river