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Pope Leo XIV is set to travel to the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes on Saturday as part of his official visit to France this week.
Nestled in the Pyrenees near the Spanish border, the small town of Lourdes draws millions of pilgrims every year. Here is everything you need to know about the pope’s visit, the town, and the shrine.
Leo XIV will be the first pontiff to set foot in Lourdes since Benedict XVI, who visited in September 2008 to mark the 150th anniversary of the Virgin’s apparitions to Bernadette Soubirous.
Now one of the world’s foremost Catholic pilgrimage sites, Lourdes owes its fame to Soubirous.
A young girl from a modest background, she said she witnessed 18 apparitions of a lady dressed in white in the Massabielle grotto, near Lourdes, between February and July 1858.
Believers say that during the ninth apparition, Bernadette heard the words: “Go and drink at the spring and wash yourself there.”
In 1862, the Catholic Church officially recognised that the apparitions were those of the Virgin Mary and later built a shrine on the site. Millions of pilgrims from around the world have since flocked to the Massabielle grotto.
These days, Lourdes welcomes around three million pilgrims a year. According to the town hall, it is the fourth most visited Catholic pilgrimage site in the world, after the Vatican, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City and the Basilica of Our Lady of Aparecida in Brazil.
Although Lourdes has a population of just 13,000 residents, it has almost 10,000 hotel rooms and around 21,200 beds to accommodate the many visitors.
Finding affordable accommodation during Pope Leo’s visit, however, has proved challenging, with huge crowds expected to gather for the event and some hotels charging more than €2,000 euros per night.
According to the latest figures released by the authorities, close to 200,000 people are expected to converge on Lourdes over two days, including around 150,000 who have registered to take part in the celebrations at the shrine.
Leo XIV’s visit comes at a time when the number of baptisms in France is rising sharply.
Over the past five years, the number of adults being baptised has risen by 28%, while the number of teenagers baptised has increased by 10%. A total of 21,386 baptisms were recorded in 2026 – more than three times the figure from a decade ago.
After spending two days in Paris, Leo XIV is set to land at Tarbes Lourdes Pyrénées airport on Saturday evening. He will then begin his visit to Lourdes with Mass at the Massabielle grotto.
The pope is also due to hold private talks with seven victims of sexual abuse.
The visit comes at a particularly sensitive time for the Catholic Church in France. In 2021, the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church estimated that 216,000 minors had been sexually abused by priests or members of religious orders between 1950 and 2020. That figure rose to around 330,000 when laypeople working in Church-related institutions were included.
Additional sources • AP