Car Hire in Lourdes, France
Lourdes, approximately 30km southeast of Pau, has just one function. Above 7 million Catholic pilgrims arrive here every year, and the town is entirely given over to looking after and exploiting them. Lourdes was hardly over a village before 1858, when Bernadette Soubirous, the 14-year-old daughter of an ex-miller, had the earliest of 18 visions of the Virgin Mary in the so-called Grotte de Massabielle through the Gave de Pau. Consequently, Lourdes is continuing to grow a great deal, and is also now one of the best sightseeing attractions in this area of France, lots of its visitors are looking forward to a miraculous cure for conventionally intractable ailments.
The primary large-scale pilgrimage befell in 1873, established by a reactionary Catholic movement referred to as the Assomptionistes, whose avowed objective was to stem the advancing tide of republicanism and rationalism. They took over the handling of Lourdes, shoving aside the local priest who had planned to organize the pilgrimages himself. Adroit propagandists and agitators, they sought to develop their cause by publishing an economical mass-circulation paper called La Croix ,Croix, geared toward the indigents and uneducated, and also by organizing these massive pilgrimages.
Practically every shop is given over to the sale of indescribable religious kitsch: Bernadette in most shape and size, adorning barometers, thermometers, plastic tree trunks, key rings, empty bottles that you could fill with holy Lourdes water, bellows, candles, sweets and illuminated plastic grottoes. There's even a waxworks museum called the
Musée Grévin , at 87 rue de la Grotte (daily: April-Oct 9-11.30am & 1.30-6.30pm; July & Aug also 8.30-10pm; 33F/?5), with more than over a hundred life-sized figures showing the lives of Bernadette and Christ. Clustered within the miraculous grotto are the churches of the Cité Réligieuse, an annexe to the town proper that sprang up last century. The first to be established was the flamboyant Basilique du Rosaire et de l'Immaculée Conception (1871-1883), swiftly along with the massive subterranean Basilique St-Pie-X , which claims to be capable of facilitating 20,000 people at a time as a residential home. The Grotte de Massabielle itself, where Bernadette had her visions, is the center of the pilgrimages - a moisture-blackened overhang by the riverside with a statue of the Virgin in waxwork white as well as baby blue.
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