A Tale of Two Waters or: Lourdes, Won’t You Buy Me a Souvenir

Denise here! Steve is too busy watching Le Tour so it’s my turn to fill you in. Water is everywhere in the Pyrenees. It pours from the mountains, powering hydroelectric plants, runs through villages in charming little creeks and spillways, flows from fountains at every church and city square, and generally falls from the sky at some point most every day. I doubt the locals take it for granted given the lack of water in so many other parts of the world right now and we certainly don’t. 

 As it turns out, the water is also pretty famous for its healing properties.  Steve and I have ‘taken the waters’ in one of the many historic thermal spas near our town on several occasions with lovely results and I’ll describe more of that later, but first, a few notes from my trip to the Mother Superior of all water spigots: Lourdes. 

As many of you know, I was raised in a moderately devout Catholic family and, like any good Catholic, Lourdes — along with Father Damian —  loomed large in my upbringing.  Lourdes was such a fantastic idea to me:  I loved the notion that holy water from a spring in a cave could miraculously heal sickness!  It didn’t matter that I had no idea where Lourdes was or that the Virgin Mary appeared exactly as depicted in paintings of the times. The little vials of water that devoted pilgrims from our parish brought back to family and friends each year could have contained tap water for all I knew.  Who cared?  It was magical.  Later, it became a running joke in my family that Lourdes was always the fall-back escape for any illness that might creep up. 

I should mention that Steve was raised under similar religious circumstances and his mother even kept a cherished Virgin Mary-shaped vial of the blessed water in a special spot in their home.  But Steve, being the curious child he was, went so far as to drink the contents of the bottle one day, causing his mother to have a fit which, no doubt, added to his general disdain for the Roman Catholic faith. Later, their family dog chewed the now-empty plastic bottle into something resembling modern sculpture.  Needless to say, I made my sojourn to the Grotto alone.    

Pilgrims have been flocking to Lourdes in droves since 1858, when the Virgin Mary supposedly, miraculously appeared to a young girl named Bernadette Soubirous in a grotto at the edge of town, next to the Gave de Pau.  Bernadette claims to have seen Mary more than a dozen times and was instructed by Mary to tell them to build a chapel at the site, ask forgiveness, and bathe in the water to cleanse all sins. The miraculous ‘healings’ started around the early 1870’s and since that time over 70 medical miracles have been recognized by the church along with a very strict board made up of doctors, other medical professionals, and clergy. Unfortunately,  there’s been a bit of a slowdown on miracles of late, with the last documented one taking place in 2008.  However, that has not deterred thousands of pilgrims in various states of medical need from showing up daily to collect the water and pray at the site, a large parkland consisting of a giant cathedral built on top of the grotto and over 40 micro spots where faithful groups can gather for mass, prayer and evening candle lightings. Getting see the actual Grotto of Apparitions is a bit of an ordeal, not unlike waiting in line for Space Mountain or a Taylor Swift concert I suppose, the difference being that people here quietly and respectfully shuffle along — no loud chatting, jostling, or gum chewing in this crowd! It does help to be in need though, as I saw dozens of people in wheelchairs and walkers assisted by volunteer nurse-nuns, who are dressed in identical crisp white habits, get the VIP treatment and go straight to the front of the line.  Once you enter the grotto area you can see the spot where Bernadette must have been standing or kneeling in her moments of fervor. You are allowed run your hand along the rocky walls but forget trying to stick a  finger in the actual spring: several stout, stern nuns looking exactly like my eighth grade teacher, Sister Mary Elizabeth, held arms akimbo preventing anyone from actually violating the holy water. No doubt this is just one more of life’s simple pleasures of which COVID 19 has robbed us!  

 

The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes is visited by nearly five million people annually and it’s a decidedly international crowd with people coming from all corners of the globe.  The town itself has a population of only 15,000 people but if you need to book a trip for your entire congregation, Lourdes has the most hotel rooms of any city in France outside of Paris! The inns mostly sprang up in the area surrounding the grotto in the 18th and 19th centuries and not much has changed since then, at least on the outside of the buildings. 

I had my own reasons for visiting Lourdes. For many years I’ve suffered weird and debilitating pain in my lower extremities resulting from pretty serious fractures in both legs. So when we arrived, I’m thinking what the hell?  I’m Catholic, I’m only nine miles away from miracle central, and I feel fairly entitled, so I was willing to give Lourdes a whirl. It’s really no different than buying a lotto ticket for a one billion dollar Powerball prize, right?  Well, I’d probably have better odds with the Powerball, if you can believe that!  

After visiting the actual Grotto, pilgrims line up at one of the founts that are made available so the faithful can fill whatever containers they have brought along, and it’s an amazing assortment!  People carried everything from eyedropper bottles to huge 10L jugs to fill with the healing waters. If you neglected to bring your own container, no problem: the streets leading down to the Sanctuary site are absolutely jam-packed with shops offering every kind of Blessed Virgin Mary logo-emblazoned empty plastic receptacle you can imagine. I had brought along an empty Perrier water bottle for this very purpose but felt weirdly ashamed that I was going to put this supposedly healing water into such a crass (albeit top-shelf name brand) one liter bottle and ended up dropping two euros on two small, plastic bottles featuring the VM herself and felt better about that. I’ll let you know if it helps (or watch your evening news). 

Speaking of shopping….there is nothing like the lineup of souvenir stores leading to the Grotto.  It’s Disneyland Main Street for the Catholics. Never in my life have I seen so many shops devoted to the devoted!  There’s a dazzling array of everything from cheap religious tchotchkes to legit beautiful ecclesiastic arts and crafts.  I was stunned by the sheer volume of merchandise. Shopping never felt so heavenly! 

I’ll leave Lourdes with this final thought: the one thing I think is actually cool about Lourdes is that it’s a city entirely devoted to the only women in the Catholic faith that gets any kind of recognition. Europe, especially France, is so full of endless depictions of Christ on the cross. So good on you, Mary and Bernadette!  You own this town!  

Higher up in the Pyrenees, less holy but wholly more relaxing, the thermal baths await and it’s a real experience to make a day of extreme hiking and then retreat into a bath house for the mineral-rich waters, which used to be a destination for the wealthy but now mostly cater to the hiking and biking crowd. The area we are in are full of these baths and the one Steve and I visited — Luzea in Luz-Saint-Sauveur — was built by Napoleon to house and treat his recovering soldiers!  Nowadays, for about $20, you get two hours of bobbing around in pools of various temperatures and sizes and saunas of different steaminess but the real treat, for a nominal extra cost, is the private hydrotherapy treatment taken in the old original spa building. When we inquired about the treatment at the front desk, the lady assured us that the waters in the hydrobaths had actual healing powers and who were we to argue?  The experience lasts about 20 minutes and you end up feeling like you’ve had a full-body massage. The minerals in the water left my skin softer than I’ve felt in years and Steve even delighted in being able to touch his toes, and after two hip replacements, that’s no small feat. 

All in all, taking the waters at either of these locations, be it a holy shrine or a steamy mountain spa, is certainly worth your while, and the scenery is not too shabby either!  My Lourdes experience set me back only two euros compared to the double-digit spa bill at Luzea so there’s that. The hydrotherapy probably gave me more relief than the holy waters down the mountain but ultimately it’s all worth it, right? 

Coming soon: the old folks go for a bike ride and take in some live music. We’re wrapping up our time here in France before we head due south and a short distance to spend a month in the Spanish Pyrenees.