Between February 11 and July 16, 1858, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared eighteen times to Bernadette Soubirous, a poor, asthmatic miller's daughter aged fourteen, at the grotto of Massabielle near the town of Lourdes in the French Pyrenees.
On the ninth apparition, the Lady instructed Bernadette to drink and wash at a spring that did not yet exist. Bernadette scratched at the ground, and a trickle emerged that within days became a steady flow. That spring has been the site of pilgrimage and healing ever since.
On the sixteenth apparition, the Lady at last gave her name in Bernadette's Pyrenean dialect: 'Que soy era Immaculada Counceptiou' — 'I am the Immaculate Conception.' The phrase had been formally defined as Catholic doctrine by Pope Pius IX only four years earlier (1854); Bernadette had no idea what it meant.
The Lourdes Medical Bureau, founded in 1883, has examined more than 7,000 reported cures since the spring opened. Of these, 72 have been formally recognised as miraculous by the Church — the most recent being that of Antonia Raco, an Italian woman healed of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, recognised in 2025. Roughly five million pilgrims now visit Lourdes each year.