France Pilgrimage Sites and Shrines

1. Why France Holds So Many Shrines

France has been Christian since the second century, and almost every layer of that history left a shrine behind. Roman Gaul produced martyrs at Lyon and a soldier-bishop at Tours. The early medieval abbeys gathered relics and became stops on the roads to Compostela and Rome. The Gothic cathedrals rose in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries around relics of the Virgin and of the Passion. The Catholic revival of the seventeenth century founded schools of prayer at Paray-le-Monial and in Paris. The nineteenth century, a period of sharp anticlericalism in French public life, produced a dense run of reported Marian apparitions: rue du Bac in 1830, La Salette in 1846, Lourdes in 1858, Pontmain in 1871.

Those layers are still visible on the ground, and they are the reason a French pilgrimage looks different from an Italian or a Holy Land one. Rome gathers the tombs of the apostles and the offices of the Church into a single city, and the Holy Land sites gather the events of the Gospels into a few square miles. France scatters. The shrines are spread from the Pyrenees to Normandy, from the Alps to the Atlantic, and each one is small enough to be about one thing. Lourdes is about the sick. Ars is about confession. Paray-le-Monial is about the Heart of Christ. Lisieux is about a way of holiness available to people with no gifts and no platform. Mont-Saint-Michel is about the archangel and the sea.

The Difference Between a Shrine and a Monument

Many of the buildings named on this page are also famous works of architecture, and a great deal of what is written about them treats them as monuments. A pilgrim goes for a different reason. Chartres is a masterpiece of thirteenth-century glass, and it is also the church that has kept a relic of the Virgin since 876 and draws walkers across the wheat plain every Pentecost. Mont-Saint-Michel is one of the most photographed places in Europe, and it is also an abbey where a community sings the Office every day. The buildings will hold your attention on their own. The question worth bringing is what the place was built to make possible, which is prayer, confession, the Mass and the veneration of the saints. Our guide to what a pilgrimage actually is sets out that distinction at length.

What the Church Has and Has Not Declared

Several of these shrines rest on reported apparitions, and the Church's judgments about them differ sharply from one case to the next. Lourdes, La Salette, Pontmain and Laus each have a named episcopal decree with a date. The chapel at rue du Bac has no such decree and was approved by a different route. The Provencal tradition at Sainte-Baume rests on medieval legend rather than on any decree at all, and the Church has never adjudicated it. This page states each case as it stands, and our guide to how the Church judges Marian apparitions gives the full framework, including the norms the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published on 17 May 2024, under which the Church ordinarily no longer declares any apparition supernatural.

2. Lourdes and Nevers

Lourdes is a market town in the French Pyrenees where a fourteen-year-old miller's daughter named Bernadette Soubirous reported eighteen apparitions of a young woman at a riverside cave between 11 February and 16 July 1858. On 25 March 1858 the figure identified herself in the local Occitan with the words Bernadette did not understand and had to carry to her parish priest: the Immaculate Conception. On 18 January 1862 Bishop Bertrand-Severe Laurence of Tarbes issued the judgment that the Virgin Mary had truly appeared at the grotto of Massabielle, and the shrine grew from that decree.

What Lourdes became is a place organised around the sick. The town receives pilgrims with serious illness and disability on a scale the sanctuary is purpose-built for, carried in blue-hooded chariots by volunteers who pay their own way to push them, and the whole architecture of the sanctuary follows from that: level ground, wide processional avenues, an underground basilica able to hold a very large congregation under cover. The spring Bernadette uncovered with her hands during the ninth apparition feeds the taps and the baths. The Church has never taught that the water has power in itself, and the healings the medical bureau at Lourdes examines are assessed under strict criteria, with only a small number ever recognised as inexplicable by the diocese concerned.

The evening rosary procession, thousands of candles moving up the esplanade with the Ave of Lourdes sung between decades, is the image most people carry away. Our full guide to the Lourdes pilgrimage walks the grotto, the spring, the baths, the processions and the three basilicas in detail, so this hub does not repeat it.

Nevers, Where Bernadette Is

Bernadette did not stay at Lourdes. In 1866 she entered the Sisters of Charity of Nevers, three hundred miles north in Burgundy, and lived there in poor health and deliberate obscurity until her death on 16 April 1879 at the age of thirty-five. She is at Nevers still. Her body lies in a glass reliquary in the chapel of the Espace Bernadette Soubirous, with a light wax covering over the face and hands applied after the exhumations of the early twentieth century, and pilgrims who have stood at the grotto often find that the second half of the story matters more to them than the first. Pope Pius XI canonised her in 1933. The pairing of the two towns is the point: the girl who was given the apparitions was given nothing else, no office, no fame she wanted, and no cure of her own illness.

3. Lisieux and the Carmel

Lisieux is a town in Normandy that holds the Carmelite monastery where Therese Martin lived from 1888 until her death in 1897, and it is one of the most visited Catholic shrines in France. The pilgrimage is unusual because the place has almost nothing dramatic in it. There was no apparition at Lisieux. There is a small enclosed convent on an ordinary street, a bourgeois family house on the hill above the town, a cathedral where a family sat in the same pews for years, and, on the slope, an enormous twentieth-century basilica built because the crowds outgrew everything else.

The Carmel

The Carmel of Lisieux is a working monastery of enclosed nuns, and the part open to pilgrims is the chapel. Therese's reliquary lies in a side chapel there, a recumbent figure in the Carmelite habit behind glass. Behind the grille is the enclosure she entered at fifteen, having gone to Rome and asked Pope Leo XIII directly for permission to enter early. She spent nine years inside it, wrote the manuscripts that were assembled after her death as Story of a Soul under obedience to her prioress, endured tuberculosis and a long interior darkness about the existence of heaven, and died on 30 September 1897. Pius XI canonised her in 1925, and John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church in 1997, one of only a handful of women so named.

This page does not retell her life, because we have a full one: read our life of Saint Therese of Lisieux and her Little Way for the doctrine, the manuscripts and the spirituality. What matters for a pilgrim is the geography. The Carmel is where the enclosure was, and the smallness of it is the argument. She proposed that holiness is available inside a life with no scope, no travel, no influence and no visible achievement, and Lisieux is the physical proof that she meant it.

Les Buissonnets and the Martin Family

Les Buissonnets, the house on the hillside where the Martins moved after Zelie's death, is kept as a museum with the family's own furniture. The Basilica of Sainte-Therese on the hill above the town was begun in 1929 and consecrated in 1954, a vast Romano-Byzantine church with a crypt where the relics of her parents are venerated. Louis and Zelie Martin were canonised together by Pope Francis on 18 October 2015, and their canonisation changed the shape of the Lisieux pilgrimage: families now come for the parents as much as for the daughter. Read Saint Louis Martin and Saint Zelie Martin for their story, including the four children they buried and the long illness Zelie hid.

Alencon, an hour to the south, holds the house where Therese was born and where Louis and Zelie lived and worked, and it is often visited on the same trip. The Carmelite thread also runs backward from Lisieux to Spain: the reform Therese entered was the one Saint Teresa of Avila founded three centuries earlier, and Therese read her.

4. Ars and the Confessional

Ars-sur-Formans is a village in the Dombes north of Lyon, and it is a shrine because of confession. Jean-Marie Vianney, a farm boy who had struggled through seminary and barely scraped through his Latin, was sent there as parish priest in 1818 to a parish that had largely stopped practising. He stayed for forty-one years. He preached plainly, fasted severely, catechised children, founded an orphanage called La Providence, and heard confessions, and as word of him spread across France the confessions took over his life entirely. In his last years he was in the confessional for many hours a day, most of the year, hearing pilgrims who had travelled to the village for that one purpose.

He died at Ars on 4 August 1859. Pius XI canonised him in 1925 and named him patron of parish priests in 1929, and Benedict XVI made him the figure of the Year for Priests in 2009. His body lies in a reliquary above the altar of the basilica built beside his old parish church, the face covered with a wax mask, and his heart is venerated in a separate reliquary at the shrine. The presbytery where he lived has been kept much as he left it, and the poverty of it is the exhibit: a bare room, a hard bed, the kitchen where he ate almost nothing.

What a Pilgrim Actually Does at Ars

The answer is the obvious one. Ars is a shrine of the sacrament of penance, priests are available to hear confessions there, and pilgrims go to make one, often after a long time away. The village has nothing else to offer and does not pretend otherwise. It is also the natural place for a priest to make a retreat, and for a layperson to pray for the priests they know by name. Our guide to the sacrament of confession covers what to say and how to make a good one if it has been years, and the guide to the Catholic priesthood covers what the Cure of Ars was formed to be.

5. Paray-le-Monial and the Sacred Heart

Paray-le-Monial is a small town in Burgundy where a Visitation nun named Margaret Mary Alacoque reported a series of revelations of the Sacred Heart of Jesus between 1673 and 1675, and it is the origin point of the devotion that spread across the Catholic world in the centuries after. The Visitation monastery is still there, and the Chapel of the Apparitions, where her reliquary lies, is the centre of the pilgrimage. Beside it stands the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, a Cluniac priory church of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and one of the finest Romanesque buildings in Burgundy, which was given its present title because of what happened in the convent next door.

Margaret Mary reported that Christ showed her his heart, wounded and crowned with thorns, and asked for a return of love from a world that had grown cold to him. From the revelations came the practices that became universal: the Feast of the Sacred Heart on the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi, the Holy Hour, and the communions of the First Fridays. Her Jesuit confessor, Claude de la Colombiere, believed her when almost nobody in her own community did, defended her, and carried the devotion to England; he was canonised in 1992 and his relics are at Paray. Margaret Mary herself was canonised in 1920.

How the Church Treats the Revelations

The revelations at Paray-le-Monial are private revelation. The Church has canonised Margaret Mary, approved the liturgical feast and encouraged the devotion, and none of that obliges any Catholic to believe the particulars of what she reported, including the twelve promises attached to the devotion in later popular literature. Devotion to the Sacred Heart itself rests on the Gospel: the pierced side of Christ in John 19:34, and the invitation of Matthew 11:29 to learn from a heart that is meek and humble. Pope Pius XII set out the doctrine in the 1956 encyclical Haurietis Aquas, and Pope Francis returned to it in 2024 in Dilexit Nos.

The Visitation order that Margaret Mary belonged to was founded at Annecy in Savoy by Saint Francis de Sales and Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, and Annecy is itself a pilgrimage worth making: the basilica there holds the remains of both founders, and the gentleness of Salesian spirituality is the soil the Paray revelations grew in. Paray-le-Monial today also hosts large summer sessions run by the Emmanuel Community, and the town in high summer is a very different place from the quiet Romanesque town of the rest of the year.

6. Rue du Bac and the Miraculous Medal

The chapel at 140 rue du Bac in the seventh arrondissement of Paris is one of the busiest pilgrimage chapels in the city and one of the easiest to walk past. It sits behind a courtyard on a busy street of shops, and it is the chapel of the mother house of the Daughters of Charity. In 1830 a novice there named Catherine Laboure reported a series of appearances of the Virgin Mary, including one in November in which she saw an oval frame with rays streaming from Mary's hands and the invocation "O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee." She was asked to have a medal struck to that design.

The archbishop of Paris permitted the medal to be struck in 1832, a canonical inquiry followed in 1836, and the medal spread so fast and so widely that people began calling it miraculous. Catherine told almost nobody. She spent the next forty-six years in the community's hospice at Enghien caring for the elderly, and her identity as the visionary became public only after her death in 1876. Pius XII canonised her in 1947. Her body lies in a glass reliquary beneath the side altar of the chapel, and the remains of Saint Louise de Marillac, who founded the Daughters of Charity with Saint Vincent de Paul, lie in the same chapel. The heart of Vincent de Paul is kept there too, and his body lies a short walk away in the chapel of the Congregation of the Mission on rue de Sevres.

The Status of Rue du Bac

No bishop ever issued a decree at rue du Bac declaring the apparitions supernatural, which puts it in a different category from Lourdes or Pontmain. Approval came through practice: the permission to strike the medal, the inquiry of 1836, the establishment of the feast of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal on 27 November, and the canonisation of the visionary herself. That is a real and settled approval, and it took a different route. Our guide to Marian apparition sites and how the Church judges them explains why the routes differ and why no official Vatican list of approved apparitions exists.

The medal itself is a sacramental. Wearing one is an act of devotion and a reminder of a prayer, and it works no automatic effect; the Church's own catechesis on sacramentals is careful about that, and the invocation on the medal is a request for intercession addressed to the Mother of God. If you want the doctrine behind the words "conceived without sin", read our guide to Mary, Mother of God, which covers the dogma of the Immaculate Conception defined by Pius IX in 1854, four years before Lourdes.

7. La Salette, Pontmain and Laus

Three French shrines rest on episcopal decrees that most pilgrims have never heard of, and all three are remote enough that reaching them is itself part of the pilgrimage. La Salette sits high on an alpine slope in the Isere, Pontmain in a hamlet in the Mayenne, and Notre-Dame du Laus in a valley in the Hautes-Alpes. None of them has anything like the infrastructure of Lourdes, and that is much of the attraction.

La Salette, 1846

On 19 September 1846 two cowherds, Melanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud, reported meeting a weeping woman seated on a stone on the mountainside above the hamlet of La Salette-Fallavaux. She spoke to them at length about the neglect of Sunday, about blasphemy, and about the failure of the harvest, and gave each child a secret. Bishop Philibert de Bruillard of Grenoble issued his doctrinal judgment on 19 September 1851, five years to the day, declaring that the apparition bore the marks of truth and that the faithful were justified in believing it. The Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette were founded the following year. The basilica stands at the apparition site itself, on open mountain at high altitude, with bronze figures marking the places in the account, and the road up is long.

La Salette is a shrine of penance and of tears. The message is severe, and the two visionaries had difficult later lives that the shrine does not conceal. What was declared in 1851 concerned the apparition, and the later published texts of the secrets, particularly the versions circulated by Melanie decades afterwards, were not covered by that judgment and were the subject of Roman interventions. Anyone reading La Salette material should keep the 1851 decree and the later secret literature clearly apart.

Pontmain, 1871

On the evening of 17 January 1871, with Prussian forces advancing on Laval during the Franco-Prussian War and the village men at the front, several children in the hamlet of Pontmain reported seeing a woman in a starry blue robe in the night sky above a barn. As the villagers gathered and prayed the Rosary, the children read a message that appeared letter by letter beneath her: "But pray, my children, God will hear you in a short time. My Son allows himself to be moved." The Prussian advance halted the next day and the armistice followed shortly after. Bishop Casimir Wicart of Laval issued the decree recognising the apparition on 2 February 1872. The Basilica of Our Lady of Hope stands beside the barn, and the village church where the Rosary was prayed that night is still in use.

Notre-Dame du Laus, 1664 to 1718

Saint-Etienne-le-Laus in the Hautes-Alpes holds one of the longest apparition accounts in the French record. Benoite Rencurel, a shepherdess, reported appearances of the Virgin from 1664 until her death in 1718, fifty-four years. The message was penance and reconciliation, and the shrine became a place of confession, with priests hearing penitents there more or less continuously for three centuries. A diocesan commission gave a favourable judgment as early as 1665, and the formal decree came very late: Bishop Jean-Michel di Falco Leandri of Gap recognised the apparitions on 4 May 2008. Benoite Rencurel was declared Venerable in 2009. Laus is quiet, and the confessionals define it in the way they define Ars.

The dates and named acts in this table are the diocesan judgments as published by the shrines and dioceses concerned. They are acts governing public devotion and the permission to believe. Under the Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena published by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on 17 May 2024, the Church ordinarily no longer issues declarations of supernatural origin, and these older cases were judged under an earlier framework and an earlier vocabulary. No Catholic is obliged to believe any private revelation.

8. Cotignac in Provence

Cotignac is a village in the Var, in the hills of inland Provence, and it holds two shrines with an unusual pairing: one of Our Lady and one of Saint Joseph. The sanctuary of Notre-Dame de Graces stands on Mont Verdaille above the village, on the site where a woodcutter named Jean de la Baume reported an appearance of the Virgin in 1519, and a chapel was built there soon afterwards. The second shrine sits on the slope of Mont Bessillon, where in 1660 a shepherd named Gaspard Ricard reported that a man identifying himself as Joseph told him to move a stone, under which he found a spring.

Devotion at Cotignac has been continuous since the sixteenth century and is served today by religious communities on both hills. The site is also bound up with a well-documented act of French history that has nothing to do with the apparition accounts: in 1638 King Louis XIII consecrated the kingdom of France to the Virgin Mary by the vow known as the Voeu de Louis XIII, ordering that the Assumption be kept as the national feast, and the devotion at Cotignac became attached to that vow in French memory.

Cotignac is worth naming on a page like this precisely because it is a shrine of Saint Joseph, and shrines of Joseph are rare. Pilgrims come to pray for fathers, for work, for families under strain, and for a good death, the four things Joseph has always been invoked for. Read our guide to Saint Joseph for what the Gospels actually say about him, which is very little in words and a great deal in action.

This page names no decree for Cotignac. The 1519 and 1660 accounts are the shrine's own tradition, devotion there has long been permitted and the site is served by religious communities, and no attempt is made here to place it in the same category as Lourdes or Pontmain, which have dated episcopal decrees. The 1638 vow of Louis XIII is a documented royal and liturgical act and is separate from the apparition accounts.

9. Chartres and the Pentecost Walk

Chartres is a cathedral city an hour southwest of Paris, and the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Chartres is both one of the best preserved Gothic buildings in France and a Marian shrine with a relic at its heart. The church holds the Sancta Camisa, a length of silk cloth venerated as a garment worn by the Virgin, given to the cathedral by Charles the Bald in 876. Chartres was a place of Marian pilgrimage before the present building existed, and the present building exists because of a fire. In 1194 the Romanesque cathedral burned; the relic was found undamaged in the crypt, the townspeople read that as a mandate to rebuild, and the cathedral went up with astonishing speed in the decades that followed.

What survived is the glass. Chartres kept most of its medieval windows through the Revolution and both world wars, and the deep blue of the twelfth-century panels is the reason people cross Europe to stand in the nave. The labyrinth set into the floor of the nave is walked by pilgrims as a prayer, a slow circuit toward the centre. The crypt below is one of the largest in France and holds Notre-Dame de Sous-Terre, the underground Virgin.

The Pentecost Pilgrimage

Since 1983 an association called Notre-Dame de Chretiente has organised a walking pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres over the three days of the Pentecost weekend, roughly one hundred kilometres across the wheat plain of the Beauce. Pilgrims walk in chapters behind banners, sing, pray the Rosary on the road, sleep in fields under canvas, and attend Mass each day in the traditional Latin rite. The walk was inspired by the poet Charles Peguy, who walked from Paris to Chartres alone in 1912 in petition for his sick son, and who wrote the long poems about the Beauce that pilgrims still recite. A separate pilgrimage organised by the diocese of Chartres walks in the opposite direction over the same weekend, from Chartres toward Paris.

Chartres in Pentecost week is a demanding physical pilgrimage of the kind the Camino de Santiago routes are better known for, compressed into three days. It has become one of the most visible gatherings of young French Catholics attached to the older liturgy, and the guide to the traditional Latin Mass covers the liturgical questions that sit behind that. Nothing about the cathedral itself belongs to one liturgical camp: the diocese runs its own pilgrimages, the cathedral's regular liturgy is the ordinary form, and the relic and the glass are there year round for anyone.

The Paris to Chartres Pentecost pilgrimage is organised by the association Notre-Dame de Chretiente, which publishes its own route and arrangements each year. The distance of roughly one hundred kilometres is the route as that association describes it. This page gives no participant numbers, no dates for a given year and no costs, because those change annually and can only be verified from the organiser.

10. The Churches of Paris

Paris is a pilgrimage city in its own right, and the churches worth a pilgrim's time are spread across the arrondissements rather than gathered in one quarter. Six of them carry most of the weight.

Notre-Dame de Paris

The cathedral on the Ile de la Cite was begun in 1163 and is the mother church of the archdiocese. On 15 April 2019 a fire destroyed the roof and the nineteenth-century spire, the vaults held, and the relics and much of the treasury were carried out by firefighters and the cathedral chaplain. The cathedral reopened on 7 December 2024 after a restoration that cleaned the stone back to a colour Parisians had not seen in generations. It is a working cathedral and the seat of the archbishop, and it holds the relic of the Crown of Thorns treated in the next section.

Sacre-Coeur de Montmartre

The white basilica on the hill north of the city was begun in 1875 as a national act of reparation after the defeat of 1870 and the Commune, and it was consecrated in 1919. The reason a pilgrim climbs the hill is the adoration. Perpetual Eucharistic adoration has been kept at Sacre-Coeur since 1885, day and night without interruption, through two world wars, and pilgrims can join it at any hour. Below the hill, the Martyrium chapel on rue Yvonne le Tac marks the traditional site associated with the martyrdom of Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris, and with the vows Ignatius of Loyola and his first companions made in 1534, the founding act of the Society of Jesus.

Sainte-Chapelle, Saint-Sulpice, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont and Saint-Denis

The Sainte-Chapelle, built by King Louis IX between 1242 and 1248 to house the relics of the Passion, is a reliquary in the form of a building: fifteen windows of thirteenth-century glass rising without visible wall between them. It is a state museum today and no longer holds the relics. Saint-Sulpice is a vast seventeenth-century parish church with a great organ and the Delacroix murals, and it was the parish of the seminary that formed much of the French clergy. Saint-Etienne-du-Mont on the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve holds the shrine of Saint Genevieve, the woman whose prayer Paris credits with turning Attila away in 451, and it keeps the last rood screen in the city. The Basilica of Saint-Denis to the north is the burial church of the kings of France and the building where Gothic architecture began under Abbot Suger in the 1140s.

Any of these can be walked in a day, and the honest advice is to pick three rather than seven. The chapel at rue du Bac treated above belongs on the same list, and it is the one most pilgrims regret skipping. For a city where the shrines are packed into one place instead of scattered, compare our guide to Rome pilgrimage sites.

11. The Crown of Thorns

The relic venerated as the Crown of Thorns is kept at Notre-Dame de Paris, and its documented history in France begins in 1239. King Louis IX, the crusader king later canonised as Saint Louis, acquired it from the Latin Emperor Baldwin II of Constantinople, who had pledged it against a debt to Venetian creditors. Louis met the relic at Villeneuve-l'Archeveque and carried it into Paris on foot and barefoot. He then built the Sainte-Chapelle to house it and the other relics of the Passion he assembled.

What survives is a circlet of rushes bound together, without thorns; the thorns were detached and given away as separate relics across Europe over the centuries. The relics were dispersed and partly destroyed during the Revolution, and what remained was placed in the treasury of Notre-Dame in the early nineteenth century. On 15 April 2019 the crown was carried out of the burning cathedral, and it was kept at the Louvre during the restoration before returning to Notre-Dame after the reopening in December 2024.

What the Church Claims About It

The Church permits and encourages the veneration of the relic and makes no pronouncement about its physical authenticity. That distinction matters and applies to relics generally. Veneration of a relic is directed to Christ and to the mystery it recalls, and its value does not rest on a laboratory result. The same care governs the Shroud of Turin, which the Church presents as an icon of the Passion for veneration without ruling on how the image was formed.

Veneration of the crown has traditionally been offered on Fridays in Lent and on Good Friday, carried in procession by the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. Arrangements at the cathedral have changed with the restoration, and a pilgrim planning to venerate it should confirm the current practice with the cathedral itself rather than trusting a page like this one.

12. Mont-Saint-Michel

Mont-Saint-Michel is a granite island in the bay between Normandy and Brittany, crowned by an abbey church, and it is a shrine of Saint Michael the Archangel. The tradition holds that in 708 Aubert, bishop of Avranches, reported that the archangel appeared to him and told him to build a sanctuary on the rock, and that Aubert acted only after the third appearance. A community of canons was established, Benedictine monks replaced them in 966, and the abbey grew upward over a thousand years until the church stood on the summit and the monastic buildings clung to the north face in the tiered structure the medieval builders called La Merveille, the Marvel.

The bay has one of the largest tidal ranges in Europe and a sand flat that floods and drains twice a day. Medieval pilgrims, called miquelots, crossed the sands on foot and some of them drowned doing it, which is why the pilgrimage carried the reputation it did. Guided barefoot crossings of the bay are still made today with people who know the quicksand and the tide, and walking in rather than driving to the causeway is the older and better way to arrive.

The abbey passed through hard centuries. It declined before the Revolution, was suppressed, and served as a prison through much of the nineteenth century before being classified as a monument and eventually returned to religious use. A monastic community lives on the rock again and sings the Office in the abbey church daily, so the place is a working monastery inside a heavily visited monument. Go early or late in the day, and go to the Office rather than only to the ramparts.

Why Michael, and Why a High Rock

Shrines of Saint Michael sit on heights across Europe: the Gargano cave in Apulia, Sacra di San Michele in Piedmont, Saint Michael's Mount in Cornwall, and Mont-Saint-Michel itself. Michael is the archangel of Revelation 12:7, who casts down the dragon, and of Daniel 12:1, who stands guard over the people of God. The heights are the point of the symbolism: he is invoked at the boundary between earth and heaven, and in France he became a national patron, invoked by Saint Joan of Arc, who said that Michael was among the voices she heard. Our guide to Saint Michael the Archangel covers the Scripture and the prayer.

13. Rocamadour

Rocamadour is a village in the Lot built in stages up the face of a limestone cliff above a gorge, and its shrine is the chapel of Notre-Dame, which holds a small dark wooden statue of the Virgin and Child known as the Black Madonna. The chapel sits in the middle of a cluster of sanctuaries wedged into the rock, reached from the village below by a long stone stairway that penitents traditionally climbed on their knees, sometimes in chains, as an assigned penance.

The shrine became famous in the twelfth century after a body was found in 1166 in a grave beside the chapel and identified with the hermit Amadour, for whom the place is named. Miracle collections were compiled, kings and bishops came, and Rocamadour became one of the great pilgrimages of medieval France and a stop for pilgrims making their way toward Compostela. Hanging in the chapel is an iron bell, said in the local tradition to have rung of itself when sailors at sea were delivered after invoking Our Lady of Rocamadour, and the walls carry ex-votos left by people who believed they had been heard. The legend that the sword fixed in the rock above is Durandal, the sword of Roland, belongs to the chansons de geste rather than to history, and the shrine tells it as a story.

Rocamadour is a shrine of petition, and the physical shape of it teaches that. You arrive at the bottom and you go up. The climb is the prayer, which is the oldest idea in pilgrimage and the one our guide to Christian pilgrimage sites worldwide traces from Jerusalem outward.

The stair, the bell and the miracle accounts at Rocamadour are the shrine's own long-established tradition, preserved in medieval miracle collections compiled at the site. This page gives no step count, no visitor figures and no claim about any specific miracle, because those cannot be verified from the tradition alone.

14. Le Puy-en-Velay

Le Puy-en-Velay in the Auvergne is a town of volcanic plugs, and it is the head of the Via Podiensis, one of the four historic French roads to Santiago de Compostela. The cathedral of Notre-Dame du Puy stands at the top of a steep street with its own black Virgin, an ancient Marian pilgrimage that predates the Compostela traffic and drew French kings for centuries. On a needle of rock across the town stands the chapel of Saint-Michel d'Aiguilhe, built in 962 and reached by a long stair cut into the volcanic core.

The Compostela connection is documented and early. In 950 or 951 Godescalc, bishop of Le Puy, travelled to Santiago with a large company, and his is among the earliest pilgrimages to Compostela recorded by name in the sources. The road from Le Puy, now marked as the GR 65, runs southwest through the Aubrac plateau, past Conques, through Cahors and Moissac to the Pyrenees, where it joins the roads that become the Camino Frances in Spain. Our guide to the Camino de Santiago routes compares the French roads with the Spanish ones and explains the credencial and the distance rules for the Compostela certificate, and the guide to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela covers what waits at the end.

Le Puy keeps a jubilee tradition of its own. When the feast of the Annunciation, 25 March, falls on Good Friday, the town keeps a jubilee year, and the cathedral has done so since the Middle Ages. It happens rarely and irregularly, and the date is determined by the movable date of Easter, which our guide to the liturgical calendar explains.

15. Vezelay and Conques

Vezelay and Conques are the two great Romanesque pilgrimage churches of central France, both on roads to Compostela, and both built around relics. They are the best surviving evidence of what a medieval pilgrimage church was designed to do: move large numbers of people past a shrine without interrupting the monastic Office.

Vezelay

The Basilica of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine sits on a ridge above the Burgundian countryside. From the eleventh century the abbey claimed the relics of Mary Magdalene, a papal confirmation followed in 1058, and Vezelay became one of the most important pilgrimages in Europe. Bernard of Clairvaux preached the Second Crusade there in 1146 before the king and a vast crowd, and Richard the Lionheart and Philip Augustus assembled there in 1190 for the Third; our guide to the Crusades covers those events and the Catholic assessment of them. The claim was eclipsed in 1279 when relics were discovered at Saint-Maximin in Provence and the Angevin count promoted them, and Vezelay declined for centuries before a nineteenth-century restoration saved the building.

What draws pilgrims now is the nave and the tympanum of the narthex, a Pentecost scene with rays streaming from the hands of Christ to the apostles and the peoples of the world ranged around the arch. On the summer solstice the light from the south windows falls in a line of pools down the centre of the nave floor. Vezelay is the head of the Via Lemovicensis, one of the four French roads to Compostela, and a community of the Fraternities of Jerusalem lives there and sings the Office.

Conques

The abbey church of Sainte-Foy at Conques stands in a wooded gorge on the Via Podiensis a few days' walk out of Le Puy, and it holds the relics of Saint Faith, a young girl martyred at Agen in the persecutions of the early fourth century. The monks of Conques obtained the relics from Agen in the ninth century by theft, an episode the abbey never concealed and which medieval writers classed under the frank heading of furta sacra, holy thefts. The reliquary made to hold them, a seated golden figure encrusted with antique gems and cameos donated by pilgrims over centuries, is a rare survival of early medieval reliquary sculpture and is displayed in the treasury.

Above the west door is a Last Judgment tympanum of the twelfth century, crowded with figures, the ordered ranks of the blessed on one side and a chaotic hell on the other, still carrying traces of its original paint. It was carved to be read by people who could not read, and it is the clearest surviving statement in stone of what our guides to the final judgment and heaven set out in words. The modern windows are by Pierre Soulages, installed in 1994, in clear glass that changes with the weather. Pilgrims walking the Via Podiensis still arrive at Conques in the evening and attend Compline with the Premonstratensian canons who serve the church.

16. Sainte-Baume and Saint-Maximin

Sainte-Baume is a cave high in a forested massif in the Var, and Provencal tradition holds that Mary Magdalene spent the last thirty years of her life there in solitude. The grotto has been a place of prayer since at least the fifth century, and Dominicans have served it since 1295, when Charles II of Anjou entrusted the site to them. Reaching it means a walk up through an ancient beech and lime forest to a terrace on the cliff, and the grotto itself is fitted out as a chapel in the rock, cold and dripping in any season.

Down in the plain, the Basilica of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume holds the relics said to be hers, discovered in 1279 in the crypt, with a skull kept in a gilded reliquary that is carried in procession through the town on her feast, 22 July. The basilica is the major Gothic church of Provence, and the Dominicans returned to it in the twentieth century.

Saying Plainly What the Tradition Is

The Provencal story holds that after the Resurrection, Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, Martha and their companions were set adrift in a boat without oars and landed at what is now Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, that Lazarus became bishop of Marseille, and that Magdalene withdrew to the cave. That account first appears in written sources in the medieval period, many centuries after the events. The Gospels place Mary Magdalene at the cross and at the tomb, and record that Christ appeared to her first and sent her to tell the apostles, which is why the Eastern and Western traditions both call her the apostle to the apostles. Where she went afterwards, Scripture does not say, and an Eastern tradition places her at Ephesus with the apostle John instead.

The Church has never adjudicated the Provencal tradition, and this page does not either. What Sainte-Baume undoubtedly is, and what makes it worth the climb, is a place where people have prayed continuously for many centuries, held by an order founded to preach, in a forest that has been protected since the Middle Ages because of the shrine above it.

17. Tours and Saint Martin

Tours on the Loire is the burial place of Saint Martin, and for a thousand years it drew pilgrims from across Europe. Martin was a soldier in the Roman army who, as a catechumen at Amiens, cut his military cloak in two with his sword and gave half to a beggar at the gate, and who reported a dream that night in which Christ wore the half he had given away. He left the army, became a monk under Hilary of Poitiers, founded the community at Liguge near Poitiers around 361, and in 371 was made bishop of Tours by popular demand against his own resistance. He founded Marmoutier outside the city, evangelised the countryside of Gaul, and died in 397.

His tomb made Tours a destination for kings, and the Merovingian and Carolingian monarchies treated his cloak, the cappa, as a national relic; the words chapel and chaplain descend from the little building where it was kept and the clerics who guarded it. The great basilica was destroyed after the Revolution and streets were driven through the site. The tomb was rediscovered in 1860, and the present Basilica of Saint-Martin was built over it at the end of the nineteenth century, a domed church far smaller than the medieval one, with the tomb in the crypt.

Martin matters for a reason worth naming. He is among the earliest saints of the Western Church to be widely venerated without having died a martyr, and his cult established that a life of charity and pastoral work could be honoured in the same way as a death under persecution. That shift is behind most of what the Church has done with sainthood since, and our guide to the saints and why Catholics venerate them traces it. Martinmas, 11 November, is still kept across Europe, and the countryside around Tours holds Liguge and Marmoutier for anyone who wants the monastic half of the story.

18. Taize on Its Own Terms

Taize is an ecumenical monastic community in a village in southern Burgundy, and it describes itself in its own terms rather than as a Catholic shrine. Brother Roger Schutz, a Swiss Reformed pastor, settled in the village in 1940 and sheltered refugees, including Jews fleeing the occupied zone, before being forced out and returning in 1944. The community of brothers he founded took life vows from 1949. It now includes Catholics and members of several Protestant churches, from many countries, living under one rule, holding no personal possessions and accepting no donations for themselves, supporting the community by their own work.

The brothers call the community a parable of communion. They do not receive members into a church of their own, and they consistently refuse to build a Taize movement: young people who come for a week of prayer, silence, Bible introductions and shared work are sent back to their own parishes and congregations to serve there. That refusal is the community's most deliberate act and the thing most often missed about it. The Church of Reconciliation, the long low building where prayer is held three times a day, fills with people sitting on the floor for the sung prayer that has carried the Taize name into churches worldwide: short repeated phrases from Scripture in many languages, sung over and over, with long silence in the middle.

Brother Roger was killed during evening prayer in the church on 16 August 2005 by a woman who was mentally ill, and the community continued under the prior he had designated. Popes have taken the community seriously: John Paul II visited Taize in 1986 and told the young people there that one passes through Taize as one passes close to a spring of water.

The Catholic Position on Taize

Catholic pilgrims can and do go to Taize, and Catholic Mass is celebrated there daily. The unity Taize embodies among its brothers anticipates something the churches have not achieved, and the differences it holds in tension are real: the Catholic Church and the Reformation churches remain divided over the Eucharist, ordination and the authority of the Church, and Taize does not paper over any of that. The Second Vatican Council's decree Unitatis Redintegratio commits the Catholic Church to the work of Christian unity, and our guide to ecumenism and Christian unity sets out what the Catholic Church holds about it, including what it can and cannot do about shared communion. Read that before deciding what Taize is for you, and go with the community's own description rather than a borrowed one.

19. Choosing Which One to Visit

The French shrines reward a choice made on the basis of need rather than fame. Below is the sorting most pilgrims arrive at after they have been to a few, offered as a way to narrow the list rather than as an itinerary.

Practical Things That Do Not Change

Book nothing on the strength of a page like this one, including this page, for anything time-bound. Opening arrangements, Mass times, accommodation, transport and prices change constantly and can only be confirmed with the shrine itself. What does not change is worth planning around: the shrines are spread across the country and few of them are near each other, most sit in small towns or on mountainsides that public transport reaches slowly, the great pilgrimage seasons run from spring to early autumn, and the shrines that matter most are usually the quietest.

Go to Mass and go to confession while you are there. A pilgrimage that skips the sacraments has visited a monument. Bring names with you, written down, and pray them at each shrine. Walk part of the way if you can, because arrival on foot is the oldest form of the thing and it changes what the arrival means. If you cannot travel at all, our guide to making a virtual pilgrimage covers what the Church has always said about pilgrimages of desire, which are real and which are open to everyone.