Lourdes, France
South West Area/Lourdes
In 1858, a fourteen-year-old peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous had a series of eighteen visions of the Virgin Mary who appeared in a niche in the grotto of Massabielle near Lourdes, a village on the Gave de Pau river in the foothills of the Pyrenees in southern France.
The first apparition occurred on 11 February 1858.

