The Church's approved apparitions are few, and the shrines built where they happened are among the most visited places on earth. Lourdes and Fátima are the two great European ones, a long day's travel apart and different in character: Lourdes is a grotto by a river and a sanctuary for the sick; Fátima is an open plain and a message of prayer and penance given to three children. Our Fátima & Lourdes journey gives each of them four or five nights.
Guadalupe is the Marian shrine of the Americas and, for Catholics in Florida and the South, the closest of the great pilgrimages. The tilma is extraordinary; the devotion of the people around it is more so. Częstochowa's Black Madonna has been the heart of Polish Catholicism for six centuries. Medjugorje is the youngest and the most debated: in 2024 the Vatican permitted devotion there without affirming the reported apparitions, and we describe it in exactly those terms.
Marian devotion is not an end in itself; every one of these shrines points past itself to her Son, and the Mass and the Rosary are the centre of each. Choose the one whose story speaks to you. The guide below helps.
