Sanctuary of Fátima

In 1917 this was a stony hollow where three children from Aljustrel grazed their families' sheep. Today it is a paved esplanade roughly twice the size of St Peter's Square, with a basilica at each end, and about four million people cross it every year. What almost everybody comes for is neither of the basilicas. It is a small white building in the middle of all that space, about the size of a bus shelter, standing on the spot where the children said a lady spoke to them.

What happened in 1917

It began the year before, in 1916, with three visits from a figure the children described as an angel — at the Loca do Cabeço, a rocky hollow above Aljustrel, and at the well behind Lúcia Santos's house. Then, on 13 May 1917, Lúcia, who was ten, and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, who were nine and seven, said a lady appeared to them here at the Cova da Iria and asked them to come back on the 13th of the month for six months.

They did, and the crowds grew each time. There is one exception, and it matters if you want to understand the geography of the place: the August apparition did not happen here. On 13 August the children were not at the Cova at all — the administrator of Ourém had taken them into custody, and by some accounts threatened them with boiling oil, trying to make them retract. The apparition is said to have found them instead on 19 August at Valinhos, a field about a mile away. Five of the six were here; one was not.

On 13 October a crowd variously estimated between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand stood in pouring rain. Many of them reported that the clouds broke and the sun spun, changed colour and appeared to plunge towards the earth before returning to its place, and that their soaked clothes were dry afterwards. Reporters from the Lisbon papers, some of them hostile, were among the witnesses. It is called the Miracle of the Sun, and it is why Fátima is Fátima rather than one more local devotion.

Francisco died of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic on 4 April 1919, aged ten. Jacinta died on 20 February 1920, in Lisbon, aged nine. Both were canonised in 2017. Lúcia became a Carmelite nun, wrote the memoirs that are the source for almost everything anyone knows about the apparitions, and died in 2005 at ninety-seven.

How the church responded — slowly

Not with enthusiasm. Local people built the first small chapel themselves between 28 April and 15 June 1919, and the church authorities neither helped nor stopped them. On 13 May 1920 pilgrims got past government troops to install a statue in it. The first officially celebrated Mass was on 13 October 1921. Then, on the morning of 6 March 1922, somebody dynamited the chapel. It was rebuilt and working again by 13 January 1923.

The canonical investigation opened on 3 May 1922 and ran for eight years; the Bishop of Leiria declared the apparitions worthy of belief in 1930. The reversal was complete by 13 May 1946, when Cardinal Aloisi Masella crowned the statue as papal legate. Portugal was a young, aggressively secular republic in 1917, which is the context both for the children's arrest and for the bomb.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The esplanade

The open ground between the two basilicas is about twice the area of St Peter's Square, and it is not a piazza in any European sense: it is a working liturgical space, sized for a crowd of hundreds of thousands. On an ordinary Tuesday in February it can feel bleakly empty. On 13 May it is full.

Running across it towards the chapel is a narrow marked lane of polished stone. That is the penitential path, and people cross it on their knees — some of them a long way, some of them in obvious pain, some accompanied by a relative walking beside them with a bottle of water. It is in use at almost every hour of the day. Do not walk along it, and think hard before pointing a camera at anyone on it.

The Chapel of the Apparitions

Built between 28 April and 15 June 1919 by local people, dynamited in 1922, rebuilt by 1923, and deliberately never grandified: it still looks like the popular country hermitage it was. The open porch you see over it was inaugurated during John Paul II's first visit, on 12–13 May 1982, and in 1988 the ceiling was lined with pinewood from northern Siberia, chosen for lightness and durability.

The statue in the niche is the work of José Ferreira Thedim, of São Mamede do Coronado. It was paid for by Gilberto Fernandes dos Santos of Torres Novas, blessed on 13 May 1920 and brought here a month later; it is Brazilian cedar and 1.04 metres high, and Thedim reworked it himself in 1951. The chapel's organ, by Gerhard Grenzing, has twelve stops and two manuals.

Look at the crown — on the great pilgrimage days, when it is worn. It was given by the women of Portugal on 13 October 1942: gold, 1.2 kilograms, 313 pearls and 2,679 precious stones. On 13 May 1981, the anniversary of the first apparition, Mehmet Ali Ağca shot John Paul II in St Peter's Square. He believed Our Lady of Fátima had deflected the bullet, gave it to the shrine on 26 March 1984, and in 1989 it was set into the crown, where it remains. Whatever you make of the theology, it is one of the strangest objects in any European church.

The Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary

The first stone was laid on 13 May 1928 and the church was consecrated on 7 October 1953; Pius XII gave it the title of basilica the following year. Gerardus Samuel van Krieken, a Dutchman who had come to Portugal in 1889 to teach ornamental art and stayed, designed it, and did not live to see it finished.

The tower is 65 metres and carries a bronze crown weighing seven tonnes under an illuminated cross. The carillon has 62 bells, cast and tuned at Fátima itself by José Gonçalves Coutinho of Braga; the largest weighs about three tonnes and its clapper alone weighs ninety kilos. In the niche of the spire is a statue of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, 4.73 metres high and fourteen tonnes.

Inside, fifteen altars for the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary, stained glass telling the story of the apparitions, and the four great apostles of the Rosary at the corners — Dominic, John Eudes, Anthony Mary Claret and Stephen of Hungary. The organ has five divisions, 152 stops and about twelve thousand pipes, the tallest eleven metres and the smallest nine millimetres; it was scattered around the building until 1962, when it was gathered into one instrument in the high choir.

Along the walls are the graves. Jacinta was moved here on 1 May 1951, Francisco on 13 March 1952, and Lúcia after her death in 2005. The three children who started all of this are buried inside the basilica that was built because of them.

The statue of Our Lady above the main entrance is worth a note of its own. It was carved by an American Dominican, Father Thomas McGlynn, who spent a long time with Sister Lúcia while she described what she said she had seen and corrected him as he worked. It is not what he had originally designed. It was a gift from American Catholics in 1958, and it is probably the closest thing there is to an eyewitness likeness.

The colonnade, the monument and the Berlin Wall

The curved colonnades that frame the esplanade were built between 1949 and 1954 to António Lino's design. The Sacred Heart monument stands at the centre of the square, over a spring. And near the entrance, south of the rectory, is a piece of the Berlin Wall, put there deliberately: Fátima's second secret is read by many Catholics as concerning Russia, and the segment is a claim about what the Rosary did to the Eastern Bloc. You may or may not accept the argument; it is unmistakably an argument, in concrete.

The Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity

At the far end, and it divides opinion sharply. Consecrated in 2007, designed by the Greek architect Alexandros Tombazis, it seats about 8,600 people, has no internal columns at all, and from outside reads as an enormous low circular drum rather than a church. People who love the Rosary basilica frequently hate it. It exists because on the great days the old basilica could hold a fraction of the people who came, and it does that job.

The museum, and the Irish Monstrance

The Shrine's museum is easy to skip and shouldn't be. Among its holdings is the Irish Monstrance, given in 1949 and regarded as one of the most significant works of religious art produced in Ireland. The treasury also holds the offerings, which are their own kind of document: jewellery, medals, wedding rings, given by people who believed something happened to them.

Aljustrel and Valinhos

If you have half a day, walk out of the sanctuary to the village. The children's houses at Aljustrel are open and are startlingly small and poor. Behind Lúcia's house is the well where the angel appeared in the summer of 1916, and where Jacinta later said she saw a vision of the Holy Father weeping on his knees in a large house; the figures there are by Maria Irene Vilar. Above the village is the Loca do Cabeço, the rocky hollow of the first and third angel apparitions, with sculptures by Maria Amélia Carvalheira da Silva behind an iron screen by Domingos Soares Branco.

The Way of the Cross climbs from there, and between its eighth and ninth stations is Valinhos, where the August 1917 apparition is said to have happened. The monument was paid for by Hungarian Catholics. This walk, taken slowly, does more to explain Fátima than the esplanade does — it puts the events back into a landscape of small fields and stone walls where three children were minding sheep.

The candlelight procession

Most evenings, and on the 12th of the month in the pilgrimage season, the statue is carried out of the chapel and the esplanade fills with candles. Whatever you believe, standing in the dark in a crowd of tens of thousands singing the Fátima Ave is not an experience you get anywhere else, and it is free.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The Chapel of the Apparitions The small white building in the middle of the esplanade. Everything else here exists because of it, and most visitors walk past it.
• The bullet in the crown Set into the statue's crown in 1989 — the one taken out of John Paul II after he was shot on 13 May 1981, the anniversary of the first apparition.
• The penitential path The polished lane across the esplanade, crossed on the knees, in use at almost any hour.
• The three graves Francisco, Jacinta and Lúcia are all buried in the Rosary basilica.
• The McGlynn statue Above the basilica's main door, carved by an American priest working from Sister Lúcia's corrections — as close to a description from the source as exists.
• The Berlin Wall A segment of it, near the entrance, placed there as an argument about the second secret.
• Valinhos and the Loca do Cabeço A mile out of town, free, quiet, and the only places that still look like 1917.
• The candlelight procession The reason to stay the night.

Insider tips

Stay the night if you possibly can. Almost every coach tour arrives mid-morning and leaves mid-afternoon, which means the sanctuary is at its most crowded and its least atmospheric exactly when the day-trippers are in it. The evening rosary and procession are the point.

The esplanade is enormous and completely unshaded. In July and August it is genuinely punishing by midday, and there is a real risk of sunburn while queueing at the chapel. In winter the same openness makes it bitter. Bring a hat or a coat and mean it.

Everything is free, including the car parks and the toilets, and it is the Shrine rather than the local council that provides them. That is currently a live argument: the municipality of Ourém has proposed a €2-per-night tourist tax from 2027, and the Shrine has publicly opposed it on the grounds that it would deter pilgrims. Worth knowing if you are booking accommodation for 2027 or later.

Aljustrel and Valinhos are a walk, not a drive — the Path of the Little Shepherds is signposted and takes about half an hour each way. It is the best thing you can do here after the chapel, and it costs nothing.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Fátima is a town built almost entirely around the sanctuary, and it has more hotel beds than a place this size could otherwise justify — which means good availability and fair prices on ordinary dates, and none at all around the 13th of May and October. There are also hostels and retreat houses run by the Shrine itself. The food is functional rather than memorable; if you want a good dinner, Batalha and Ourém are both close.

More Portuguese churches

• Batalha Monastery — twenty minutes away, and the finest Gothic building in Portugal.
• Alcobaça Monastery — Portugal's largest church, and the facing tombs of Pedro I and Inês de Castro.
• Jerónimos Monastery — the Manueline masterpiece in Lisbon, with Vasco da Gama's tomb.
• Chapel of Bones, Évora — a very different kind of Portuguese religious experience.

See all the Portuguese churches in this guide →