🇵🇹 Portugal · Central Portugal
Fátima is one of those places where tourism and faith meet in a way that is hard to find anywhere else. In this small town in central Portugal, on a stretch of open ground called Cova da Iria, three shepherd children said they saw the Virgin Mary six times between May and October 1917. What began as the account of three children from a poor village became, over the 20th century, the most important Marian sanctuary in Portugal and a religious phenomenon of worldwide reach that now receives millions of pilgrims a year.
The heart of it all is the Capelinha das Aparições, a simple chapel raised on the exact spot where the children said the Lady appeared, beside the holm oak on which their visions rested. Around it spreads an enormous esplanade able to hold hundreds of thousands of people, flanked by two great churches: the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary, neoclassical and dating from 1953, and the modern, monumental Basilica of the Holy Trinity, opened in 2007. On the days of the great pilgrimages — 13 May and 13 October — the esplanade fills with the faithful, some advancing on their knees, lighting candles and praying the rosary under an open sky.
This guide treats Fátima with respect and precision: we set out what the 1917 testimonies say, what the Church recognises and what you can see today, without affirming or denying the supernatural, because for millions of people this is above all a destination of faith. But it is also a place with a fascinating history to understand — the republican, anticlerical Portugal of a century ago, the 'secrets', the canonisations — and a peaceful place to walk, visit the shepherd children's villages and look into a central chapter of 20th-century Portugal. Whatever your reason, here is how to get there, what to see and how to make the most of it.
Fátima owes its name, according to tradition, to a 12th-century Moorish princess, though its worldwide fame comes from something much later: between 13 May and 13 October 1917, in the middle of the First World War and under Portugal's strongly anticlerical First Republic, three shepherd children from the hamlet of Aljustrel — Lúcia dos Santos (aged 10) and her cousins Francisco (9) and Jacinta Marto (7) — said they saw the Virgin Mary six times at the Cova da Iria. The last apparition, on 13 October 1917, drew some 70,000 people who said they had witnessed the so-called 'Milagre do Sol'. In 1930 the bishop of Leiria canonically recognised the apparitions and authorised the cult. Francisco and Jacinta died very young in the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920; Lúcia became a nun and lived until 2005. The three 'secrets' confided to the children marked the century: the third, written down by Lúcia and kept at the Vatican, was revealed in 2000 and linked by the Church to the attempt on the life of John Paul II on 13 May 1981. Francisco and Jacinta were canonised by Pope Francis on 13 May 2017, on the centenary of the apparitions. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Portugal of learning and faith: Coimbra and its university, one of the oldest in the world; Fátima, a great pilgrimage centre; Nazaré and its giant waves; Aveiro, the 'Portuguese Venice' of the lagoon; and Óbidos, a walled medieval village.
Read the history of Central Portugal →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand what happened at Fátima you first have to understand the Portugal of 1917, a tense, impoverished country in full upheaval. In 1910 a revolution had overthrown the monarchy and proclaimed the First Republic, a strongly secular and anticlerical regime. In 1911 the young republic passed a Law of Separation of Church and State that expelled the religious orders, confiscated Church property, banned the public wearing of the cassock in many cases and placed the clergy under tight state control. For much of the republican leadership, Catholicism represented the backwardness the country had to be freed from; for the deeply devout peasantry of the centre and the north, those measures were an attack on their faith.
On top of that internal fracture came the disaster of the First World War. Portugal had entered the conflict in 1916 on the Allied side, and by 1917 its troops were fighting and dying in the fields of Flanders. The war brought hunger, inflation, bread shortages and deep social unrest. It was, in short, a time of fear, mourning and hardship, with death very present in the daily life of Portuguese families.
It was in that context — a poor village on the limestone plateau of central Portugal, in a country at war and divided over religion — that three peasant children said, in the spring of 1917, that they had begun to see the Virgin. The state's anticlerical climate meant that for years the civil authorities viewed events at the Cova da Iria with hostility and suspicion, which in turn explains episodes such as the children's detention by the local administrator in August 1917.
The protagonists were three children from the hamlet of Aljustrel, in the parish of Fátima: Lúcia dos Santos, aged 10, and her cousins Francisco Marto, aged 9, and Jacinta Marto, aged 7. By their account they had already had three apparitions of an Angel in 1916 — whom they called the 'Angel of Peace' or 'Angel of Portugal' — while tending sheep at spots such as the Loca do Cabeço. But what made Fátima famous worldwide began on 13 May 1917, when the children said they had seen above a small holm oak in the Cova da Iria 'a Lady brighter than the sun', who asked them to return on the 13th of every month.
The apparitions were repeated, always on the 13th, between May and October 1917, with one exception: in August it was not the 13th but the 19th, because on the 13th the children had been detained by the administrator of the Ourém council, Artur de Oliveira Santos, a republican and anticlerical official who questioned and even threatened them to make them retract. The children did not change their story. In each apparition, according to their testimony, the Lady insisted on messages of prayer — the rosary in particular — penance and conversion, and confided three 'secrets' to them.
The news spread and the Cova da Iria began to draw growing crowds of the curious, the devout and the sceptical. The apparition of 13 October 1917, the last, was the most famous: an estimated 70,000 people gathered on that rainy day. Many of those present later said they had witnessed the so-called 'Milagre do Sol', the Miracle of the Sun: the sun, according to the accounts, seemed to spin on itself, change colour and plunge towards the earth before returning to its place, while the ground and their soaked clothes, they said, dried instantly. The episode was even reported by the secular press of the day, such as the newspaper O Século, though its interpretation is still debated.
After October 1917 the Cova da Iria became a place of spontaneous pilgrimage, encouraged by the believing peasantry and viewed with mistrust by the republican authorities. In 1919 the faithful built a first small chapel on the site of the apparitions, the Capelinha das Aparições. In March 1922 a bomb planted by unknown hands partly destroyed the chapel, an episode that reflects the tension of those years; it was rebuilt soon afterwards. The devotion, far from fading, kept growing.
The fates of the three visionaries were very different. Francisco and Jacinta Marto died as children, victims of the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 — the misnamed 'Spanish flu' — that swept Europe: Francisco died in 1919 and Jacinta in 1920. Lúcia dos Santos, by contrast, lived a long life: she entered a religious school, became a nun (first a Dorothean and later a Carmelite) and died in the convent at Coimbra in 2005, aged 97. It was she who, at the instruction of her superiors and of the bishop of Leiria, wrote down in the following decades her memories of the apparitions and the content of the 'secrets'.
The decisive step came on 13 October 1930, when the bishop of Leiria, José Alves Correia da Silva, after years of investigation by a diocesan commission, declared the apparitions of the Virgin to the three shepherd children 'worthy of belief' and officially authorised the cult of Our Lady of Fátima. With that canonical recognition, what had been a popular devotion persecuted by the state now had the backing of the Church, and Fátima began its transformation into the great national sanctuary. The building of the great Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary, begun in 1928 and consecrated in 1953, gave that consolidation physical form.
One of the aspects that has most fed the fascination with Fátima is the so-called 'three secrets', messages that, according to Lúcia, the Virgin confided to the children in the apparition of July 1917. Lúcia wrote them down at different stages, at the request of the bishop of Leiria. The first two were already known in the 1940s. The Church interprets them as follows: the first would be a vision of hell intended to prompt conversion; the second, an announcement about the end of the First World War, the threat of a worse war if the world did not convert, and references to Russia and the spread of its 'errors' — later read as pointing to the atheist communism of the 20th century.
The third secret was kept sealed. Lúcia wrote it down in 1944 and it was decided that it should be sent to the Vatican; for decades it remained closed, and the visionary herself had suggested it should not be opened before 1960, because — she said — by then it would be better understood. The secrecy fed all kinds of apocalyptic speculation through the century. Finally, on 26 June 2000, the Vatican made its content public: a vision in which 'a bishop dressed in white' falls, shot down at the foot of a great cross, along with other martyrs.
The Church, through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI — interpreted that third secret as an image of the sufferings of the Church and the martyrs of the 20th century, and linked it in particular to the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II on 13 May 1981, the anniversary of the first apparition, when he was shot in St Peter's Square. The Pope, who survived, attributed his survival to the protection of Our Lady of Fátima and donated one of the bullets to the sanctuary; it is now set in the crown of the image in the Capelinha. The official interpretation has always coexisted with debates and alternative readings, but the publication of 2000 marked the Church's 'official' closing of the mystery.
Through the 20th century Fátima went from being a hamlet to becoming one of the largest Catholic pilgrimage centres on the planet, comparable to Lourdes in France or Guadalupe in Mexico. Papal visits cemented its international standing: Paul VI came in 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary of the apparitions; John Paul II made three pilgrimages (in 1982, a year after the assassination attempt, in 1991 and in 2000); Benedict XVI travelled here in 2010 and Pope Francis in 2017.
The recognition of the visionaries also advanced. On 13 May 2000, at the Cova da Iria, John Paul II beatified the two Marto siblings, Francisco and Jacinta, who had died in childhood. Seventeen years later, on 13 May 2017, coinciding with the centenary of the apparitions, Pope Francis canonised them before an enormous crowd, making them the youngest non-martyr saints in the history of the Church. The canonisation process for Lúcia, who died in 2005, is still under way.
Today the Sanctuary of Fátima is a vast complex organised around the Capelinha das Aparições. At one end of the vast esplanade stands the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary, from 1953, with its 65-metre tower and the tombs of the three shepherd children; at the other, the modern Basilica of the Holy Trinity, inaugurated on 13 October 2007 with room for some 8,600 people, one of the largest churches in the world by capacity. Every year millions of pilgrims from all over the world reach Fátima, many on foot after days of walking, and the great pilgrimages of 13 May and 13 October gather hundreds of thousands of people. Whatever your own beliefs, Fátima is one of the great religious and social phenomena of contemporary Portugal, and a place that still draws believers and the curious alike.