Moulin de Boly et Cachot, les maisons de Bernadette

Lourdes

Bernadette Soubirous was born on 7 January 1844 at the moulin de Boly, a watermill on the Lapacca stream that her Castérot grandparents had worked since 1786 and that her father François, a poor manager, held until his ruin in 1854. The room where she was born, the kitchen and the millstones can still be seen. Ten years of decline followed: another mill, unpaid rents, the dearth of 1856, and, in 1857, eviction. A cousin then lent the Soubirous family the ground floor of a building in the rue des Petits-Fossés that had served as a prison until 1824: a dark, damp room of 3.72 metres by 4.40, which everyone in Lourdes calls "the cachot", where Spanish seasonal workers were usually lodged and where six people were to live. It was from there that the father went off for a week in detention, in March 1857, for a theft of flour of which he would be cleared; it was from there that Bernadette, fourteen years old, went out on Thursday 11 February 1858 with her sister and a friend to gather dead wood on the bank of the Gave, and came back saying she had seen, in the grotto of Massabielle, a little girl in white. The eighteen apparitions, the questioning by the police commissioner and the public prosecutor, the crowds in front of the door: all of it takes place within these walls until the autumn of 1858. The place, kept bare, is the truest part of the pilgrimage: here one takes the measure of what "the poorest in the town" meant.

Wikipédia — Moulin de Boly ↗

Getting there : The two houses are in the old centre, ten minutes' walk from the sanctuary; free entry. The Cachot opens every day, 9 am-12 noon and 2 pm-5.30 pm from April to the beginning of November, afternoons only in winter. The moulin de Boly can also be visited.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound