Many religious articles sellers whose shops line the streets around the Marian sanctuary at Lourdes in southwestern France are up in arms because the mayor wants them to buy the boutiques they now rent at low cost from the town.
Among about 200 shops offering statues of the Virgin Mary and plastic bottles to take home holy water, 66 belong to the municipality and are rented out under an accord dating back to 1911. Tenants were supposed to maintain the shops themselves but many haven’t and their buildings are in a sorry state.
French tax law now requires the town to pay for repairs to low-rent municipal property, but Mayor Josette Bourdeu says Lourdes doesn’t have the funds needed to spruce up the shops known as the “bancs de la Grotte” (benches of the Grotto).
Bourdeu and her allies passed the sales plan at a lively municipal council meeting earlier this month that divided the town and could endanger her chances of reelection next year.
“Mrs Bourdeu is determined to find money to compensate for the deficit she herself created,” said Bruno Vinuales, a former deputy who has joined the opposition in the municipal council.
The trinkets sellers “are mostly older people who don’t have the means to buy these shops,” he told local television.
The dispute has soured the atmosphere in the crowded streets surrounding the sanctuary, which drawn about 600,000 pilgrims annually, and local television found shopkeepers reluctant to discuss the issue on camera.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” one man said in his shop lined with glow-in-the-dark statues, shelves of candles and racks of rosary beads. “I don’t want to argue. There’s already too much arguing about this.”
Bourdeu said the small shops were estimated to be worth between 150,000 and 515,000 euros apiece. Under the plan, local merchants would have priority and none could purchase more than two shops, to avoid outside developers taking over.
The mayor expected to reap about one million euros this year from the sale of the first few shops. Otherwise, she said, “I’m sure I’d be forced to raise taxes for all residents of Lourdes to pay for these 66 ‘benches of the Grotto’.”
Although pilgrim numbers have risen a bit in recent years, Lourdes — which has the second-most number of hotel rooms in France after Paris — has seen a gradual decline in visits in the longer term.
Rising costs, including for trains to the town near the Spanish border, and competition from the Medjugorje shrine in Bosnia-Herzegovina are among the reasons cited for the decline.
In addition, most pilgrims go to visit the grotto where Saint Bernadette Soubirous said she saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1858, to attend Mass and bathe in the waters there — and not to spend large sums in the garish shops nearby.
Average pilgrims spend only about 10 to 15 euros on religious trinkets in shops with names like “The Rosary of the Virgin”, “Sacred Heart of Jesus” and — probably for English-speaking pilgrims — “Saint Patrick”.
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