We visited two places today, Fatima and Nazare. One is a religious shrine, and the other is one of the great surfing places in the world.
Yesterday we rode the bus into town with a Dutch women who was staying at our campground. We had a nice conversation with her, and she told us about Fatima. We had seen it in our research and were undecided about visiting it, but she told us it was worth a stop and quite interesting.
So after another night of extremely loud college students outside our door we were up early and punched Fatima into the GPS. When we arrived we were surprised by the giant parking area for the Shrine. Neither one of us were expecting the large crowds that were heading into the area of the Shrine. The shrine is immense with a large basilica centering a plaza. Today there was a mass going on on the steps of the basilica facing the plaza and there were probably a couple of thousand people in the plaza. Some where focused on the mass but many where just wandering around taking pictures and enjoying the sites. It was very different than the other masses I have attended, much less formal.
We joined in for a while before moving on to another very modern building that is partially underground, but includes several chapels, and one very large very modernistic church the size of a lot of cathedrals. One of the small chapels was also having a mass, and shortly after we entered the larger church another mass started. Also, in amidst all of the chapels and churches there is also a museum which we walked thru. All of this is to support the thousands of pilgrims who come every year to Fatima.
I assumed the miracle of Fatima happened hundreds of years ago, but it turns out that the miracle that has driven all of this activity happened in 1917. That year three young children, a brother and sister and their cousin were tending the family sheep in a field when a bright shining lady (Mary)appeared to them and told them that prayer could end the great war (WWI). They went home and told their mother who told them not to tell anyone else as she was embarrassed. She told a couple of her friends who spread the word and people began to appear to pray for peace. The brother and sister died the next year during the great flu epidemic, but the cousin became a nun and continued to receive visits from the bright shining lady during her life.
The basilica building was built around 1930. The plaza we saw all of the people on covers the field where the children saw the vision. The modern churches were build in the 60’s and 70’s. There was a lot of modern religious art around the site which we both found interesting. A stop we thought would be a quick walk thru an old church turned into a much longer walk thru a vast but quite modern religious site.
Nazare was the place we had thought was going to be the focus of our day. Due to an interesting combination of a steep cliff jutting into the ocean, and a deep underwater canyon just off shore when the conditions are right enormous waves of up to 100 feet can be generated. Over the last few years using tow boats surfers have gone out and surfed these monster waves, with the current record being 80 feet.
Today the conditions were not generating those kind of waves, in fact they were hardly generating any waves, and most of the surfers looked bored. There was a beach soccer tournament going on, and a lot of people were enjoying the weekend at the beach. But otherwise it looked like another pretty beach town along the Atlantic coast.
We walked from the campsite to the beach, but the guy at the campsite recommended we walk to the beach and then spend the €5 it would cost for a taxi ride home. He was right as it would have been quite a climb back. When we got back we stopped in the campsite bar to watch a Premier league soccer game before heading back to François for the night.