2023-10-21 13:00:00
REPORTAGE – Unattractive, too dependent on its religious tourism and in difficulty, the city wants to reinvent itself. “In the Pyrenees, we are fighting,” says the mayor, Thierry Lavit, who refuses to give up.
At the end of October, the town of Lourdes is decidedly unwelcoming. The sky is gray, and the drizzle is only interrupted by rare clearings. Around, the facades of the buildings are gloomy, poorly maintained. Wastelands are abandoned, stores keep their curtains closed. Life in this small town of 13,400 inhabitants, known for being the site of eighteen apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubirous, seems to have stopped in the 1970s. If millions of pilgrims are delighted to go to this highly symbolic place, at the gates of the Pyrenees, local elected officials know it: the situation is serious.
Already in difficulty for around ten years, Lourdes took the full brunt of the health crisis in 2020. A period revealing its ultra-dependence on pilgrimages, the form and expectations of which are however evolving. This year, “we went from 3 million euros in revenue linked to the tourist tax to 300,000 euros. We lost more than 4.6 million euros. Since then, the city has been placed on a drip and the scars are visible everywhere», says the mayor, Thierry Lavit. The challenge is big. But, far from being defeatist in the face of this painful observation, the elected official, in office since 2020, has not said his last word. In a hurry to restore all its splendor to the Marian City, the city hall is alerting the highest peaks of the State and moving heaven and earth to find solutions.
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