Floods leave Lourdes counting the cost

The flooded grotto at Lourdes last Saturday. The waters have now receded, leaving a thick carpet of mud in many hotelsBob Edme/AP

“The waters rose rapidly between 8 and 8.30am,” Jean Buscail says of the floods which engulfed Lourdes, the French pilgrimage town, last Saturday. M Buscail, the owner of the 220-room Hotel Arcades, watched with horror as his basement and ground floor were quickly submerged in more than a metre of water. The trigger? The River Gave de Pau, which flows through the Pyrenean town, had burst its banks and wreaked havoc, uprooting trees, damaging bridges, wrecking a hydro-electric plant and ripping up roads and pathways.

It also flooded the grotto-cave where the Virgin Mary allegedly appeared 18 times in 1858 to Bernadette Soubirous, the illiterate daughter of a local miller. Her visions made Lourdes a major religious tourism destination, one that now attracts six million…