Sanctuary of Our Lady of La Salette

Sanctuary of Our Lady of La Salette is in La Salette-Fallavaux, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France and is a high-altitude Marian pilgrimage sanctuary associated with a reported 1846 apparition to two shepherd children.. Maximin Giraud and Mélanie Calvat said that they encountered a “Beautiful Lady” on 19 September 1846 in the mountain pastures above La Salette.

After an ecclesiastical inquiry, Bishop Philibert de Bruillard of Grenoble formally recognized the apparition on 19 September 1851. In May 1852 he announced the foundation of a sanctuary with a church and accommodation for pilgrims. The sanctuary identifies the “Beautiful Lady” reported by the two children with the Virgin Mary, now venerated as Our Lady of La Salette.

The claimed apparition is recorded here as a Catholic devotional tradition and an ecclesiastically recognized claim, not as an independently demonstrated supernatural event. Its importance rests on the continuity of pilgrimage that followed the 19th-century inquiry and on the sanctuary formally created by the Diocese of Grenoble in 1852.

The foundation plan already combined a church with accommodation for pilgrims, showing that reception of visitors was part of the project from the beginning.