It was an hour’s drive north from Surfville Nazaré to Fatima, the Catholic Disneyland, where we had only about three hours to check out the religious scene. And in truth, that was plenty of time.
The Portuguese highway system is first-class. The freeways are all toll roads, and our rental car was outfitted with a transponder. At each toll gate, there was an EZPass lane marked with a green check mark. There were never any backups.
The oceanside terrain quickly gave way to a landscape resembling northern Arizona, with red dirt and pine-forested hills. Geology repeats itself around the globe.
But the hillsides looked like they had been hit with a bomb. The destruction went for miles and miles. The wind had been moving from west to east in a wide swath. You could tell because all of the trees had been blown down and snapped off in the same direction.
Winter Storm Kristin struck in late January 2026, causing widespread tree damage and devastation in the mountains and surrounding areas of Leiria, Portugal. The storm’s impact was catastrophic due to exceptional wind gusts exceeding 120mph. These winds were described as toppling mature trees “like matchsticks,” completely blocking roads, shutting down the power grid, destroying houses, and isolating entire neighborhoods. More than 15 million trees fell across Portugal during the storm. Where was god when you needed him?
Supposedly, god was very familiar with the lands we were passing through. The story of Fátima, Portugal, centers on a series of religious events in 1917, when the Virgin Mary purportedly appeared to three young shepherd children. The small village where they lived was soon transformed from a quiet farming community into one of the world’s most significant Catholic pilgrimage sites. Once the miraculous story emerged amid the turmoil of World War I, there was no stopping that old-time religion.
Beginning on May 13, 1917, and continuing on the 13th of each subsequent month through October, three children — Lúcia dos Santos (10) and her cousins Francisco (9) and Jacinta Marto (7) — reported seeing a “Lady more brilliant than the Sun” at the Cova da Iria — basically, a field full of sheep in the middle of nowhere.
The figure, later identifying herself as “Our Lady of the Rosary,” called for daily prayer (specifically the Rosary), penance, and devotion to her Immaculate Heart in order to bring peace to the world and end the war.
She reportedly entrusted the children with three “secrets” or prophecies:
Secret #1 was about Hell, offering a terrifying glimpse of the afterlife intended to inspire conversion.
Secret #2 addressed World Wars and Russia. It predicted the end of WWI and the start of WWII, alongside a request for the consecration of Russia to her heart.
And Secret #3 dealt with the Persecution of the Church, describing a vision of a martyred Church, featuring an angel with a flaming sword crying out, “Penance, Penance, Penance!” It depicts a pope (“bishop dressed in white”) killed alongside bishops, priests, and lay people beneath a large wooden cross. It was later interpreted as predicting the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II.
On October 13, 1917, an estimated 70,000 people gathered to witness a promised sign from the apparition. Witnesses reported that the sun appeared to “dance,” spinning like a wheel, changing colors, and zig-zagging toward the Earth before returning to its place.
After careful review, the Catholic Church declared the visions “worthy of belief” in 1930.
As an unapologetic atheist, I have always been fascinated by the story of Fátima. So, I wanted to see it while we were in Portugal. My wife was unfamiliar with the place but agreed it sounded like it would undoubtedly be amusing. We intended to show no disrespect, but we were primed for some good laughs.
When I first wrote about our visit to Fátima on Facebook, I didn’t question the validity of the “miracle”. But I did take a few underhanded shots at the place’s commercial nature and the hamfisted way the Catholic Church does business. The immediate response from the Portuguese public on Facebook — including one very popular blogger who essentially declared war on me for several days — was rather intense, indignant, and irrational. I got several hundred angry comments, warning me to back off. They lectured me on the religious significance of the holy visions and the spiritual sanctity of Fátima as a place of healing, and told me to heed god’s holy words. It got personal. And THAT finally pissed me off.
So, let’s take a closer look at this glorious phenomenon, starting with the fundamental question: How did three prepubescent and illiterate children tending sheep upon an isolated field in rural Portugal come up with such a detailed and complex series of visions?
Well, the simple answer is: THEY DIDN’T. The visions and the writing happened decades apart. The apparitions were in 1917. The detailed written accounts came from Lúcia Santos’ memoirs, written in the 1930s and 1940s, with the most famous third vision text written in 1944. Lúcia was the only one of the three children still alive by then; Francisco and Jacinta both died in the 1919–1920 flu pandemic, just a couple of years after the apparitions.
So the lengthy, detailed, geopolitically literate text isn’t a transcription of what a child said in 1917. It’s the writing of an adult woman — by then a nun in her late 30s, who had spent over twenty years in convent life, reading, praying, and almost certainly absorbing the Church’s own developing interpretation of Fátima’s anti-Bolshevik message — recalling and narrating an experience from her childhood.
The first and second visions (the vision of hell and the Russia/WWII prophecy) were written by Lúcia in 1941, as part of her third memoir, at the request of the Bishop of Leiria, José Alves Correia da Silva. He’d been pressing her for years to write down everything she could remember, partly to settle disputes about what exactly had been said.
By 1941, WWII was already underway, the Russian Revolution and Soviet state were 24 years old, and Lúcia had spent two decades as a nun under bishops deeply invested in Fátima as an anti-communist sign. The “prediction” of a second war was written down two years after that war had already started.
The third vision was written in 1944, also at the bishop’s request, sealed in an envelope, and explicitly marked not to be opened until 1960 (Lúcia herself set that date, reportedly saying it would “appear clearer” by then). The bishops followed Lúcia’s instructions and did not open it until the appointed hour. Or at least, that’s the party line.
It was eventually opened and released by the Vatican in 2000, under John Paul II — 56 years after Lúcia wrote it, and after John Paul had already publicly tied the 1981 assassination attempt on him to Fátima. The released text turned out to be a symbolic vision (a bishop in white, a city in ruins, killings) rather than the specific, decodable prophecy many expected.
The texts we call the secrets are really institutional documents with a single, institutionally embedded author, written long after the fact.
Bishop da Silva oversaw the canonical inquiry, which began in the 1920s, and commissioned the written memoirs. Lúcia’s confessors and later Vatican officials (including future Cardinal Ratzinger, who handled the 2000 release) were the gatekeepers for what got published and when. There’s no named co-author or ghostwriter in the record — the documented claim is that Lúcia wrote it herself — but the multi-decade delay, the specific timing of each release, and the heavy institutional hands tightly holding the documents are exactly what make independent verification of “what a child experienced in 1917” essentially impossible.
In other words, the entire Fatima spectacle comes from Lúcia’s own pen, in 1941, with no earlier corroborating document, describing a war that was already happening when she wrote it. There’s no independent 1917 source — no parish record, no contemporary diary, no other witness — that contains this prophecy before the fact.
When academics finish punching holes in the three holy visions, true believers scream, “But there were 70,000 witnesses to the final celestial event where the sun danced across the sky, just as young Lúcia predicted it would! How can you refute that?”
Okay, let’s shine some sunlight on this one. The Miracle of the Sun on October 13, 1917, when the crowd reported seeing the sun move and change color. Tens of thousands of people — estimates ranged from 30,000 to 100,000 — were there, and many reported something unusual in the sky.
Astronomers and physicists point out that nothing was wrong with the sun that day, and nothing could be, without consequences far beyond a crowd in rural Portugal. If the sun had actually moved, spun, or changed color, it would have been visible from half the planet, not just a hillside in Fátima. No observatory anywhere on Earth recorded any solar anomaly that day. The sun is also roughly 93 million miles away. Anything genuinely happening to it wouldn’t manifest as a localized show for one crowd.
Medical experts concluded that staring at the sun causes exactly these symptoms. Direct solar viewing produces retinal afterimages, color distortion, and perceived movement (a known optical effect sometimes called the “sun dance” illusion) as the eye’s photoreceptors fatigue and the retina sends inconsistent signals to the brain. People had been told a miracle would happen at a specific time and place, then stared at the sun waiting for it — which is close to a textbook setup for this exact illusion.
Behavioral psychologists have noted that mass expectations and suggestions can often play a real role in shaping individual and collective reality. Most of the crowd had come specifically because Lúcia had announced in advance that a sign would happen on that date. That kind of primed, expectant crowd, combined with the heat, fasting, fatigue, and overcast/hazy conditions described that day (some accounts mention thin clouds that would have made looking at the sun easier and more visually unstable), is a known recipe for shared subjective experience without a shared external cause.
The accounts aren’t even consistent with each other. Some witnesses reported the sun spinning, others saw it change colors, others said it seemed to fall toward Earth, and others saw nothing unusual at all despite being in the same crowd. Genuinely shared physical events tend to produce more convergent descriptions; this pattern looks more like individually generated perception than a shared external phenomenon.
The scientific position isn’t that 70,000 people are lying. It’s that a large, expectant crowd staring at the sun is sufficient on its own to produce widely varying, dramatic-sounding testimony, and that nothing actually happened to the sun itself, because we’d have global, instrument-recorded evidence of that and we don’t.
And so, if you want to believe in all this foolishness, more power to you; faith can bring solace and great joy. But I find the whole proposition preposterous.
Today, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fátima is a massive complex that includes the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary and the Basilica of the Holy Trinity, one of the largest Catholic churches in the world. The size of the place is overwhelming. And we have been to the Vatican.
Francisco and Jacinta were canonized as saints in 2017. Lúcia became a cloistered nun and lived until 2005; her cause for canonization is currently underway.
There were several large free parking lots adjacent to the Sanctuary. These lots offered immediate access to the central plaza, allowing us to focus our limited time on the most significant spiritual sites within the vast Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fátima complex.
We began our little pilgrimage at the Chapel of the Apparitions. This is the heart of the sanctuary, built on the exact spot where the Virgin Mary appeared to the three children back in 1917. We got there in time to catch the end of the midday Rosary. The worshippers came in all shapes, sizes, and nationalities.
Next up was the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary. We walked across the large prayer square to this Neo-Baroque basilica to see the tombs of the three shepherd children: Francisco, Jacinta, and Lúcia. Pilgrims crawled on their knees towards the Basilica in painful devotion, and there were rows of wheelchair-bound worshippers awaiting hands-on ministering from the resident healers. True believers were barbecuing various wax body parts. Speakers were broadcasting messages and masses. There was a lot going on.
Located at the opposite end of the plaza sat the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity. This modern basilica is one of the largest Catholic churches in the world, with a seating capacity of 9,000. It reminded me of a very large and impenetrable concrete bomb shelter.
The Catholic Church has always been about money, and Fátima is basically a printing press for money. It follows a hallowed tradition of impoverished towns claiming to have a splinter off the cross upon which Christ was crucified, or a drop of his blood. Religion and tourist attractions walk hand in hand. Always have. Always will.
If you think I am being harsh, the Fátima gift shop was selling flesh-colored votive candles shaped like titties and wombs. But there were no dicks. That’s where the Catholic Church drew the line at Fátima Disneyworld. NO DICKS!
Coimbra, a riverfront city in central Portugal and the country’s former capital, was another hour to the north along a near-empty freeway. It is home to a preserved medieval town and the historic University of Coimbra. Built on the grounds of a former palace, the university is famed for its baroque library, the Biblioteca Joanina, and its 18th-century bell tower. In the city’s old town lies the 12th-century Romanesque Cathedral Sé Velha. The town packs a pretty mean punch.
We checked into the Hotel Oslo down by the river and then climbed staircase after staircase to the tippy top of town, where the university crowns the chockablock ancient city of white stone houses capped with red tile roofs. I’m pretty sure this was the place Led Zeppelin was singing about.
Many of the buildings were crumbling and beyond repair. When juxtaposed with the recent, sleek renovations that were often literally attached to the ruins, it made for an interesting before-and-after mix. The vast inventory of abandoned buildings — some clearly important structures back in their day — was mind-boggling.
Many of the houses near the upper levels of the ant pile were crammed with student apartments. The graffiti was prolific and unsightly, giving the impression that the folks living there had abandoned all hope.
We ascended through the Arco de Almedina, the medieval gateway and main entrance to the old walled city. The climb was beyond steep, but it took us through the most atmospheric “Backbreaker” stairs (Quebra Costas). I thought I had died and gone to heaven.
The next stop was the Old Cathedral of Coimbra (Se Vella), adorned with golden everything. This fortress-like Romanesque cathedral is one of the most important in Portugal. It is the only nearly intact Romanesque cathedral from the Reconquista era still standing today. Commissioned by the first king, Afonso Henriques, it symbolizes the nation’s birth and architectural evolution. Unlike most historic churches, it retains its original 12th-century Romanesque architecture. Built during wartime, it has thick walls, battlements, and arrow slits that resemble a castle, designed to defend against Moorish attacks.
We spent an hour strolling around the campus, past the various schools, like chemistry and medicine, where students hung out as students do on every campus, in between classes on a lovely day.
We did a quick walk-through of the Science Museum, with its Curiosity Room filled with all sorts of things, like Amazon ceremonial masks and weird musical instruments from far-off lands visited by the early Portuguese explorers during the Age of Discovery. The kaleidoscopic display cases glowed in the dark like an acid flashback.
It was almost time for the library tour, so we headed over to the royal palace. Soon-to-be-graduated students in long black robes were getting their class photos snapped on the palace steps. Excitement was in the air.
We had been incredibly lucky to snag the last two tickets for the final tour of the day at 5:40 PM at the Joanina Library — an absolute must according to all the guidebooks. Technically, they were sold out, but when I told the ticket vendor that we had come all the way from Washington, D.C., and hated Trump, they laughed aloud and sold us two tickets.
Well, the Dublin Library it ain’t. In fact, it was incredibly underwhelming — rather small, dark, musty, dusty, and in need of a fresh coat of paint. The rear wall was impressive, but it might have been Lord Plushbottom’s private library in terms of scale and majesty. In fact, the whole place could have actually been a complete facade. Even the people working there seemed bored out of their minds. Taking photos was expressly forbidden. I snapped a photo anyway just to watch them freak out, but they didn’t even notice. And we never figured out why they first steered us into a dead-end dungeon before leading us up the steps to the two-room library. It was all very odd indeed. Frankly, I liked the Curiosity Room in the Science Museum way more.
We ended our whirlwind day at Bar 5° Andar, the rooftop bar of our hotel, offering one of the best 360-degree views of the illuminated University and the city as the sun set.
Places like Fatima and Coimbra are off the beaten track. And they aren’t hip and cosmopolitan like Lisbon or Porto. But they offer insights into the real Portugal, which is a very diverse and deeply layered nation — one whose glorious past still echoes louder than its economic present. If you just visit the sophisticated big cities or hike along the Algarve coast, you have definitely been to Portugal, but there is so much more to the picture. And most of it will make you think twice before assuming you know where to find the real Portugal.
