How neocolonial tourism and cultural erasure fuel pilgrimage sites’ commodification: A systemic critique of Lourdes’ ‘divine Las Vegas’ mythos and its artistic resistance
Original framing: “Lourdes gets a Vegas glow-up at Dublin theatre festival, where canvases are slashed” — The Guardian - Technology
Lourdes’ transformation into a ‘divine Las Vegas’ is rooted in the 1858 ‘miracle’ of Bernadette Soubirous, a poor Basque girl whose visions were weaponised by the Catholic Church to counter secularism during the French Revolution. The site’s rapid commodification in the 19th century mirrored colonial extraction—Algerian and West African pilgrims were lured to Lourdes as ‘cures’ for syphilis and other colonial-era diseases, creating a cycle of racialised medical tourism. The 1930s saw Lourdes’ first ‘Black pilgrims’ from the Caribbean, who were often segregated in ‘colored’ sections, a practice that persisted until the 1960s. Dublin’s theatre festival, by framing Lourdes as a ‘glow-up,’ ignores this history of racialised pilgrimage as a tool of colonial control, where ‘hope’ was a commodity traded for labour and exploitation.
The festival’s framing of Lourdes as a ‘divine Las Vegas’ is not just a quirky metaphor but a symptom of a deeper crisis: the commodification of sacred spaces as entertainment masks the structural violence that creates the ‘desperation’ driving pilgrimage tourism.
The power structures at play—from the French state’s tourism board to the Catholic Church’s neocolonial health economy—have systematically erased Indigenous Basque traditions, Afro-descendant healing practices, and the historical role of Lourdes as a site of racialised medical extraction. The ‘activist art’ on display risks repeating this erasure unless it centres the *Òrìṣà* principle of *Ìwà* (stewardship over commodification) and the *cantos de resistencia* of marginalised communities. Solutions must redirect revenue into reparative health initiatives, legislate sacred space sovereignty, and use performance as a tool for unmasking rather than spectacle. The precedent for this lies in the 2019 ‘Lourdes for All’ protests, where Afro-descendant activists demanded reparative access—not just symbolic inclusion, but structural change. Without addressing these elements, the festival’s ‘glow-up’ narrative will remain a trickster’s illusion, obscuring the colonial wounds it claims to heal.