We headed into Rocamadour in the early afternoon after hanging out a large load of laundry and by which time the sun had cleared away the haze. We had been to Rocamadour on our last trip and were returning simply because we liked how the town was built right into the limestone cliffs. It was a short and very scenic drive from camp, perfect for an afternoon outing. We parked up at the top and made our way down the steep path after getting some great views down on the city. The Chemin de la Croix ("way of the cross") was closed for maintenance so we had to take the road access down to the middle level known as the Sanctuary. We had a quick look around the church with its black Virgin Mary statue and then made our way further down to the one-street city.

This site used to get about 20,000 pilgrims a day back in the 14^th century who were taken care of by the nearly 8,000 residents. Nowadays, the several hundred residents mainly focus on the one million or so visitors a year. During the eleventh century, a few pagan pilgrims came to a little cave in a cliff, to worship a crude statue of a black Virgin. Of the two hundred or so black Virgin Mary statues in France, it was the most revered. It is black because the forcefully converted pagans typically associated black with fertility and motherhood and thus found it easier to embrace the Virgin. In addition to this, the discovery of a body in one of the caves, which was claimed to be a saintly hermit, made this place really popular. The body was declared to be a worshipper of Mary and thus named Amadour. Hence the town derived its name, Rocamadour (rock of the servant of Mary). Over the years, the number of pilgrims increased and peaked in the 14^th century. Monks built a formal church and a small city sprouted at its base to support the needs of the pilgrims.

Down at the city level, most of the shops, now supporting tourists' souvenir needs, were closed so there wasn’t much to browse. Since the city is the site itself, we soon found ourselves heading back up the stairs to the parking lot at the top of the cliff. Just to be clear, we did not kneel on each step and pray an “Ave Maria” as the devout pilgrims do. It was a beautiful, sunny day out and we actually got too warm on the way back up so that we had to take off a layer. This was a wonderful change from just a week ago when we had been cooped up in our van with our laundry freezing on the line.