When the sun “danced” at Fátima: 13 October 1917

Avelino de Almeida had to walk. The senior reporter of O Século, Lisbon's big republican daily, got off the train at Chão de Maçãs at about four in the afternoon of 12 October 1917 with the photographer Judah Ruah. Their carriage never came, so they tramped the ten kilometres to the town of Ourém, past barefoot pilgrims praying the rosary, the women with bags on their heads topped by their heavy shoes.2 sources

The pilgrims were heading for the Cova da Iria, a stony hollow in the hills near the village of Fátima. Three shepherd children said a Lady had been appearing to them there, and many took her for the Virgin Mary. She would give a sign, they said, at midday on the 13th. Many pilgrims planned to sleep in the open beside the small holm oak where the children said she stood.3 sources

At about ten the next morning it began to pour. Almeida watched from the Leiria road above the hollow, where someone counted more than a hundred motor cars and more than a hundred bicycles. Below him, thousands of people stood in the sodden clay around the oak, over which a rough arch hung with two lanterns had been put up. The children arrived perhaps half an hour before the appointed time. Lúcia told the people to close their umbrellas, and they did.1 source

Then the rain stopped and the clouds broke open over the sun. The whole crowd turned to look at it.1 source

The spectators nearest by began to shout “Miracle, miracle!”. Afterwards, most said they had seen the sun tremble and “dance”. Some swore it had spun like a Catherine wheel or dropped towards the earth; others said it had changed colour. Almeida wrote it all down, and his paper, which had treated the story with suspicion since July, put it on its front page two days later.2 sources

Portugal had been a republic for seven years. The monarchy fell in October 1910, and the first decree of the new Provisional Government, on 8 October, expelled the Jesuits. Republicans saw the Catholic Church as an obstacle to a modern, secular country and set out to shrink its influence.2 sources

Portugal was also at war. It entered the European conflict on 9 March 1916, and in January 1917 the first troops of the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps (CEP) were shipped to France. The corps grew to more than 50,000 men and held a sector of the Flanders front under British command. At the Cova da Iria on 13 October, street sellers offered postcards of a CEP soldier “thinking of the help of his protectress for the salvation of the Fatherland”.2 sources

Fátima itself was a parish of more than twenty small hamlets in the Serra de Aire. Nobody lived at the Cova da Iria; there were a few trees, a great deal of stone and a small field that belonged to Lúcia's parents, about two kilometres from their hamlet of Aljustrel. Around three in four Portuguese could not read, and in the parish of Fátima the figure in 1920 was about 87 per cent.2 sources

Lúcia de Jesus dos Santos, born in Aljustrel in 1907, lived 200 metres from her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, and the three minded their families' sheep. On 13 May 1917, they said, a Lady “more brilliant than the sun” appeared above a holm oak at the Cova da Iria, said she came from Heaven and asked them to return on the 13th of each month for six months.3 sources

The children did not experience the visions in the same way. Carlos de Azevedo Mendes, a lawyer from Torres Novas who questioned them separately in September 1917, wrote that Lúcia saw the Lady, heard her and spoke to her; Jacinta saw and heard her but did not speak; Francisco only saw her. Lúcia did the talking for all three.2 sources

Almost everything we know about what the Lady said comes from Lúcia. The parish priest, Manuel Marques Ferreira, began questioning the children on 27 May 1917, and notes of their many interrogations that year survive. The longer dialogues quoted today come from memoirs Lúcia wrote as a nun between 1935 and 1941.2 sources

Early on 13 August, Artur de Oliveira Santos, administrator of the municipality of Vila Nova de Ourém and so the Republic's local authority, posted a detachment of the Republican National Guard (GNR), the gendarmerie, at the town hall and went to Aljustrel. He persuaded the parents to let the parish priest of Fátima question the children. Afterwards, the priest wrote, Santos put them in his carriage, telling the parents he was taking them to the Cova da Iria, and drove off at a gallop to Ourém.2 sources

The children spent three days in Ourém. In her first written account, in 1922, Lúcia said they were locked in a room, threatened with various punishments and promised gold coins if they revealed the secret, and that they told nothing. Her mother's sworn statement of 1923 is milder: Jacinta's brothers had cycled to Ourém and seen the children playing on the administrator's veranda, well treated. On 15 August Santos brought them back to the parish priest's house in Fátima.2 sources

At the Cova da Iria on the 13th the crowd had waited anyway. When a young man on a bicycle brought the news, people turned on the parish priest as an accomplice and called for him to be lynched. On Sunday 19 August, while Lúcia and Francisco were grazing sheep at Valinhos, near Aljustrel, the children reported the fourth apparition; Jacinta was fetched from home in time to see it. According to Lúcia, the Lady said the miracle would have been better known if they had not been taken away.2 sources

People came from the Alentejo and the Algarve, the Minho and the Beiras, by ox cart, carriage, bicycle and motor bus. The rain began in the morning, at eight or ten depending on the witness, and the crowd knelt in the mud to pray.2 sources

Nobody counted the crowd. Almeida's report gave 30,000 to 40,000, citing “dispassionate estimates by educated people”, and a postcard he sent his sister from Ourém that day said “some 40,000”. Two weeks later he wrote “some fifty thousand”.3 sources

Others differed. Joaquim Ramos Pinto, a Leiria merchant, wrote on 15 October of some 30,000; an undated note by Maria Luísa Garrett Correia spoke of nearly 60,000. The figure of about 70,000 came in 1921 from Manuel Nunes Formigão, a priest who had questioned the children in 1917, and went into the diocesan commission's report of 1930. In 1922 Formigão himself wrote of about 60,000.1 source

Lúcia later wrote that the Lady named herself the Lady of the Rosary, asked for a chapel and promised that the war would end, then opened her hands, which reflected on the sun. Carlos de Azevedo Mendes wrote to his brother that it was at the moment Lúcia cried “look at the sun” that everyone saw it dance.2 sources

The accounts written that autumn share a core. The sun appeared at the zenith through thinning cloud, pale enough to look at, like a disc of matt silver. Garrett Correia wrote that it spun dizzily, gave off heat like an open oven and seemed to approach the earth in sudden jerks, turning the scene yellow and then purple, for about ten minutes while the kneeling crowd begged for mercy. Carlos Silva, writing to the Leiria paper O Mensageiro, noticed that he was suddenly dry after being soaked, but did not think it a miracle.2 sources

Not everyone saw it. A reader of the Lisbon paper Portugal wrote on 17 October that he had seen nothing miraculous, had learned from O Século that the sun had “danced”, and doubted the size of the crowd it reported.2 sources

Before the crowd dispersed, Lúcia was carried from group to group in the arms of Carlos de Azevedo Mendes, announcing, as Almeida heard it, that the war had ended and the soldiers would come home. It had not: the armistice came 13 months later, on 11 November 1918. The crowd left quickly and peacefully, with no need for a patrol of the guard.2 sources

O Século was Portugal's biggest newspaper, with an average print run of 80,000 copies, and a republican paper with a strong political colour. It was probably the first national paper to report on Fátima: on 23 July 1917 its correspondent suspected “a premeditated financial speculation” to turn a hidden mineral spring into “a miraculous resort like old Lourdes”. According to the Catholic daily A Ordem, it was still running stories about exploiters of credulity on 12 and 13 October.4 sources

On Monday 15 October the paper's front page carried Almeida's report under the headline “Coisas espantosas! Como o sol bailou ao meio dia em Fátima”, “Astonishing things! How the sun danced at noon at Fátima”. It was the only story on the page with an exclamation mark. Almeida, a former seminarian aged 43, did not call it a miracle. He ended by leaving “the macabre dance of the sun” to those competent to judge it.3 sources

On 29 October he wrote again in Ilustração Portuguesa, the illustrated magazine of O Século, in the form of a letter to an old friend who had lost his faith and wanted an impartial witness. He described the rain stopping at the predicted hour and the sun dancing “in a violent, convulsive ballet”, and still declined to judge it.2 sources

Judah Bento Ruah, who had travelled with Almeida, photographed the crowd. The Santuário has exhibited 13 of his pictures of that day, which the photographer Paulo Catrica calls the only photographs of the moment. In a country where most people could not read, he argues, such pictures were of fundamental importance. They show the crowd staring upwards, not the sun.2 sources

Some readers took the report as proof, others as grounds for doubt. In a later letter to her grandchildren, Vitória Sirgado Azevedo Mendes called O Século “a thoroughly Jacobin paper”, and so above suspicion, and said she had lent her copy out so often that she never got it back.1 source

A year later the flu pandemic reached Aljustrel. Francisco fell ill in October 1918 and died at home on 4 April 1919, aged 10. Jacinta, ill since the same autumn, was taken to Lisbon's Dona Estefânia hospital on 2 February 1920, had an operation and died there on 20 February, aged 9.2 sources

A small chapel was built at the Cova da Iria between April and June 1919, as Lúcia said the Lady had asked. Mass was first said there on 13 October 1921. On the night of 5 to 6 March 1922 it was blown up with dynamite. It was restored and reopened on 13 January 1923.2 sources

Lúcia left Fátima. In June 1921, at the invitation of the new Bishop of Leiria, José Alves Correia da Silva, she entered the Asilo de Vilar, a boarding school in Porto, under another name. She became a Dorothean sister in Spain and in 1948 a Carmelite nun in Coimbra, where she died on 13 February 2005, aged 97.2 sources

The bishop appointed a commission in May 1922. Its report of April 1930 found nothing to show that the children had lied or been deluded. On 13 October 1930, in a pastoral letter, he declared the visions of 13 May to October 1917 “worthy of belief” and allowed the cult of Our Lady of Fátima. Such approval does not oblige Catholics to believe; it means the message contains nothing contrary to faith and may be accepted with prudence.3 sources

On 13 July 1917, Lúcia said, the Lady showed the children things they were not to repeat. In 1917 the three refused to reveal them, even in Ourém. Lúcia wrote the first two parts down in her third memoir, dated 31 August 1941: a vision of hell; a call for devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary; a warning that a worse war would break out under Pope Pius XI; and a request for the consecration of Russia, which would otherwise “spread her errors throughout the world”.2 sources

She wrote the third part on 3 January 1944 and sealed it; the envelope went to the Vatican's archives in 1957. John Paul II asked for it after he was shot in Rome on 13 May 1981, the anniversary of the first apparition. Published on 26 June 2000, it describes a “bishop dressed in white” crossing a ruined city and killed by soldiers on a mountain. The Vatican read it as a vision of the century's persecutions and of the attack on the Pope.1 source

Russia is not mentioned in the children's first interrogations; it appears only in the 1920s, and critics, some of them Catholics, have accused others of shaping Lúcia's account. The warning of a second war was first written down in 1941, with the Second World War already under way. The Vatican's own commentary in 2000 warned readers who expected apocalyptic revelations that they would be disappointed.2 sources

The First Republic ended with a military coup on 28 May 1926. The dictatorship that followed, shaped by António de Oliveira Salazar into the Estado Novo (New State), made peace with the Church and lasted until the revolution of 1974. Historians describe how the regime made political use of Fátima, although Salazar, a devout Catholic, seldom went there.2 sources

The bishops tied the shrine to the nation's fate. Cardinal Cerejeira, Patriarch of Lisbon, was cautious at first but backed Fátima from 1933. In 1936 the bishops vowed to return there if Portugal were spared the Spanish Civil War, and in 1938 they consecrated the country to the Immaculate Heart of Mary at Fátima. In April 1940 they promised a monument in Lisbon if Portugal stayed out of the world war; the Concordat with the Holy See followed a month later.1 source

Lúcia was sympathetic too. Before the 1945 elections she sent Cerejeira a card saying that Salazar was the person chosen by God to go on governing. During the colonial wars of 1961 to 1974, families of conscripts came to Fátima to pray, and some Catholics criticised the attitude of the Church and of the shrine's leaders towards the war. In the revolutionary summer of 1975 there were threats to nationalise the sanctuary, but the pilgrimages went on.1 source

The doubts began immediately, and not only among anticlericals. Domingos Pinto Coelho, a Catholic monarchist lawyer, was at the Cova da Iria and wrote in the Catholic daily A Ordem that what he had seen looked natural. He said he had watched the sun again in similar weather and got the same sensations, and put them down to looking at the sun through thin cloud driven fast by a strong wind. Remove the one extraordinary fact, he argued, and what is left is “the statements of three children”, which was “very little”.1 source

Later explanations follow similar lines. Auguste Meessen, a physicist at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, stared at the sun himself and argued that the spinning, the colours and the apparent fall come from after-images and the bleaching of pigments in the retina. He thought the humid air after the rain could have dimmed the sun enough to look at, and that the seers were honest.1 source

The British sceptic Steuart Campbell blamed atmospheric dust for dimming and colouring the sun. Benjamin Radford points out that if the sun had moved, millions elsewhere would have seen it. The historian A. H. de Oliveira Marques suggested an aurora, which Bruno Cardoso Reis thinks implausible.2 sources

Believers answer that the children had named the day and hour months in advance, and that the event came at the time they gave. No explanation has been proved. Wendy Grossman, founder of The Skeptic magazine, notes that, as far as she knows, the kind of miracle was never specified, so anything unusual that day might have counted. She leans towards unusual atmospheric conditions seen by an expectant crowd, but concludes that “we can only say we don't know”.2 sources

The Santuário counts as pilgrims the people who take part in at least one of its celebrations. In 2017, the centenary, when Pope Francis canonised Francisco and Jacinta at Fátima on 13 May, there were a record 9.4 million. The pandemic cut the 2020 figure to 1.4 million. In 2025 there were about 6.5 million.4 sources

The holm oak is long gone; the plinth of the statue in the Chapel of the Apparitions marks where it stood. The Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary, begun in 1928 and dedicated in 1953, holds the tombs of Francisco, Jacinta and Lúcia. Across the prayer square, the circular Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity, dedicated in 2007, seats 8,633 people. Fátima became a town in 1977 and a city in 1997.4 sources