LOURDES -- When Bernadette Soubirous was sent out to forage for firewood on a chilly February morning, she noticed something moving in a rocky hollow, or grotto, into which cattle often strayed.

As the 14-year-old later recounted, she then saw "a beautiful lady" wearing a white veil and a blue girdle and holding a rosary.

Bernadette, illiterate but deeply religious, was immediately convinced that the vision was none other than the Virgin Mary.

The year was 1858 and the young girl had ventured out from her family's squalid one-room home in the town of Lourdes, southwestern France.

Two companions who were with Bernadette during that first vision said they saw nothing, but like dozens of others who accompanied her on later visits, they were deeply struck by her absorption.

Over the subsequent six months the girl returned many times to the grotto, and reported seeing the "beautiful lady" on 17 other occasions.

Although she never gave her name, Bernadette said the mysterious figure spoke to her several times and also made the sign of the cross.

During one apparition the figure told Bernadette to drink from a spring at the base of the rocks: although witnesses said there was no water there, the young girl scrabbled with her hands and later a spring started gushing at the place.

It continues to do so and is so prolific that its water, believed to have curative powers, is bottled and sold all over the world.

Bernadette's sightings caused great excitement, and it was not long before there were reports of miraculous cures due to the spring water.

The young girl said the apparition had asked that a chapel be built over the grotto, and after initial skepticism on the part of the authorities, work was started four years later.

Today the main basilica at the site can house 25,000 pilgrims and over six million people visit Lourdes every year.

Although she set in motion one of the Roman Catholic Church's most famous pilgrimages, Bernadette Soubirous did not benefit from the apparently miraculous cures the church has subsequently registered.

After retiring to a convent in the north-central French town of Nevers in 1866, she died of chronic asthma and tuberculosis there in 1879, at age 35.

When her body was disinterred years later, church authorities said her features were miraculously intact, although the remains which pilgrims can still view today in Nevers are fitted with a wax death mask.

Bernadette Soubirous was declared a saint in December 1933; she is the patroness of the sick, the poor and shepherds.

In most countries her feast day falls on April 16, although in France it is February 18