I first attended the pilgrimage at Our Lady of Santa Cruz (Nîmes) in 2002, on Ascension Day.1 On this day each year a great number of pilgrims converge on a small sanctuary concealed in a suburban landscape that, at first sight, appears rather unwelcoming. I had heard about this pilgrimage the year before in Algeria, more precisely in Oran, where I had frequented the large sanctuary of the same name that dominates the town from atop Mount Murdjadjo. Before Algeria’s independence in 1962 and the forced departure of most residents of European origin, the shrine, though now abandoned by the Church and in partial ruins, was once the site of a great pilgrimage that, like other Marian sites in Algeria, also attracted the devotion of many Muslims. And so, in this ramshackle shrine, in a region deemed highly dangerous – a place where, during the civil war of the 1990s, very few people dared to venture – I saw Muslim women lighting candles at a small, mutilated statue of the Virgin and Muslim men kneeling in the act of prayer on the vast esplanade of the central building. Catholic clerics I then met in town mentioned the existence of a kind of duplicate of both the shrine and the pilgrimage in Nîmes, in the south of France.