Sanctuary of Loyola

Sanctuary of Loyola tickets: which one to buy

Entry to the basilica is free. The Santa Casa, the tower house where Ignatius was born and converted, is visited on a guided tour with a small ticket, and that is the part worth paying for. Tours run in Spanish and Basque with English at set times; the shrine also has an audiovisual presentation included in the price. Loyola sits in Azpeitia, about forty-five minutes from San Sebastian by road, with a bus service that runs several times a day.

Organised visits from San Sebastian or Bilbao cost several times the ticket and usually add the coastal village of Getaria or the hermitage of San Ignacio. Nothing needs booking outside the summer feast. The basilica and the grounds are open to anyone walking through, and there is a large free car park. A restaurant and a hostel run by the Jesuits stand within the complex and serve pilgrims and walkers on the Ignatian Way.

Visiting Sanctuary of Loyola: what to see

Inigo Lopez de Loyola, a Basque nobleman, was wounded by a cannonball at Pamplona in 1521 and brought home to this tower house to recover; with no chivalric romances to hand he read a life of Christ and the saints, and the conversion that followed produced the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits acquired the house in the seventeenth century and wrapped it in a sanctuary: the Italian architect Carlo Fontana designed a circular basilica with a dome 65 metres high, begun in 1689 and finished in 1738, in a Churrigueresque baroque of black and pink marble quarried nearby.

The original fortified house survives inside the complex, its lower floors of rough stone and upper floors of brick, with the room where Ignatius convalesced turned into a chapel of gilded wood. The contrast between the plain tower and the enormous church around it is the point. The Ignatian Way, a 650-kilometre walking route from Loyola to Manresa in Catalonia, begins at the basilica door and has become a modern pilgrimage in its own right.

Sanctuary of Loyola opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily from morning to evening with a break at midday; the Santa Casa keeps shorter hours and closes on some winter afternoons. The feast of St Ignatius on 31 July fills the sanctuary with pilgrims and the surrounding towns hold festivals in the same week. The Basque country is green because it rains, and the sanctuary is at its best under cloud rather than sun. The complex is level and accessible.

Dress modestly. Photography is allowed outside and restricted in the Santa Casa. Allow ninety minutes. Azpeitia has a railway museum in the old station and the coast at Zumaia, with its extraordinary layered cliffs, is half an hour away. Azpeitia holds a Basque rural sports festival in the summer, with stone-lifting and wood-chopping, on the field beside the sanctuary.