Father João Pires, Rector of the Sanctuary of Nossa Senhora dos Milagres, reflects on pilgrimage, faith, hospitality and the thousands who will cross Terceira on foot during the 2026 feast
There are pilgrimages that can be measured in kilometers, and others that can only be measured in what they awaken within those who make them. The road to Serreta belongs to the second kind. Every September, across Terceira, men and women begin walking toward the Sanctuary of Nossa Senhora dos Milagres carrying promises, gratitude, fear, memory, and the quiet weight of things that cannot always be spoken aloud. Some leave before dawn. Some walk with their children. Some repeat a journey their parents once made. Some arrive exhausted. Some arrive crying. And, as Father João Pires, Rector of the Sanctuary, says with a simplicity that contains the entire mystery of pilgrimage, “Each callus and each tear tell a sacred story between the pilgrim and God.”
The Feast of Nossa Senhora dos Milagres takes place in Serreta from September 4 to 15, and this year one of its most significant novelties will be the uninterrupted opening of the Sanctuary from Friday, September 11, through Monday, September 14. The decision responds to the growing number of pilgrims arriving through the night and in the early hours, especially during the days surrounding the great feast and the traditional Segunda-feira da Serreta. The Sanctuary will ordinarily remain open from 8 a.m. until midnight throughout the celebrations, but during those three nights it will not close at all. There is something almost elemental in that gesture: while people continue walking, the church remains awake.
For Father João Pires, the pilgrimage is not simply a devotional custom inherited from another age. It is living evidence of a Church that, in his words, “was, is, and will always be young.” He points to the image of the Child Jesus held in the right hand of Our Lady of Miracles and sees in it an essential part of the Christian message: Christ goes toward those at the margins, but he also allows himself to be sought. The encounters with the Samaritan woman, the Roman centurion, Zacchaeus, and others outside the expected religious boundaries become, in Pires’s reflection, a model for understanding the contemporary pilgrim. “Sometimes it is Jesus who goes to meet people, and other times it is people who go to meet Jesus,” he says. “Never to condemn them, but always to save them.”
That conviction gives the Serreta pilgrimage a meaning larger than the fulfillment of a promise. Pires insists that faith must be humble and strong at the same time, never arrogant, never selfish. Prayer, too, should be stripped of spiritual entitlement. “Our prayer should be made with open hands,” he says, “and never in an attitude of demands toward God.” The phrase carries a particular beauty in the context of pilgrimage, where the body itself becomes a kind of open-handed prayer. The person walks without controlling the outcome, moves forward without certainty, offers effort without bargaining. The road becomes a language of surrender.
This year’s novena develops that language through the theme “Pilgrim, what do you say of yourself?” For Pires, the preaching is intended to become “a beacon” guiding each person through a journey of introspection, identity, and spiritual renewal, helping the faithful rediscover their baptismal essence as people walking toward both their brothers and sisters and toward the Father. The theme is striking because it turns the question inward. It does not ask what the pilgrim wants from God, but who the pilgrim is becoming along the way.
Organizing a feast expected to draw around 12,000 pilgrims is, unsurprisingly, a formidable undertaking. Pires identifies several major challenges. The first is inviting the preacher approximately a year in advance and ensuring that the novena develops a coherent spiritual theme. The second is coordinating the participation of the many pastoral services of the diocesan Church: liturgical, evangelical, social, youth, health ministries, senior centers and other pastoral structures from the deaneries of Angra and Praia da Vitória. The novena, he says, becomes “a true thermometer” of the vitality and good work being carried out in the parish communities of Terceira. The third challenge is sustaining the spirit of hospitality, service and volunteerism for which Serreta has long been known, in close partnership between the festival committee, the church committee and the parish pastoral council.
The fourth challenge is intensely practical: ensuring that those walking to the Sanctuary do so safely. Pilgrims are reminded to wear appropriate footwear, remain hydrated, monitor weather conditions and use reflective equipment so that drivers can see them clearly. They are also asked to care for the environment along the way, because, as Pires stresses, a pilgrim’s witness must include respect for nature. Drivers, in turn, are asked for heightened caution during the days when thousands of walkers share the roads. Traffic restrictions near the Sanctuary will be imposed at specific times on September 11, 12 and 13, particularly affecting the main road closest to the church, and people with reduced mobility are encouraged to plan their visits accordingly.
These details may appear distant from theology, but they are not. Pilgrimage is always embodied. Faith walks on actual roads, under actual weather, with tired legs, blisters, water bottles, family members waiting at the end and cars passing nearby. The sacred does not abolish the physical world; it enters it.
Perhaps nowhere is that more visible than in the stories Father João Pires has witnessed over the years. Asked whether one particular testimony remains with him, he resists choosing a single one. What moves him most is the collective image of pilgrims arriving with their eyes fixed on Nossa Senhora dos Milagres. He remembers people visibly exhausted, surrounded by family members waiting for them, entering the Sanctuary in tears—not tears of pain, but of gratitude.
“The miracle is not only the grace received,” he says, “but the unshakable faith that makes them cross the island on foot.”
That sentence may contain the deepest meaning of Serreta. The miracle is not always located at the end of the road. Sometimes it is the road itself: the decision to begin, the strength to continue, the family that waits, the prayer repeated step after step, the body that becomes exhausted and still moves forward. The answer sought may remain mysterious, but something has already happened in the act of walking.
And every pilgrimage is singular. One person may be giving thanks for recovery from illness. Another may be carrying the memory of someone who died. Another may be asking for reconciliation within a family. Another may not know exactly why they are walking, only that the tradition belongs to them and that not walking would feel like losing something they do not yet know how to name. This is why Pires speaks of each callus and each tear as sacred. They belong to individual biographies that no official program can fully record.
For the Rector, however, the most emotionally powerful moment comes at the conclusion of the great procession, when the Bishop addresses the immense gathering in front of the Sanctuary and the image of Nossa Senhora dos Milagres — the Star of the Sea — remains elevated behind him, looking out over her children. It is then, Pires says, that the Bishop asks Mary to bring to families and communities the one grace that should always be sought before all others: Jesus Christ.
“By giving us Jesus, Our Lady also offers us a new joy, full of meaning,” he says. “By giving us Jesus, she offers us a new capacity to cross with faith the most painful and difficult moments. By giving us Jesus, she also offers us the capacity for mercy, so that we may forgive one another, understand one another and support one another.”
The conclusion of the procession therefore becomes less an ending than a theological beginning. The crowd has walked, prayed, listened and gathered. The image returns. The Bishop speaks. But the true question is what the pilgrim carries away after leaving the Sanctuary. A firmer faith? Greater mercy? A renewed relationship with family? A quieter heart? The ability to endure something that cannot be changed? The courage to change something that can?
In this sense, Serreta belongs to a much older tradition of sacred journeys. Across religions and centuries, human beings have walked toward places they believed could reorder the interior landscape. The distance itself mattered because effort created seriousness. A journey undertaken on foot could not be reduced to convenience. The road stripped away distraction. It gave time for memory, regret, gratitude and hope to emerge.
The Azorean version of this ancient gesture has its own unmistakable character. It takes place on an island where nearly every road eventually encounters the sea, where religious devotion is inseparable from family memory, where emigration has carried traditions across the Atlantic and where returning descendants often rediscover belonging through rituals whose meaning preceded them. For some families, Serreta is faith. For others, it is also inheritance. A child walks because a parent walked; decades later that child may lead another generation along the same road.
That continuity is precisely what Father João Pires sees when he speaks of a young Church. Youth, in this sense, is not chronological. It is the ability of a tradition to remain alive enough to be received anew. A devotion that belongs only to the elderly is already becoming memory. A devotion carried by children, young people and entire families is still becoming future.
And so, between September 4 and 15, the roads will fill again. Confessions will be heard. The novena will ask the pilgrim what he or she says of oneself. The Sanctuary will remain open through the night. Families will wait at the doors. Volunteers will serve. Choirs and pastoral groups will animate the liturgies. Thousands will move toward one place.
Some will arrive limping. Some will arrive in silence. Some will arrive with tears already falling before they cross the threshold. And perhaps that is the most beautiful truth in Father João Pires’s words: no two of those tears mean exactly the same thing.
Each one carries a name, a memory, a promise, a wound, a gratitude. Each one is part of a story no one else can fully know. And each one, for the pilgrim who has crossed the island to offer it, is sacred.
Based on an interview given by Fr. Pires to the newspaper Diário Insular, published today August 18th, 2026. Photos from DI and Santuário da Serreta Facebook Page.