In the last issue, several travelers who passed by Magdala in the 19th century described it as a miserable village. Many other authors of that same century do not even take the pain of mentioning such a humble town. Among them, we mention some of the most authoritative descriptors of the Holy Land, such as the Franciscan Francesco Cassini da Perinaldo (1833), the Trappist monk Marie-Joseph de Géramb (1840) or the well-known Chateaubriand (1827).

And, though most authors keep noticing the presence of Magdalene’s town, they do not write about it more than a short line en passant. This is the case, for example, of Félicien de Saulcy (1865), the priests Fr. Jean-Jacques Bourassé (1867) and Liévin de Hamme (1875), the German pilgrim Gerhard Lüken (1896), and the Spanish writer from Teruel Octavio Velasco del Real: “Behold there el-Mejdel, Magdala, cradle of Mary the Penitent.” Similarly, the Catalan priest and poet Jacinto Verdaguer, briefly tell us in the diary of his pilgrimage (Dietari d’un Pelegrí) that, on the morning of 11 May 1886, while sailing from Capernaum to Tiberias, he spotted Magdala: “There is a plain full of trees and water sources, called Wadi Hammam, the Valley of the Doves. Between this and Tiberias, the now humble town of Magdala, the homeland of Saint Mary Magdalene, is only a dark spot.”

In short: in the 19th century, Magdala was not only a miserable village, but travelers practically ignored it, and its memory does not deserve more than some hasty thought.

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