Renkus-Heinz has supplied 43 IC Live beam-steering arrays to the Shrine of Fátima in central Portugal, overhauling the audio infrastructure at one of the world’s largest Catholic pilgrimage sites. The current phase is the first stage of a full audio renovation expected to continue over the next four to five years.
The open-air prayer area linking the site’s two basilicas and a chapel regularly hosts congregations of between 50,000 and 100,000 people during the main outdoor season, with peak celebrations on May 13 and October 13 placing concert-scale demands on the site’s audio system. The legacy infrastructure was no longer delivering the intelligibility or coverage required, prompting the upgrade.
System designer Ricardo Castro of RCOE specified five ICL-F-RD and 38 ICL-F-DUAL-RD loudspeakers, secured to lamppost pillars around the prayer area. The arrays’ digital beam-steering technology is designed to direct sound precisely toward the audience, with the dual modules providing higher SPL and tighter vertical control. The project was distributed by SeeSound, with installation carried out by the Shrine’s in-house technical team.
Castro, CEO at RCOE, said: “At such an important religious site, it was imperative to find a solution that delivers the necessary speech and music clarity for every type of service, whilst also respecting and preserving the renowned historic architecture.”
The enclosures carry an IP54 rating and feature Finnish birch construction with steel grilles – which Castro says makes them well suited to the exposed outdoor environment. Loudspeaker settings were predefined using Renkus-Heinz’s RHAON configuration software, reducing installation complexity and minimising disruption to ongoing services.
Redundancy was a key design requirement absent from the previous system. The new infrastructure features multiple rack rooms maintaining at least 50 percent network operation in the event of a major failure, with primary and secondary Dante paths, a third AES-EBU feed, and analogue backup in critical areas.
Castro added: “The transformation has been incredible. Complaints about sound have disappeared, replaced by a sense of amazement. Pilgrims and visitors are consistently impressed, with balanced audio across the full frequency range.”
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