An artificial rock cave, the Grotto is used by its visitors as a sacred space for prayer, meditation, and outdoor Mass.

Edward Sorin, C.S.C., the French Holy Cross priest who founded the University of Notre Dame in 1842 on a tract of land in Northern Indiana, had a lifelong devotion to Mary.

He named several structures on the nascent campus after the Blessed Virgin Mary, and, seeking to attract Catholic pilgrims to Notre Dame, he constructed a replica of the Portiuncula—a Marian chapel located in the Papal Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels in Assisi.

The replica was a wooden structure that sat atop a small rock wall, complete with several religious statues, and adjacent to the Church of the Sacred Heart.

Unlike the first replica, the current Grotto took the form of a rock cave, located downhill from the church rather than adjacent to it.

Edward Sorin, C.S.C., the French Holy Cross priest who founded the University of Notre Dame, had a lifelong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and named several institutions he created after her.

[1]: 2 [2]: 144  In 1842, he founded the university in the midst of what was then wilderness in northern Indiana at a former Jesuit mission site that was then-named Sainte-Marie-des-Lacs (lit.

"Saint Mary of the Lakes"), giving the site the French name of Notre Dame du Lac (lit.

[1]: 3  He and several Holy Cross Brothers, with whom he had traveled to the New World, began to construct a chapel by Saint Mary's Lake, which they completed in 1844.

[1]: 13  Following their return from Europe, Lourdes-related imagery and replicas began to proliferate on the campuses of Notre Dame and Saint Mary's; a replica of the Grotto at which Bernadette Soubirous is said to have seen apparitions in Lourdes was constructed inside of a building at Saint Mary's in 1874, while the sanctuary lamp in Notre Dame's Church of the Sacred Heart was replaced in 1875 with a newly ordered exact replica of the sanctuary lamp present in the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes.

[1]: 17–18 In September 1877, Sorin stated that he would make a replica shrine at Notre Dame in every respect a facsimile of the original, with the exception of not having a copy of the 200-foot (61 m) high wall of rock that is present at the Lourdes Grotto.

[5] Rather than being a large rock cave, however, Sorin's Grotto was a wooden octagonal structure with glass panes, fifteen feet (4.6 m) in height by seven feet (2.1 m) in diameter with a three-foot (0.91 m) pedestal, and located at the northwest of the church, between the sacristy and the apse chapels.

[1]: 60 [6]: 157  Rather than building the new Grotto between the sacristy and the apse chapels of the Church of the Sacred Heart, the new Grotto was constructed down the hill from the church closer to Saint Mary's Lake; it was built atop the location that the charred remains of the main building had been spread after it had burned down in 1879, which itself had been built atop to hold a garden of Sorin's.

[1]: 81–82  However, the spring at Notre Dame was covered up and replaced with a hand water pump shortly after its discovery.