Basilica of Our Lady of Copacabana

Image: Wikimedia Commons

On the shore of Lake Titicaca, nearly four thousand meters above the sea on ground the Incas held sacred, a descendant of Inca emperors gave the Americas one of their most beloved images of Mary. Francisco Tito Yupanqui had no training as a sculptor, and his first clay Virgin was ridiculed by the priest, so he traveled to Potosí to learn from master artisans, and in 1583 his statue of the Virgin of Candelaria, carved from maguey wood, covered in gold leaf, her face bearing the features of his own Andean people and her dress that of an Inca princess, was enthroned at Copacabana. Miracles followed and never stopped: crowned Queen of Bolivia in 1925, the dark Virgin whom the Aymara and Quechua tenderly call La Coyeta never leaves her basilica with its gleaming white Moorish domes, a copy travels in her processions, and outside, in a custom found nowhere else, cars line up daily to be blessed before the patroness of Bolivia.