Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Image: Wikimedia Commons

At the foot of Tepeyac hill in Mexico City, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe guards the tilma of Saint Juan Diego, the cloak on which the image of the Virgin was miraculously imprinted during the apparitions of December 1531. The old basilica, consecrated in 1709, still stands beside the vast circular new basilica, to which the sacred image was solemnly transferred on 12 October 1976. The most visited Marian shrine in the world, it draws some twenty million pilgrims a year to Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of Mexico and of the Americas, celebrated every 12 December.