Las Lajas Sanctuary

Image: Wikimedia Commons

A Gothic church stands on a bridge across a canyon in the Andes, its spires rising a hundred meters above the Guáitara River, and the reason it was built in so impossible a place is painted on the rock itself. In 1754, an indigenous woman named María Mueses de Quiñones and her daughter Rosa, deaf and mute from birth, took shelter from a storm among the flat stones, the lajas, when Rosa suddenly spoke her first words: the Mestiza is calling me. On the canyon wall appeared an image of the Virgin with her Child, Saint Dominic receiving the rosary and Saint Francis beside them, and later studies found no paint or pigment on the surface: the colors go into the stone itself. Pilgrims from Colombia and Ecuador have come ever since, building shrine after shrine until this neo-Gothic marvel rose between 1916 and 1949, its sanctuary wall being the living rock that bears the image. The devotion was approved in 1951, the image crowned in 1952, and the walkway down the gorge is lined with thousands of plaques of thanks for graces received.