Sanctuary of Saint Rose of Lima

Image: Wikimedia Commons

On Avenida Tacna in the heart of Lima stands the sanctuary built around the very home where Isabel Flores de Oliva was born in 1586, the girl the world would know as Rose of Lima. A Dominican tertiary who never left her city, she prayed in a tiny hermitage she built in the family garden, cared for the sick and the poor, and died at thirty-one in 1617. Canonized in 1671, she became the first saint of the Americas, and pilgrims still visit her hermitage and drop written petitions into the deep well of her garden. Rome keeps her feast on August 23, the day the Church of three continents that claims her as patroness turns toward Lima.