Latin America Pilgrimage Shrines

1. Why Latin America Is the Centre of Catholic Pilgrimage

Latin America is the region with the largest Catholic population on earth, and its shrines carry the traffic to prove it. Brazil and Mexico alone account for a substantial share of the world's baptised Catholics, and the two national shrines that serve them, Aparecida and Guadalupe, draw crowds that reorganise the cities around them. The pattern repeats down the continent: nearly every country has one shrine that functions as a national gathering point, one image that appears in taxis and kitchens, and one week in the year when the roads leading to it fill with people walking.

Source: the Pew Research Center report The Global Catholic Population identifies Latin America and the Caribbean as the region holding the largest share of the world's Catholics, and Brazil as the country with the largest Catholic population.

The history behind that is specific. Evangelisation in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas ran through images rather than through relics. Europe built its pilgrimage map on the graves of apostles and martyrs, and the Americas had none of those in the sixteenth century. What the missions had instead were carved and painted images of the Virgin and of Christ crucified, often made locally, often by Indigenous or mestizo hands, and often associated with a story of discovery: an image found in a river, in a cave, in a burning tree, in a fisherman's net. Those stories anchored devotion in a particular place, and the place became a shrine.

A second pattern followed. Popes formalised the devotions long after the people had settled them, by granting a proper Mass and Office, by permitting a solemn coronation of the image, by declaring the Virgin under that title the patroness of a nation, and by raising the church to the rank of a minor basilica. Those are the acts that stand behind Aparecida, Copacabana, Caacupe, Coromoto, Altagracia, Suyapa and El Cobre. Almost none of them involves a decree judging an apparition. Section 15 sets out what that distinction means and why it matters when someone tells you a shrine has been approved.

A third pattern shapes the calendar. Latin American pilgrimage is intensely seasonal. Guadalupe fills in the days before 12 December, Aparecida on 12 October, Caacupe on 8 December, Cartago on 2 August, Esquipulas in mid January, Lujan on the youth pilgrimage weekend in early October, and Qoyllur Rit'i in the days before Corpus Christi. Outside those weeks the same shrines are quiet, and a pilgrim who wants to pray rather than to be carried along by a crowd should choose deliberately between the two experiences.

If the practice itself is new to you, our page on what a pilgrimage is in Catholic teaching covers the penitential and devotional roots, and the global overview of Christian pilgrimage sites puts Latin America alongside the Holy Land, Rome and the Camino.

2. The Major Shrines at a Glance

The table below lists the principal national and regional shrines covered in this guide, with the country, the object of devotion and the season when the pilgrimage peaks. Every entry is expanded in a later section.

Feast dates above are the dates fixed in the liturgical calendars of the countries concerned or the traditional dates of the shrine's own romeria. Attendance at these shrines is estimated by shrine rectories, municipal governments and national police forces rather than counted at a gate, and published figures differ substantially between sources. This guide gives no attendance numbers for that reason.

3. Guadalupe and the Hill of Tepeyac

The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe stands at the foot of the hill of Tepeyac in the north of Mexico City, and it is the centre of Catholic devotion in Mexico. The tilma venerated there, a cloak of coarse fibre bearing the image of the Virgin, hangs above the altar of the modern basilica completed in 1976, with a moving walkway beneath it so that a continuous crowd can pass. Behind it stands the eighteenth century basilica, and above it on the hill the chapel of the Cerrito marks the traditional site of the encounter.

The account, preserved in the Nahuatl Nican Mopohua, places the apparitions in December 1531 and gives them to Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, an Indigenous convert, who carried Castilian roses out of season in his tilma to the bishop of Mexico. John Paul II canonised Juan Diego at the basilica on 31 July 2002. Our full treatment of the account, the image and the arguments about it lives at our guide to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the shrine itself is covered in detail at our page on visiting the Basilica of Guadalupe, and the visionary has his own page at Saint Juan Diego. This section covers only what a route planner needs.

Guadalupe functions as the hinge of the entire Mexican and Central American pilgrimage system. Diocesan groups from every Mexican state arrive on foot, by bicycle and by truck in the first twelve days of December, and the traffic includes contingents from Guatemala, El Salvador and the United States. The whole northern district of the city reorganises itself around the arrival. A pilgrim who wants the atmosphere should come then. A pilgrim who wants to pray in front of the image without moving at the pace of a walkway should come in any other month, when the same basilica is calm enough to sit in.

The Tepeyac site is a complex rather than a single church, and the parts reward an unhurried morning: the old basilica with its tilted floor, the Capilla del Pocito with its domed well, the Capilla del Cerrito at the top of the hill, the Chapel of the Indians, and the museum of ex votos. The climb up the hill is short and it is the part most rushed groups skip.

4. Mexico Beyond Tepeyac

Mexico holds a second tier of shrines that between them carry a volume of pilgrimage comparable to Guadalupe's, spread across the year and across the country. Most foreign visitors have never heard of any of them, and Mexican pilgrims organise their lives around them.

San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco

The Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos, in the Altos de Jalisco between Guadalajara and Leon, holds a small image of the Immaculate Conception made from maize paste and orchid glue, a technique Indigenous artisans of Michoacan used for light processional figures. The image is known locally as La Cihualpilli, a Nahuatl title meaning the noble lady. The devotion dates from the 1620s, when a child of travelling acrobats was reported healed after the image was laid on her, and the town has been a pilgrimage centre ever since. The heaviest arrivals fall around the feast of the Presentation in early February, and pilgrims walk in from Leon, Aguascalientes and Guadalajara along marked routes. The church was raised to the rank of minor basilica in the twentieth century.

Chalma, State of Mexico

The Sanctuary of the Lord of Chalma sits in a ravine in the municipality of Malinalco, southwest of Mexico City, and it is the second great pilgrimage of central Mexico after Tepeyac. Augustinian friars established the shrine in the sixteenth century at a cave that had been a place of Indigenous worship, and the crucifix venerated there took over the site. The approach is on foot down a steep valley. Pilgrims traditionally stop at the ahuehuete tree and its spring above the sanctuary to wash, and they wear crowns of woven flowers and dance at the entrance before going in, a custom the shrine has kept rather than suppressed. The peak weeks are in Lent, at Pentecost and in early July.

Chalma is the clearest example in Mexico of a continuity that historians argue about and pilgrims simply live: a pre-Christian sacred place that became a Christian sanctuary, with the older gestures of approach carried into the newer devotion. A visitor should treat the dancing and the flower crowns as part of the liturgy of arrival rather than as folklore laid on for spectators.

Zapopan, Guadalajara

The Basilica of Our Lady of Zapopan, in the metropolitan area of Guadalajara, holds another small maize paste image, given to the Franciscan mission in the sixteenth century and known as La Generala after the military honours conferred on her in the nineteenth century. Each year the image spends months visiting parishes across the city and is carried home to Zapopan on 12 October in a walking procession called the Romeria, which fills the avenues of Guadalajara from before dawn.

Source: UNESCO inscribed the Romeria, the cycle of festivities of the Virgin of Zapopan, on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2018. The inscription record is published on the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage website.

Ocotlan, Tlaxcala

The Basilica of Our Lady of Ocotlan crowns a hill above the city of Tlaxcala, east of Mexico City. The local tradition places the events in 1541 and gives them to an Indigenous man named Juan Diego Bernardino, who was sent to draw water for the sick during an epidemic and found the image in a burning ocote pine. The building is one of the masterpieces of Mexican baroque, and the Camarin de la Virgen behind the altar, an octagonal dressing chamber carved and gilded over decades by the Indigenous artist Francisco Miguel, is the reason art historians travel there. Tlaxcala also holds the sixteenth century Franciscan convent of the Assumption, one of the oldest in the Americas.

Juquila, Oaxaca

The sanctuary of Our Lady of Juquila, in the Sierra Sur of Oaxaca, holds an image barely thirty centimetres tall that the devotion says survived a fire that destroyed the village of Amialtepec in the seventeenth century. Oaxacan pilgrims walk to Juquila from Oaxaca city and from the coast, a hard mountain route, with the heaviest movement around 8 December. Pilgrims traditionally stop at El Pedimento on the way, a hillside where they shape small figures out of clay to represent the thing they are asking for. The road in is winding and the town is small.

Plateros, Zacatecas

The sanctuary of the Santo Nino de Atocha at Plateros, outside Fresnillo in Zacatecas, is the centre of a devotion to the Christ child as a pilgrim in a broad hat, carrying a basket and a staff, which came to Mexico from the Spanish shrine of Atocha in Madrid. Plateros is famous for its ex voto paintings, small painted panels left by pilgrims to record a rescue from a mine collapse, an illness, a car crash or a border crossing, hung in a room beside the church. As a record of what ordinary Mexicans have actually prayed for over two centuries, the retablo room is one of the great records of Mexican popular devotion.

Cristo Rey del Cubilete, Guanajuato

The Cerro del Cubilete, a hill near Silao in Guanajuato, carries a monumental bronze statue of Christ the King with two angels at his feet. The first monument on the summit was destroyed by government order in 1928 during the conflict between the Mexican state and the Church, and the present statue was raised in the middle of the twentieth century after the settlement. The site is a working sanctuary with a basilica beneath the statue, and it doubles as a memorial of the Cristero period. The view over the Bajio from the summit is the reason many Mexican families make the drive.

Santa Ana de Guadalupe and Saint Toribio Romo

Santa Ana de Guadalupe, a hamlet in the Altos de Jalisco, holds the remains of Saint Toribio Romo Gonzalez, a diocesan priest shot on 25 February 1928 during the persecution of the Church in Mexico. John Paul II canonised him on 21 May 2000 with Cristobal Magallanes Jara and twenty four companions, most of them priests killed in the same years. Toribio Romo has become the patron invoked by Mexican migrants crossing into the United States, and the shrine at Santa Ana is full of testimonies left by people who credit his intercession with a safe crossing. The village is small and the visit is quiet, and it sits close enough to San Juan de los Lagos to be joined to the same day.

5. Brazil: Aparecida, Congonhas, Belem and Trindade

Brazil has more Catholics than any other country, and its pilgrimage map is dominated by one national shrine with three very different regional centres behind it. Distances in Brazil are continental, and a pilgrim should plan around one region rather than around the country.

Aparecida, Sao Paulo state

The National Shrine of Our Lady Aparecida stands in the Paraiba valley between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, on the main highway between the two cities. The account is simple and well documented in the local records: in 1717 three fishermen working the Paraiba do Sul river ahead of a visit by the governor drew up first the body and then the head of a small dark terracotta image of the Immaculate Conception, and afterwards filled their nets. The image was kept in a fisherman's house, then in a chapel, then in the basilica of the eighteenth century, and finally in the vast modern basilica consecrated in stages from the 1980s, one of the largest churches in the world by capacity.

Pius XI declared Our Lady Aparecida the principal patroness of Brazil in 1930, and 12 October is a national holiday. The shrine has twice been the setting for events of continental weight. Benedict XVI opened the fifth general conference of the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean there in May 2007, and the concluding text is known everywhere as the Aparecida Document. Pope Francis prayed at the shrine in July 2013 at the beginning of World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, the first journey of his pontificate.

The complex is designed for volume: a basilica with multiple altars, a separate chapel for confessions with priests in many languages, a large open plaza, and an approach for pilgrims arriving on foot from the surrounding towns. The devotion around the image is intensely national. Pilgrims bring football shirts, wedding photographs, school certificates and medical scans, and the room of promises holds them.

Congonhas, Minas Gerais

The Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos at Congonhas, in the mining country of Minas Gerais south of Belo Horizonte, is one of the great Passion sanctuaries of the Americas. A Portuguese immigrant, Feliciano Mendes, founded it in the eighteenth century in fulfilment of a vow after an illness, bringing the devotion to the Good Jesus of Matosinhos from northern Portugal. The terrace in front of the church carries twelve figures of the Old Testament prophets carved in soapstone by Antonio Francisco Lisboa, called Aleijadinho, and six chapels on the slope below hold sixty six polychrome cedar figures staging the scenes of the Passion.

Source: UNESCO inscribed the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Congonhas on the World Heritage List in 1985. The inscription record is published on the UNESCO World Heritage Centre website.

Congonhas rewards a slow walk down through the chapels in order, which is how the sanctuary was designed to be prayed. The town is small and sits within reach of Ouro Preto and Mariana, which makes a three day Minas circuit natural.

Belem and the Cirio de Nazare

The Basilica Sanctuary of Our Lady of Nazareth in Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon, is the centre of one of the largest Marian processions in Brazil. The devotion follows a Portuguese original from Nazare on the Atlantic coast, and the local account tells of a woodsman, Placido, who found the small image on a creek bank in the eighteenth century and repeatedly found it returned there after carrying it home. The Cirio, the procession that carries the image through the city, takes place on the second Sunday of October, and the rope that pilgrims grip along the route is the defining image of the day.

Source: UNESCO inscribed the Cirio de Nazare, the feast of Our Lady of Nazareth in Belem, on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013. The inscription record is published on the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage website.

Trindade, Goias

The Basilica of the Divine Eternal Father at Trindade, just outside Goiania in the central plateau, is one of the largest pilgrimages of Brazil's interior. The devotion began in the nineteenth century with a small medallion found by a farming couple showing the Trinity crowning the Virgin, and the Romaria do Divino Pai Eterno, held at the start of July, brings pilgrims in on foot, on horseback and in ox carts along the old road from Goiania. The devotion to God the Father under this title is distinctively Brazilian and has no close European parallel.

6. Juazeiro do Norte and Padre Cicero

Juazeiro do Norte, in the Cariri region of Ceara in Brazil's northeast, draws pilgrims in numbers that rival the country's approved shrines, and the man at the centre of it has never been beatified. Padre Cicero Romao Batista, who died in 1934, remains the object of a popular devotion that the Catholic Church has not approved, and any honest guide has to say so plainly before describing the place.

The history is contested and the outline is clear. In 1889 a beata of the town, Maria de Araujo, received communion from Padre Cicero and the host was reported to have turned to blood. The reports spread, pilgrims arrived, and the ecclesiastical investigations that followed went against the priest. He was suspended from the exercise of his ministry, the events were rejected by the authorities who examined them, and his later career took a political turn as the effective leader of a town that had grown up around him. The diocese of Crato has in recent years pursued a reconciliation of his memory, and the Church has issued no beatification, no canonisation and no approval of the events of 1889.

What stands in Juazeiro today is a statue of Padre Cicero on the Horto hill, a chapel, his tomb, and a landscape of romarias that fill the town several times a year, with the largest movements clustered around Candlemas at the start of February and around All Souls in early November. Pilgrims from across the sertao arrive in trucks, wearing hats and carrying banners, and the devotion is woven into the culture of the entire northeast.

7. Argentina: Lujan, San Nicolas, Itati and Cura Brochero

Argentina's pilgrimage life centres on Lujan, about seventy kilometres west of Buenos Aires, and it includes one of the very few Latin American apparition cases carrying a formal diocesan declaration.

Lujan, Buenos Aires province

The Basilica of Our Lady of Lujan holds a small terracotta image of the Immaculate Conception, about forty centimetres tall, brought from Brazil in 1630 for a chapel in Santiago del Estero. The account says the ox cart carrying it stopped at a point on the Lujan river and would not move until the crate holding the image was unloaded, and the image stayed. Our Lady of Lujan is honoured as the patroness of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, the image was solemnly crowned in 1887, and the neo-gothic basilica was built around the shrine over the following decades.

The great event of the Lujan year is the youth pilgrimage from the Buenos Aires district of Liniers, an overnight walk of about sixty kilometres held on the first weekend of October. Very large numbers take part, walking through the night with parish groups and arriving through the following morning. The walk is the reason Lujan matters in Argentine life, and it is open to anyone willing to do it.

San Nicolas de los Arroyos

San Nicolas de los Arroyos, on the Parana river north of Buenos Aires, is the site of reported apparitions of Our Lady of the Rosary to Gladys Quiroga de Motta beginning on 25 September 1983. A sanctuary was built and pilgrimage grew steadily through the following decades. On 22 May 2016 the bishop of San Nicolas, Hector Cardelli, issued a declaration recognising the supernatural character of the events, a judgement made under the procedure in force before 2024.

That makes San Nicolas one of a small number of modern Latin American cases with an explicit episcopal declaration behind it. It is worth stating carefully what such a declaration does and does not do. It permits and encourages public devotion, it states the local bishop's judgement that the message contains nothing contrary to faith and morals and that the phenomena bear the marks of divine action, and it leaves the faithful free. No apparition, approved or otherwise, forms part of the deposit of faith, and no Catholic is obliged to believe any of them. Our page on how the Church judges Marian apparitions sets out the full framework, including the 2024 norms that changed the procedure for every case opened since.

Itati, Corrientes

The Basilica of Our Lady of Itati stands on the Parana river in the province of Corrientes, in Argentina's Guarani northeast. The wooden image dates from the era of the Franciscan reductions at the end of the sixteenth century, and it is the great shrine of the littoral provinces, with pilgrims arriving by river as well as by road. The image was solemnly crowned in 1900. The devotion is bilingual, and the Guarani language is used in the shrine's hymns and prayers alongside Spanish.

Villa Cura Brochero, Cordoba

Villa Cura Brochero, in the Traslasierra valley west of Cordoba, holds the tomb of Saint Jose Gabriel del Rosario Brochero, the gaucho priest who spent his ministry riding the sierras of Cordoba on a mule, building roads and schools, taking groups of country people across the mountains to make the Spiritual Exercises, and who died in 1914 having contracted leprosy from those he served. Pope Francis beatified him in September 2013 and canonised him on 16 October 2016. His tomb is in the parish church of the town that carries his name, and the surrounding valley preserves the routes he rode.

8. Bolivia and Ecuador: Copacabana, El Quinche and Quito

The Andean shrines of Bolivia and Ecuador sit at altitudes that shape the pilgrimage itself, and both countries organise their devotional year around a single Marian sanctuary outside the capital.

Copacabana, Lake Titicaca

The Basilica of Our Lady of Copacabana stands on the Bolivian shore of Lake Titicaca at around 3,800 metres, on a peninsula that was a sacred site long before the Spanish arrived. The image is documented in a way few colonial images are: it was carved by an Indigenous artist, Francisco Tito Yupanqui, said to be of Inca descent, who taught himself sculpture in Potosi after his first attempt was rejected, and completed the figure of the Virgin of the Candelaria in 1583. The shrine has been served by Augustinians and the church is a white Renaissance and mudejar building with a broad walled atrium.

Our Lady of Copacabana is honoured as patroness of Bolivia and the image was solemnly crowned in the 1920s. The pilgrimage peaks at the beginning of February for the feast of the Candelaria and again in early August around Bolivian independence, when pilgrims walk from La Paz. The best known custom outside the church is the blessing of vehicles on the atrium, where drivers decorate cars and trucks with flowers and ribbons and a priest blesses them. Treat that as what it is: a blessing asking God's protection for people who drive dangerous mountain roads for a living. The lake itself, with the Isla del Sol offshore, gives the place a quiet that most great shrines lack.

El Quinche, Ecuador

The Sanctuary of Our Lady of El Quinche, in a valley northeast of Quito near the airport, is the national Marian shrine of Ecuador. The image was carved at the end of the sixteenth century by Diego de Robles, the Spanish sculptor who supplied several Andean shrines, and was placed at El Quinche after an earlier community could not pay for it. The great pilgrimage falls on 21 November, and large numbers of Ecuadorians walk through the night from Quito and the surrounding valleys to arrive at dawn, a walk that has grown steadily and that closes the roads.

Quito

Quito itself is a pilgrimage destination for its colonial churches and for two saints. The church of La Compania, the Jesuit church with a gilded interior of remarkable density, holds the remains of Saint Mariana de Jesus de Paredes, the Lily of Quito, a laywoman who lived a hidden life of penance in her family's house and died in 1645, canonised in 1950 and honoured as a national patroness. San Francisco, the vast Franciscan complex begun within a few years of the Spanish foundation of the city, is one of the oldest religious houses in South America. The Basilica del Voto Nacional, a late neo-gothic church, carries gargoyles shaped as Ecuadorian animals.

Also in Quito is the shrine of the Dolorosa del Colegio, connected with the events of 20 April 1906 at the Jesuit Colegio San Gabriel, when a group of boarding students reported that the eyes of a print of the Sorrowful Mother in the refectory opened and closed. The devotion that followed became national, and the image is honoured across Ecuador.

Source: UNESCO inscribed the City of Quito on the World Heritage List in 1978, in the first group of sites inscribed anywhere. The inscription record is published on the UNESCO World Heritage Centre website.

9. Colombia and Venezuela: Las Lajas, Chiquinquira, Buga, Monserrate and Coromoto

Colombia has four shrines of national weight, and one of them is built across a river gorge on a stone arch. Venezuela's national shrine sits in the plains at Guanare.

Las Lajas, Ipiales

The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Las Lajas stands in the gorge of the Guaitara river near Ipiales in the department of Narino, close to the Ecuadorian border. The church bridges the canyon on a stone arch and is built against the rock face, and the reason for the position is that the image is on the rock itself. The local tradition places the origin in 1754 with an Indigenous woman, Maria Mueses de Quinones, and her daughter Rosa, who was deaf and mute and who is said to have spoken at the rock during a storm. The present neo-gothic sanctuary was built between 1916 and 1949 by public subscription, largely from small donations from the region.

Las Lajas is a minor basilica and public devotion there has been permitted and encouraged for generations. The Church has issued no decree on the origin of the image on the stone, and the shrine does not depend on one. The bridge over the gorge is lined with plaques left by pilgrims recording thanksgivings, going back more than a century. Pilgrims from Ecuador cross the border in large numbers, particularly in September.

Chiquinquira, Boyaca

The Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary of Chiquinquira, in the highlands of Boyaca north of Bogota, holds a painted canvas by Alonso de Narvaez, made in the sixteenth century on rough cotton cloth. The canvas faded and was set aside, and the devotion begins with the account of its sudden restoration of colour in 1586 while a woman named Maria Ramos prayed before it. Our Lady of Chiquinquira is honoured as patroness of Colombia, the image was solemnly crowned in the early twentieth century in the presence of the national authorities, and the shrine is served by Dominicans. The pilgrimage weeks fall in early July and around the feast at the end of December.

Buga, Valle del Cauca

The Basilica of the Lord of Miracles at Buga, in the Cauca valley between Cali and Armenia, is one of the largest pilgrimages of western Colombia. The account tells of an Indigenous washerwoman who found a small crucifix in the Guadalajara river after giving away the money she had saved to free a man from prison, and of the figure growing in her house. The Redemptorists have served the shrine since the nineteenth century, and the basilica draws pilgrims from across the country and from Ecuador, with the heaviest arrivals in September and at the September feast.

Monserrate, Bogota

The sanctuary of Monserrate stands on the mountain directly above the centre of Bogota, at about 3,150 metres, and the object of devotion is a sculpture of the Fallen Christ, Christ collapsed under the cross. The name and the original foundation follow the Benedictine shrine of Montserrat in Catalonia. Pilgrims climb the stone path from the city, a long and steep stone stairway, and the traditional day for it is Friday and especially the Fridays of Lent, when the path fills from before dawn. A funicular and a cable car also serve the summit. Bogota lies below, and the climb is one of the city's habitual acts of public penance.

Coromoto, Guanare, Venezuela

The National Shrine of Our Lady of Coromoto stands outside Guanare in the Venezuelan plains, at the place where the tradition sets an encounter between the Virgin and the cacique Coromoto of the Cospes people around 1651 and 1652, at the end of which a tiny image was found in the chief's hut. That relic image, a few centimetres across, is kept at the shrine. Pius XII declared Our Lady of Coromoto patroness of Venezuela in 1942, the image was solemnly crowned in 1952, and John Paul II visited Guanare and consecrated the modern shrine church in 1996. The feast is kept in Venezuela on 11 September, and the account of the encounter is associated with 8 September.

10. Peru: Lima's Saints and the Snow Star Pilgrimage

Peru's pilgrimage life has two poles. Colonial Lima produced a cluster of canonised saints whose shrines sit within a few blocks of one another, and the mountains above Cusco hold one of the highest pilgrimages in the Catholic world.

The Lord of the Miracles, Lima

The devotion to the Senor de los Milagros begins with a wall in the Pachacamilla district of colonial Lima, where an enslaved man from Angola painted an image of the crucified Christ in the seventeenth century. The wall survived the earthquake of 1655 that destroyed the buildings around it, and again the earthquake of 1687, and the devotion grew from those survivals. A copy of the image is carried through Lima in October in a procession that lasts for hours and repeats over several days, with the confraternity carrying the litter in purple habits. Purple clothing is worn across the city through the month. The image is kept at the church of Las Nazarenas.

The saints of Lima

Four canonised saints of the same city and the same generation are venerated within walking distance of the Plaza Mayor. Saint Rose of Lima, the first canonised saint of the Americas, lived as a Dominican tertiary in her family's garden in the city and died in 1617; the sanctuary built around her family house preserves the hermitage she made and the well into which pilgrims still drop written petitions, and her relics are venerated at the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo. Our page on Saint Rose of Lima covers her life and her spirituality in full.

Saint Martin de Porres, the Dominican lay brother, son of a Spanish nobleman and a freed African woman, worked as the infirmarian of the same Santo Domingo convent and died in 1639. His relics are venerated there, and the convent is the natural place to pray for the sick and for the healing of racial division in the Church. Our page on Saint Martin de Porres gives his life and the acts of his canonisation.

Saint Juan Macias, another Dominican lay brother of the same city and years, is venerated at the convent of Santa Maria Magdalena. Saint Toribio de Mogrovejo, archbishop of Lima, who confirmed Rose and Martin and who spent years on visitation across the viceroyalty on foot and on mule, is venerated in the cathedral. A morning in the historic centre of Lima can take in all four.

Qoyllur Rit'i

The pilgrimage of the Lord of Qoyllur Rit'i, the Snow Star, climbs into the Sinakara valley below the Ausangate glaciers in the Quispicanchi province of the Cusco region, at altitudes above 4,500 metres. The object of devotion is a crucifix painted on a rock, and the account behind it involves a shepherd boy and a mysterious companion in the eighteenth century. Communities from across the southern Andes arrive in ordered groups called naciones, each with its own dancers and musicians, and men in the woollen masks of the ukuku, who hold a policing and penitential role, climb to the glacier through the night. The pilgrimage falls in the days before Corpus Christi, which means late May or June depending on the year.

Source: UNESCO inscribed the pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the Lord of Qoyllurit'i on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2011. The inscription record is published on the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage website.

Qoyllur Rit'i is the hardest pilgrimage in this guide and it is not a sightseeing trip. The camp is at extreme altitude, the nights are far below freezing, there is no infrastructure, and acclimatisation in Cusco for several days beforehand is a basic requirement. Go with an Andean parish or community group or do not go.

11. Paraguay, Chile and Uruguay

The southern countries each hold one shrine that gathers the nation and a set of smaller sanctuaries that carry the regional devotion.

Caacupe, Paraguay

The Basilica of Our Lady of the Miracles of Caacupe, about fifty kilometres east of Asuncion, is the religious centre of Paraguay. The account attributes the carving of the image to a Guarani convert named Jose, who is said to have hidden from an enemy party behind a tree and carved two figures from its wood in thanksgiving, the larger of which was later found after a flood of Lake Ypacarai. The blue-mantled figure is known affectionately across the country as the Virgencita azul. The great pilgrimage is on 8 December, when pilgrims walk the road from Asuncion through the night, and the modern basilica and its plaza were built to hold that crowd. John Paul II visited the shrine in 1988.

Chile

Chile's best known walking pilgrimage goes to the sanctuary of Lo Vasquez, on the road between Santiago and Valparaiso, where pilgrims walk through the night to arrive for 8 December, and the highway is closed to traffic to let them pass. In the north, the sanctuary of Andacollo in the Coquimbo region holds an image of Our Lady of the Rosary served by confraternities of dancers whose brotherhoods go back to the colonial period, with the great festival at the end of December. In the south, the shrine of Saint Sebastian at Yumbel in the Biobio region draws its own large January pilgrimage. Auco, in the Rinconada de Los Andes, holds the shrine of Saint Teresa of the Andes, the Carmelite who died in 1920 at the age of nineteen and who was canonised in 1993 as the first Chilean saint. The northern desert also holds La Tirana, whose July festival is danced by brotherhoods in costume.

Uruguay

Uruguay's public life is markedly more secular than that of its neighbours, and its principal shrine is at Verdun, near Minas in the department of Lavalleja, where a hillside sanctuary of the Virgin draws a large pilgrimage in April. The cathedral of Florida holds the image of the Virgin of the Thirty Three, honoured as patroness of Uruguay under a title taken from the patriots who placed their independence campaign under her protection. John Paul II crowned that image during his visit in 1988.

12. Central America: Esquipulas, Suyapa, Cartago, Portobelo and Cuapa

Central America's shrines cross borders more freely than its politics does, and Esquipulas in particular draws pilgrims from every country in the isthmus and from southern Mexico.

Esquipulas, Guatemala

The Basilica of Esquipulas stands in eastern Guatemala near the point where the borders of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador meet. The Black Christ is a crucifix carved at the end of the sixteenth century by the colonial sculptor Quirio Catano in balsam and orange wood, which darkened with age and with the smoke of candles. The white basilica with its four corner towers was built in the eighteenth century, and the image is reached by a passage behind the high altar, which pilgrims traverse without turning their backs on it.

Esquipulas is the great crossroads shrine of Central America. The heaviest arrivals are in mid January, and pilgrims come from Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Belize and Chiapas. Pilgrims traditionally take home small tablets of blessed white clay from the region, a custom with medieval European parallels. The devotion travelled north with Central American migration, and the sanctuary of Chimayo in New Mexico, one of the most heavily walked pilgrimages in the United States, venerates a related image of the Christ of Esquipulas. The church was raised to the rank of minor basilica in the twentieth century.

Suyapa, Honduras

The Basilica of Our Lady of Suyapa, on the eastern edge of Tegucigalpa, holds an image about six centimetres tall, carved in cedar, which the account says was found in 1747 by a farm labourer, Alejandro Colindres, who slept on it in a field and could not throw it away. Pius XI declared Our Lady of Suyapa patroness of Honduras in the 1920s, the older colonial church beside the modern basilica still holds the image for most of the year, and the feast is kept on 3 February. The image is carried to the large basilica for the feast and returned afterwards.

Cartago, Costa Rica

The Basilica of Our Lady of the Angels at Cartago, the old colonial capital of Costa Rica, holds La Negrita, a small dark stone image of the Virgin and Child that the tradition says a mixed-race girl named Juana Pereira found on a rock in 1635 and which repeatedly returned to the rock after being carried away. The church is built over that rock, and a spring beneath it draws pilgrims who collect water. Our Lady of the Angels is patroness of Costa Rica and the feast is 2 August. The Romeria, the walk from San Jose to Cartago of about twenty two kilometres, is made overnight on 1 August by very large numbers of Costa Ricans, and many pilgrims cover the last stretch inside the basilica on their knees.

Portobelo, Panama

The church of San Felipe at Portobelo, on Panama's Caribbean coast, holds the Black Christ, a dark wooden figure of Christ carrying the cross, known as El Nazareno. The image arrived by sea in the colonial period and the accounts of how differ. The pilgrimage falls on 21 October, when pilgrims arrive wearing purple robes, some walking the last kilometres from Sabanitas and some covering the final stretch on their knees, and the image is carried through the ruins of the old Spanish port after dark. The devotion has a strong penitential character and draws a very mixed crowd.

Cuapa, Nicaragua

Cuapa, in the department of Chontales in central Nicaragua, is the site of apparitions of the Virgin reported by a sacristan, Bernardo Martinez, in 1980, with messages centred on the rosary, peace and conversion at the outset of a period of civil conflict. The bishop of Juigalpa gave a favourable judgement on the case in 1982, and a sanctuary was built at the site. Nicaragua's wider Marian life centres on the Purisima, the December celebration of the Immaculate Conception, and on the colonial image of Our Lady of El Viejo in Chinandega.

13. The Caribbean: El Cobre and Higuey

The Spanish-speaking Caribbean holds two national shrines with long papal histories and one of them sits at the heart of Cuban identity on the island and in exile.

El Cobre, Cuba

The Basilica of Our Lady of Charity stands in the old copper-mining village of El Cobre in the hills above Santiago de Cuba. The account, recorded in a deposition taken in the seventeenth century from one of the men involved, tells of two Indigenous brothers and an enslaved African boy, remembered as the three Juans, who found a small image of the Virgin floating on a board in the Bay of Nipe around 1612 while gathering salt, with an inscription naming her as Our Lady of Charity. The image was enshrined at El Cobre, where the copper workers had staged one of the earliest successful struggles for freedom in the Spanish Caribbean.

Benedict XV declared Our Lady of Charity patroness of Cuba in 1916, at the petition of veterans of the wars of independence, and the image was solemnly crowned in the 1930s. John Paul II crowned the image again during his visit to Cuba in 1998, and Benedict XVI prayed at the shrine in 2012 during the four hundredth anniversary year. The church holds a dense collection of ex votos, including objects left by Cubans who left the island by sea. The Cuban emigration built a parallel shrine in Miami, and the two are connected in the devotional life of one people.

Higuey, Dominican Republic

The Basilica of Our Lady of Altagracia at Higuey, in the east of the Dominican Republic, is the national shrine of the country and the centre of one of the oldest continuous Marian devotions in the Americas, documented from the early sixteenth century. The painted image of the Virgin adoring the Child is kept behind the high altar of a basilica completed in 1971, a modernist building whose facade is a single soaring concrete arch. The national pilgrimage is on 21 January, when Dominicans arrive through the night, and the day is a public holiday. The image was solemnly crowned in the 1920s, and John Paul II crowned it again in 1992 during the commemorations of five hundred years of evangelisation in the Americas.

Puerto Rico's own principal shrine is at Hormigueros, on the west of the island, where the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Montserrat sits on a hill above the town and holds a colonial devotion brought from Catalonia.

14. Romero's Tomb and the Martyr Shrines

Latin America's twentieth century produced martyrs, and their tombs have become pilgrimage sites of a different kind from the Marian shrines. The best known of them is in San Salvador.

San Salvador, El Salvador

Saint Oscar Arnulfo Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, was shot on 24 March 1980 while celebrating Mass in the chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia, a cancer hospital where he lived in a small house in the grounds rather than in the archiepiscopal residence. He had spent the previous three years documenting killings and disappearances in his Sunday homilies, broadcast on the diocesan radio, during the descent into the Salvadoran civil war. Pope Francis beatified him in San Salvador on 23 May 2015 and canonised him in Rome on 14 October 2018, and his feast is kept on 24 March.

The pilgrimage in San Salvador has three parts. His tomb lies in the crypt of the Metropolitan Cathedral on the central plaza, beneath a bronze monument, and the crypt is open. The chapel of the Divina Providencia hospital, where he was shot, is preserved, and the small house beside it is kept as he left it, with his hammock, his books, his vestments and the shirt he was wearing. The Central American University holds the memorial of the six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter killed on the campus in November 1989, with a rose garden planted where they died.

Blessed Rutilio Grande, the Jesuit parish priest of Aguilares killed with two companions in March 1977, whose death is widely credited with sharpening Romero's own course, was beatified in San Salvador in January 2022. His grave is in the church at El Paisnal. The events these places record are recent, contested in Salvadoran politics, and treated by the Church as martyrdom in hatred of the faith.

The Mexican martyrs

Mexico's persecution of the 1920s left its own shrines. Saint Cristobal Magallanes Jara and twenty four companions, canonised on 21 May 2000, are venerated in their home parishes across Jalisco and Zacatecas, with Santa Ana de Guadalupe and Totatiche the best known. Blessed Miguel Agustin Pro, the Jesuit executed by firing squad in Mexico City in November 1927, was beatified in 1988, and his remains rest in the church of the Holy Family in the Roma district of Mexico City, a short walk from the centre.

Our page on the Catholic understanding of saints and their intercession explains what veneration at a martyr's tomb is and is not, and Catholic social teaching sets out the doctrine these men were applying when they were killed.

15. What the Church Has and Has Not Declared

Very few Latin American shrines rest on a Church decree adjudicating an apparition, and almost all of them rest on something else: established devotion, papal declarations of patronage, solemn coronation of an image, and the granting of basilica rank. Understanding that distinction keeps a pilgrim from repeating claims the Church has never made.

On 17 May 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published the Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, replacing the norms in force since 1978. Under them the competent authority ordinarily makes no declaration that a phenomenon is supernatural. The document sets out six possible conclusions: nihil obstat, prae oculis habeatur, curatur, sub mandato, prohibetur et obstruitur, and declaratio de non supernaturalitate. The favourable outcome is the first of them, a nihil obstat, which permits and encourages public devotion and pilgrimage while leaving the question of supernatural origin open.

Source: Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, approved by Pope Francis and published 17 May 2024, available in full on vatican.va. The six conclusions above are the document's own headings, translated.

Those norms govern cases judged since 2024. They do not reopen or annul earlier judgements, and the older acts behind the Latin American shrines differ from one another. Four broad categories cover the region.

Guadalupe is the case that shows why the first category is the strongest of them in practice. No decree ever adjudicated the events of 1531. What exists instead is Benedict XIV granting the feast a proper Mass and Office in 1754, a solemn coronation of the image in 1895, patronage declarations reaching across the Americas, and the canonisation of Juan Diego by John Paul II on 31 July 2002, an act that presupposes the sanctity of the man at the centre of the account. Approval is not always a document.

Two more points belong here. First, no apparition, however solidly approved, forms part of the deposit of faith, and the Catechism teaches that private revelations do not complete or correct the definitive revelation of Christ (CCC 67). Second, images and shrines that carry no Church judgement at all circulate widely in Latin America, in printed novena booklets and on social media, and the safe rule is to check what the local diocese actually says rather than what a devotional page claims. Our page on approved Marian apparitions and the Church's 2024 norms sets out the whole framework, case by case, including Lourdes, Fatima, Kibeho, Akita and Medjugorje.

16. Planning a Latin American Pilgrimage

The single biggest planning mistake is treating Latin America as one destination. The distances are continental, the shrines are national, and a route that tries to link Mexico City, Lima and Aparecida in two weeks becomes an airport itinerary with prayer squeezed into the gaps. Pick one country, or two neighbours, and work them.

Routes that hold together

Central Mexico gives the most compact circuit in this guide. Mexico City gives Tepeyac, the cathedral, Miguel Pro's grave and the churches of the centre; Tlaxcala and Ocotlan are two hours east; Chalma is two hours southwest; and the Bajio cities of Queretaro, Guanajuato and Leon put Cubilete, San Juan de los Lagos and Santa Ana de Guadalupe within reach on the same loop. Ten days covers it without hurry.

The Andean corridor from Bogota south is the second strong route: Bogota with Monserrate, then Chiquinquira north in Boyaca, then a long run south to Ipiales for Las Lajas, and across the border to El Quinche and Quito. Add Copacabana only if you are already going to Bolivia, because Lake Titicaca is a separate trip.

The River Plate route joins Lujan and Buenos Aires with San Nicolas up the Parana, and continues northeast to Itati in Corrientes and across to Caacupe in Paraguay, with the Jesuit and Franciscan reduction ruins of Misiones and southern Paraguay along the way. That is a mission history pilgrimage as much as a Marian one.

Central America works as a single overland journey from Guatemala through Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, with Esquipulas, Suyapa, San Salvador, Cuapa and Cartago strung along it. Security conditions vary sharply by country and by year and should be checked against current government advice rather than against a guide page.

Feast weeks and quiet weeks

Decide before you book which of the two experiences you want. A shrine on its feast is a different place: the crowd is the point, the liturgy runs continuously, and confession lines are long and moving. The same shrine in an ordinary week gives you an empty nave, an unhurried hour in front of the image, and a sacristan willing to talk. Most pilgrims are better served by the quiet week and one feast somewhere along the route.

Altitude, weather and health

Copacabana sits near 3,800 metres, Quito near 2,850, Bogota near 2,640, and the Qoyllur Rit'i camp above 4,500. Altitude sickness is a common reason an Andean pilgrimage goes wrong, and the remedy is time: several days at intermediate altitude before any exertion. In tropical lowland shrines like Higuey, Belem, Portobelo and Guanare, the heat and the rain season shape the day more than anything else, and the processions are held after dark for that reason.

Language and liturgy

Mass will be in Spanish or Portuguese, and at Itati, Caacupe, Qoyllur Rit'i and many Andean and Guarani shrines the hymns and popular prayers will be in Guarani, Quechua or Aymara. Learn the responses in Spanish or Portuguese before you go and you can pray the Mass anywhere in the region. Our page on the structure and meaning of the Mass gives the shape of the liturgy you will be following.

One final practical caution. Nothing in this guide carries opening hours, ticket prices, transport times or entry rules, because shrines change them, they differ between the feast and the ordinary week, and a page cannot keep them true. Take the times from the sanctuary's own published information in the week before you travel, and build each day around a Mass rather than around a viewing. If travel is out of reach entirely, our page on making a virtual pilgrimage covers what can be prayed from home and what a spiritual pilgrimage actually consists of.

17. Frequently Asked Questions