The walls of the room just outside this chapel are covered with the canes and crutches of those who have been healed here at Chimayó. Pilgrims touch it reverently to their heads and limbs, sometimes gathering a bit of it in a plastic bag, before moving on to make room for a few more of the thousands who wait their turn. It is said to be healing earth, tierra bendita. On the floor is an open pit of earth just over a foot wide. Here pilgrims enter only two or three at a time, ducking through a low doorway. The final destination of these pilgrims, however, is not the church sanctuary but a small chapel adjacent to the sanctuary. They offer prayers, light candles, and receive words of blessing. Today’s Good Friday pilgrims wait for hours to make their way into the sanctuary of this simple, adobe church. Hispanic Americans and Native Americans have been coming to Chimayó on pilgrimage for over a century. The astonished villagers took this as a sign to build a church, which was completed around 1815. Once more the villager found it in the earth at Chimayó. He brought the cross to his local church, but the cross disappeared. According to legend, on a Good Friday early in the 1800s, a villager found a cross buried in the earth at Chimayó. Then it became part of the world of early Spanish Catholicism. The Pueblo Native Americans of this region have long known Chimayó to be a sacred place of healing, famous for its restorative mud springs. It is sometimes referred to as the “Lourdes of the Southwest,” after the healing shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in southern France. It is estimated that more than 60,000 pilgrims come to Chimayó during Easter week, making this the largest ritual pilgrimage in the United States.Ĭhimayó is a place of healing. A few pilgrims walk more than seventy miles, all the way from Albuquerque.

Some walk only seven miles from Española while others walk thirty miles from Santa Fe. Each year during the week before Easter, the secondary roads winding through these hills toward Chimayó are filled with pilgrims. The Santuario de Chimayó is an adobe church nestled in the dusty hills of New Mexico, north of Santa Fe.

El santuario de la tierra pdf