TARGET 091111

A Legend - True or Not?
Part 2: The Present Day Location



The Canyon

Las Lajas Sanctuary (in Spanish: "Santuario de Las Lajas") is a basilica church located in the southern Colombian Department of Nariņo, municipality of Ipiales. The name Laja comes from the name of a type of flat sedimentary rock (similar to floor tiles) found in the Andes Mountains.

The cathedral is of Gothic revival architecture and although it is not known about by many people outside of Columbia, it is one of the most beautiful Catholic cathedrals in the Western hemisphere.

Detail

The details of its archetecture rival that of any cathedral in Rome.

It was built from January 1, 1916 to August 20, 1949, with donations from local churchgoers, replacing an old nineteenth-century chapel.

How it came to be

The Image

There is a highly documented legend that the above image of the Virgin Mary was discovered in a small cave, here. It was discovered by a young dumb mute who, upon seeing it for the first time, began to speak.

When you see the image, your first reaction is to believe that it is manmade. But it has been tested by reputable scientists, both Catholic and non-Catholic, from universities and Rome, who have found that the image and its colors go deeply into the stone and test out to be natural. No method is presently known for such deep coloration and mineralization of stone, as this image tests out to have, nor was any such method believed to have been known back in the mid 1700's.

The altar

The image today is surrounded by an alter.

The reason for the cathedral's creation is that in 1754 an Amerindian named Maria Mueces de Quinones and her deaf-mute daughter Rosa were caught in a very strong storm. They found refuge between the gigantic Lajas, and to Maria Mueces's surprise, Rosa exclaimed "the mestiza is calling me..." and pointed to the lightning-illuminated 'painting' over the laja. The oldest account was recorded in the accounts of Fray Juan de Santa Gertrudis's voyage through the southern region of the New Kingdom of Granada between 1756 and 1762.

In 1951 the Roman Catholic Church authorized the Nuestra Seņora de Las Lajas virgin, and it declared the sanctuary a minor basilica in 1954.

FEEDBACK MAP

Feedback map

For more information about the cathedral and the legend, please see the following web sites...

Wikipedia
A review
IPI Times article
A multitude of pictures of the sanctuary
or do an internet search for "Las Lajas Sanctuary"

Many thanks to Dennis Streetman for suggesting this (and last week's) target.