The Virgen del Cerro apparitions of Tres Cerritos, Salta

Salta, Argentina, early 1990. María Livia Galliano de Obeid, a housewife from Orán with three children, began to hear a voice inside her. It presented itself as the Mother of God. She said it spoke very beautifully and changed her heart. Her first question was simple: "¿Me recibes en tu casa?"

Then came the sight. She felt a force that put her on her knees. She raised her head, and in the middle of an immense light appeared a young girl of about 14. She had large, deep, clear blue eyes and wore a white dress, a blue mantle and a white veil, her arms and hands held out downward. The girl stood barefoot on a white cloud, a few centimetres above the ground.

She came to be known as the Inmaculada Madre del Divino Corazón Eucarístico de Jesús. In 1995 a message came for the Discalced Carmelite nuns of the Monasterio San Bernardo: "Hijita, lleva este mensaje a tus hermanas carmelitas."

In 2000 she went public and said the Virgin wanted a shrine on the hill. On 1 May 2001 a cross was placed on the second of three hills above Tres Cerritos. That August devotees carried the building materials up on their backs for a chapel. On 8 December 2001 a statue carved from her description was enthroned. She kneels, a rosary hanging from her hands.

The crowds came. About 3,000 every Saturday by 2007, up to 15,000 at major feasts. After the noon rosary she walked among the pilgrims and touched their shoulders or heads. "Muchos se desmayaban." Volunteers caught them as they fell.

A woman from Buenos Aires felt as if she had floated. Marta Bab felt warm sunlight on her back while rain still fell from a grey sky. "Todo era luz," she said. Yet no crowd sighting of the figure was ever documented. The apparitions belonged to one woman.

In 1997 Archbishop Moisés Julio Blanchoud allowed the messages to be published. In 2003 Archbishop Mario Antonio Cargnello restricted new messages, banned lay laying on of hands and asked for a psychodiagnostic assessment of the seer. The Archdiocese of Salta says the results never arrived. In 2006 it found "no proof or objective witnesses to support a supernatural explanation," though pilgrimage was not banned. In 2007 Cargnello called it "Una creación humana."

In 2011 a Mass was allowed at the close of the pilgrim year, and René Laurentin saw "progress towards the official recognition." In 2019 Pope Francis criticised the seer's central role: "Feo es que protagoniza y no deja de protagonizar."

2022. After an apostolic visit, the Vatican ordered the San Bernardo nuns not to take part in the devotion. An agreement followed on 27 August 2022, with Javier Belda Iniesta as guarantor. Court cases over gender violence, finances and nuns who had left the convent ran into 2024. One nun's letter spoke of "una constante manipulación."

The apparitions remain unapproved. María Livia stopped laying on hands by the end of 2019 and reappeared in public on 10 December 2022, and she says the Virgin still comes. About 15,000 people joined the September 2024 pilgrimage. La Nación has set the case beside San Nicolás de los Arroyos, approved as supernatural in 2016. Anthropologist M. C. Ceruti gave her study of the hill a three word title. "Ascensión, sanación y prohibición."