Our Lady of Coromoto: the apparition to the Cospes chief near Guanare

Guanare was founded in 1591, in what is now Portuguesa state. The Cospes people lived in the forests nearby, on lands held by Juan Sánchez, the Spanish encomendero.

1651. The chief of the Cospes, remembered as Coromoto, was at a stream crossing with his wife. A beautiful woman appeared before them. She held a child in her arms. She spoke to the chief in his own language. "Leave this forest taking your people with you and go where the white men are," one version runs, "so that you receive water on your heads and may thus enter heaven."

The chief told Juan Sánchez, who settled the Cospes near a ravine called Coromoto and arranged religious instruction. Many were baptized. The chief held back.

8 September 1652. Night. The chief lay in his hammock. With him were his wife, a woman named Isabel, and a nephew of about 12. Then a luminous figure appeared in the doorway. Rays of light lit the whole hut "as if it were noon". Isabel compared it to the midday sun.

The Lady came toward the chief, smiling and serene. He reacted with anger. Some say he threatened her with an arrow. Others say he tried to grab her, or push her. She vanished. One telling says a small print of her was left in his closed fist. Another says he hid it in the thatch, and the nephew carried it to Juan Sánchez.

The chief fled into the forest. On 9 September a mapanare, a venomous pit viper, bit him. He repented, asked for baptism and took the name Ángel Custodio. The image he left behind is 27 mm high and 22 mm wide, the Virgin seated with the Child on her lap. On 1 February 1654 it was handed to Vicar Diego Lozano and carried to the parish church of Guanare.

The first legal inquiry came in 1668, under Juan Caldera de Quiñones. Seven eyewitnesses spoke, among them Isabel and Juan Sánchez. That file burned on 19 March 1723. Further inquiries followed in 1728 and 1746. In 1784 Bishop Mariano Martí wrote: "En el año 1652, según dice este Cura, se apareció esta Nuestra Señora." Between 1915 and 1924, Hermano Nectario María searched the archives and shaped the modern account.

In 2009 a restoration team commissioned by the Venezuelan Episcopal Conference studied the relic under a microscope. They reported cotton fibre paper and, in the left eye, a point of light shaped like a human silhouette, taken to be Coromoto. No independent analysis has been published, and the reported eye measurements disagree with one another.

No hoax claim or academic debunking has surfaced. The doubts lie in the paper trail. The first inquiry came 16 years after the event and its original is lost. The later files lean on secondhand testimony, and the tellings differ on the arrow, the grab and the fist. Devotional writer Carlos Maldonado-Bourgoin argues the opposite, that few Marian devotions have so much documentary support.

Venezuela's bishops named Our Lady of Coromoto patroness on 1 May 1942. Pius XII confirmed it on 7 October 1944. On 10 February 1996 John Paul II inaugurated the National Sanctuary at Monte de los Negros, the traditional site of the second apparition. The tiny image rests in the base of its statue.