Our Lady of Las Lajas: María Mueses de Quiñones and Rosa in the Guáitara Canyon (c. 1754)

The Guáitara River cuts a deep canyon through the municipality of Ipiales, in Nariño, less than 11 km from the Ecuador border. The story of what happened here is mostly oral tradition, written down later by devotional writers. Even the year is soft. Circa 1754.

María Mueses de Quiñones was an Indigenous woman of Potosí. She was walking home from Ipiales with her daughter Rosa, born deaf and mute. In the canyon, a very strong storm caught them. They sheltered among the stone slabs, the lajas.

Then Rosa spoke. For the first time. "Mamita, mamita, la señora mestiza me llama." Mommy, mommy, the mestiza lady is calling me. She pointed to a lightning-illuminated silhouette over the laja. In one account, the woman "fell from the cliff with her son in her arms." María saw nothing.

Later, Rosa disappeared. Her mother found her with "a noble Lady and Child", and this time María saw the Virgin and the Divine Infant herself. Then Rosa fell ill and died. Her mother prayed at the cave, and the girl was returned to life.

On 15 September 1754, by most accounts, María brought the parish priest of Ipiales and townspeople to the cave. Sources name him Fray Juan de Villafuerte or Father Gabriel Villafuerte. On the rock face they found a coloured image. The Virgin of the Rosary on a crescent moon. The Christ Child on her left arm. St Dominic and St Francis at her side. They held the first Mass and built a chapel of straw and wood.

The oldest written reference probably comes from Fray Juan de Santa Gertrudis, a Mallorcan Franciscan, who drew on a 1759 report by Don Ramón, a Spanish priest based in Pasto. Santa Gertrudis placed the shrine about a league and a half from Ipiales. He described the Virgin "en traje de CONCEPCIÓN", dressed as the Immaculate Conception. Not the Rosary group seen today.

Secular sources speak of a mysterious mural of unknown origin. The letters P and B on the Virgin's mantle have been read as the signature of Fray Pedro Bedón, a Dominican painter from Quito. Critics answer that he died more than 130 years before the sightings. Father Manuel Chamorro Guerrero reads the letters as Pax et Bonum, Peace and Good. The French botanist Édouard André reportedly placed the painting in the school of Miguel de Santiago. The gap between the old description and the present image suggests it may have been repainted.

Devotional media repeat that German geologists took core samples and found no paint, with the colours running several feet deep. No names, date or report are ever cited, and the depth claim has not been verified. One historian, Alberto Vela, is reported to date the events to 14 September 1794.

The image was crowned on 16 September 1952 and the shrine became a minor basilica in 1954. Today the Sanctuary of Las Lajas, a neo-Gothic church built between 1916 and 1949 by Lucindo María Espinosa Medina, rises 100 m from the canyon floor. The cave forms its altar wall. About 1 million pilgrims come each year. In 2015 The Telegraph named it the most beautiful church in the world.