The El Palmar de Troya Apparitions: The Lady in the Mastic Bush

El Palmar de Troya was a hamlet of Utrera, in the province of Seville, about 40 km south of the city. A shed served as the village chapel. In the spring of 1968, four schoolgirls were about to make this quiet place famous.

Saturday, 30 March 1968. Afternoon. Ana García González, Josefa Guzmán Hidalgo, Ana Aguilera Saborido and Rafaela Gordo had just finished cleaning the shed. They walked out to the field of La Alcaparrosa, about one kilometre from the village, to pick flowers for the Virgin.

Ana García noticed the branches of a bushy mastic tree moving. There was a figure inside. At first it seemed to her the figure of a man. She tried to run away.

The girls looked again. "At the beginning, we thought that it was a hangman or a bull with green horns, but later we saw that it was the face of a lady," they said. "It was very round and rosy, with a green thing around her (head) and she was dressed in a brown mantle. She smiled at us. It was the Virgin." Josefa spoke of una señora hermosa. A beautiful lady, with very black eyes.

Word spread fast. In April the correspondent of ABC de Sevilla stood among 3,000 to 4,000 people around the bush. He saw "scenes of hysteria amid the shouts of those who claimed to have seen her." Visitors cut branches from the bush to keep as relics.

Then the adults began to see. On 11 April, Rosario Arenillas of Dos Hermanas saw the Virgin Mary with the Carmelite cloak. On 6 June, María Luisa Vila of Seville said Jesus gave her communion, and witnesses said a bloodied wafer was in her mouth. Pilgrims spoke of the sun dancing and of roses they could smell but not see. The biggest crowds came on the 15th of each month. The four girls, meanwhile, slipped out of the story.

On 15 October 1968, two men from Seville came to the site. Clemente Domínguez Gómez, an office worker, and the lawyer Manuel Alonso Corral. Clemente had his first vision, of Christ and Padre Pio, on 30 September 1969. He received the stigmata on 13 April 1970. On 15 May 1970, some 40,000 people gathered at La Alcaparrosa, many of them sick or disabled and hoping for a miracle.

The priest of Guadalema de los Quintero called the visions "totally false". In 1968 Cardinal José María Bueno Monreal, Archbishop of Seville, issued a pastoral letter denying the miracles. On 18 May 1970 he condemned the apparitions as "collective and superstitious hysteria" and barred priests from saying mass there. On 18 March 1972 he banned every form of Catholic worship at the site. That year Corral bought the estate. By then, in the words of the writer Nick Rider, the original four girls were forgotten. One anonymous blog later suggested they had been paid to start it all. No evidence has ever supported that claim.

In 1975 Clemente founded the Order of Carmelites of the Holy Face. In 1978 he declared himself Pope Gregory XVII. The cathedral-basilica of the Palmarian Church, finished in 2014, stands on the field where the mastic bush grew. Magnus Lundberg traced the whole story in his book A Pope of Their Own, and the 2020 Movistar+ series El Palmar de Troya retold it in four episodes. It all began with four girls, a bush, and a smiling face.