The Ezkioga apparitions on the Anduaga hillside

Spring 1931. The Second Spanish Republic had been proclaimed in April. King Alfonso XIII had gone into exile. In May, convents and churches burned, and Azaña's government pushed secularisation. In Catholic Gipuzkoa, anxiety ran deep.

June 29, 1931. Evening. On the hillside called Anduaga, above a church and school in Ezkioga, two children said they saw the Virgin Mary. Antonia Bereciartua was 11. Her brother Andrés was 7. They spoke only Basque and were said to be tending cattle.

Accounts differ. In one, she was clad in a black mantle. In another, she was Our Lady of Sorrows, in a white robe and black cape, with stars in her crown. She did not speak. Their father reportedly refused to hear more, and the children soon faded from the story.

The sixth day. About 3,000 people were praying the rosary when a great brightness appeared that many people could see. In it they made out the Dolorosa with a sword through her chest, in an attitude of coming toward the people.

Then the hill filled. On the nights of 12, 16 and 18 July and 16 October 1931, up to eighty thousand people came. Over a hundred seers emerged in the first month. They described blinding light. They convulsed. Many fell unconscious, and some bled.

The visions grew. The Virgin blessed the four cardinal points with a sword. Angels came with bloody swords. A seven-year-old and a 24-year-old carpenter heard her in Basque: "Errosarioa errezatzea egunero." Pray the rosary daily. Some saw the Devil on the hill, tall, with red hair, dressed in black. The writer Walter Starkie held a girl during a vision. A powerful shock seemed to pass quivering through her. At last she sank back limp, unconscious.

In July 1931 a local commission of priests, a doctor, the mayor and the town secretary drew up a printed questionnaire, so every seer was interviewed the same way. The Republic watched too. Manuel Azaña is reported to have asked Gregorio Marañón to investigate, and the civil governor briefly placed some seers in a psychiatric hospital.

Then the Church turned. The Diocese of Vitoria set itself against Ezkioga in November 1931. In June 1932 the Jesuit psychologist José Antonio Laburu blamed "mental contagion." That September, Bishop Mateo Múgica forbade seers from going to the site. The Vatican disowned the visions in 1934.

Doubt gathered around the seers. Raymond Carr wrote that Ramona Olazábal's stigmata were self-inflicted with a razor blade. Many seers repeated messages from the earlier La Salette apparition in France. Patxi Goicoechea, a carpenter and Basque nationalist, foretold civil war in the Basque country between Catholics and non-Catholics. Reviewers saw Catholic and Basque fears of the anticlerical Republic written into the visions. Yet the shared brightness of the sixth day has no specific conventional explanation in the sources.

Occasional visions continued until the fall of 1933. In 1941 the Franco regime cracked down on the remaining devotees. Photographs of entranced seers, once sold to pilgrims, survive in the Foto Sicart collection. Historian William A. Christian Jr. told the story in Visionaries in 1996. Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón followed with the film Visionarios in 2001. The Church has never recognised the visions.