The finding of Our Lady of Aparecida in the Paraíba do Sul River

October 1717. Dom Pedro Miguel de Almeida Portugal e Vasconcelos, Count of Assumar, governor of São Paulo and Minas do Ouro, was on his way to Vila Rica. His road ran through Guaratinguetá. The town council ordered the local fishermen to bring him all the fish they could catch.

Three men went out in their canoes on the Paraíba do Sul. Domingos Martins Garcia. João Alves. Filipe Pedroso, said to be the oldest.

They cast their nets from the Porto de José Corrêa Leite all the way to Porto Itaguaçu, "a good distance." Nothing.

At Itaguaçu, João Alves cast his drag net once more. In the words of the parish record, he "brought up the body of Our Lady, without the head." It was a small clay figure of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. He cast again, further downstream, and the head came up. No one, the record says, ever knew who had thrown it there.

Alves wrapped the image in a cloth and kept fishing. Within a few casts the catch was so heavy that the men feared their canoes would sink. They went home "amazed at this event." Later tradition added that the slender figure grew so heavy they could not budge it.

The statue became the centre of a home devotion. Neighbours gathered on Saturdays to pray the rosary before it. One evening the two wax candles lighting the image went out on their own. Silvana da Rocha, João Alves's mother, went to relight them. They lit by themselves. At another gathering the niche and altar shook and the candle flames trembled. The night was calm.

Nobody wrote it down in 1717. Fr. José Alves Vilela, vicar of Guaratinguetá, is credited with a first written account in 1743. In August 1757 Fr. João de Morais e Aguiar entered the Notícia da Aparição da Imagem da Senhora in the parish register, dating the find to "1719, more or less." The fishermen's own testimony does not survive, and the records of the governor's journey are silent. Popular sources give 12 October, but the Redemptorist historian Júlio Brustoloni placed the governor in Guaratinguetá from 17 to 30 October, which points later in the month.

The Church calls the find and the catch the first miracle of Our Lady of Aparecida. The name means "the one who appeared," an image that turned up, not a vision. The scholar Paul C. Johnson called the account "part history, part hagiography," and its echo of the biblical miraculous catch of fish has been noted. A conventional reading holds that an old devotional figure had lain on the riverbed for decades. Fr. José Inácio de Medeiros estimated 50 to 70 years underwater, which would fit a head and body found apart.

The 36 cm terracotta statue is attributed to the Benedictine sculptor Frei Agostinho de Jesus, around 1650. A chapel, then two basilicas, grew around it. It was crowned in 1904 and made principal patroness of Brazil in 1930. On 16 May 1978 it was smashed into about 200 pieces, then reassembled at MASP. The National Basilica in Aparecida now draws about 8 million pilgrims a year.

Its closest counterpart lies in Cuba. Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre was a floating image found by three men in a boat.