El Santuario de Chimayo

El Santuario de Chimayo is a modest adobe church with twin towers in the village of Chimayo, and it is one of the most visited Catholic pilgrimage sites in the United States. Its founding tradition sits at a junction of cultures: the devotion to Our Lord of Esquipulas came north from a Guatemalan shrine whose own earth was said to cure illness, and the story told in Chimayo is that in 1810 the Penitente Bernardo Abeyta found a crucifix in the ground on Good Friday, or was directed by a vision to dig where the earth held healing power, and that a chapel built in 1813 had to be replaced by the present 1816 shrine because the healings outgrew it. Beneath the altar lies the small pit called el posito, whose holy dirt visitors still take by the small vialful, mixed with water or rubbed on the body, the way their grandparents did.

The ground under the story is older than the shrine. The Tewa named the valley after Tsi-Mayoh, one of four sacred hills above it, the hill standing directly behind the Santuario, and the site was a place of Pueblo healing long before the Spanish returned under de Vargas in 1693, its hot springs understood as dwelling places of healing spirits that left behind healing earth when they dried. The NPS's own account records that continuity plainly, and the shrine today holds it too: a Catholic National Historic Landmark carrying an older Indigenous relationship to the same dirt. On Good Friday, tens of thousands walk the highways from Santa Fe and Espanola, some carrying crutches they hope to leave behind, and the shrine's side rooms hold what they left.

Visiting

The shrine is an active parish of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe; it is open daily but hours shift with the liturgical calendar, so check before visiting. It stands on the High Road to Taos (NM 76) in Chimayo, New Mexico. The Holy Week pilgrimage is the busiest time by far.

Photo: Dave Ruppert, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons ([source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:El_Santuario_de_Chimayo.jpg))