Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

"The miracle of Calanda: the restored leg"

Calanda (Spain) (1640)

Miguel Juan Pellicer was a young day laborer from Calanda, in Teruel. After suffering a cart accident in Castellón, he was seriously injured in one leg. He was first treated in Valencia and then at the Nuestra Señora de Gracia Hospital in Zaragoza, where his right leg was finally amputated below the knee.

Invalid and impoverished, Miguel begged for years near the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar, displaying his stump and entrusting himself to the Virgin, until he returned to Calanda to live with his parents in great poverty. On the night of March 29-30, 1640, he lay down on a straw mattress in his parents' room. Later, when his mother entered, she was astonished to discover that the bed was occupied by two legs: the one that had been amputated had been reattached.

A canonical process was then opened in the Archdiocese of Zaragoza, with numerous witnesses, which concluded with a solemn ruling recognizing the miracle. It is one of the best-documented miracle cases in all of Europe at the time, and since then, devotion to Our Lady of the Pillar has remembered it as one of the great signs of the Virgin of the Pillar.