Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

The Mother and the voice of the "still foot"

Bilbao, Bizkaia (Spain) (13th-14th centuries)

The people of Bilbao call their Virgin by a word that says it all: Amatxu, "the little mother." Our Lady of Begoña, patron saint of Bilbao and Bizkaia, reigns from her hill overlooking the estuary and the city. And her name, according to popular etymology, holds a beautiful legend. Oral tradition places the appearance of the image in an oak tree in the Artagan forest; another widespread version recounts that the image "didn't want to move" from that place and that the phrase "Bego-oña" was heard, interpreted as "stay still," the popular origin of the toponym.

The honesty of a good editor is essential. This explanation of the name—also recorded as "Begoña? Bye, ona!"—is a popular etymology frequently repeated in devotional contexts, but there is no academic philological confirmation to support it. What is documented is that the image is a Romanesque-Gothic polychrome wooden carving, dated by the basilica itself to the 13th-14th centuries, and that it was already venerated in a small hermitage on Artagan Hill, where the basilica would later be built, from the beginning of the 14th century.

Devotion to the Virgin Mary has always been warm and heartfelt. Among the miracles attributed to her by tradition, the local press recalls the one in 1534, when she is credited with saving Andrés de Bermeo, a man from Bilbao, and his ships from a storm: a favor befitting a seafaring town that entrusts its vessels to the Virgin. Her main feast day is celebrated on October 11th, and August 15th also draws a large number of pilgrims.

Regarding the Rosary, let us be cautious: the sources consulted do not establish a specific and documented link between Begoña and a Rosary confraternity or a particular Rosary event. What is clear, however, is her intense devotional and pilgrim life, in which the Hail Mary, as in all Marian piety, resonates on the lips of those who ascend to greet the Virgin Mary.