Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

The Amatxu and the voice of the "foot left"

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

The Bilbaites call their Virgin with a word that says everything: the Amatxu, "the madrecita." Our Lady of Begoña, patron of Bilbao and Bizkaia, reigns from her hill on the river and the villa. And his name, according to popular etymology, keeps a beautiful legend. The oral tradition places the apparition of the image in an oak of the Artagan forest; another very widespread formulation shows that the image "did not want to move" from that place and that it would have been heard to pronounce "Bego-oña," interpreted as "this the foot was left," a popular origin of the name.

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.