Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

"Las Lajas: the deaf-mute girl who saw the Mestiza in the rock"

Ipiales (Colombia) (1754)

In the Guáitara River canyon, near Ipiales and the border with Ecuador, stands the spectacular neo-Gothic sanctuary of Our Lady of the Rosary of Las Lajas, built on a bridge and attached to the rock face where the image of the Virgin is venerated. The devotion is expressly linked to the Rosary: the image shows the Virgin on a crescent moon, with the Child in her left arm and a rosary in her right hand.

Pious tradition recounts that around 1754, an indigenous woman named María Mueses de Quiñónez was descending the canyon carrying her daughter Rosa, who was deaf and mute from birth, in her rebozo. In the cave, the girl spoke for the first time, exclaiming something like, "Mommy, look at that mestiza woman who has fallen down the cliff with a mestizo child in her arms and two mestizos on either side." The mother saw nothing, but she heard her daughter speak.

Only then, the story goes, did the people of Ipiales come in procession and discover on the rock an already formed image of Our Lady of the Rosary with the Child, Saint Dominic, and Saint Francis of Assisi. Tradition maintains that no one painted it. Studies by German geologists are often cited, according to which the colors penetrate several centimeters into the stone, but it should be noted that the original academic publication is not readily available; this fact is repeated as an apologetic tradition.

What is well documented is that since the 18th century the place was a destination for pilgrimage, that the current neo-Gothic temple was built between the end of the 19th and 20th centuries, that there was a canonical coronation on September 15, 1952 by grace of Pius XII and a declaration of minor basilica in 1954. The dialogue of the mestiza, the resurrection of Rosa and the image not painted by human hands belong to the local tradition collected late.