2023

The pilgrimage in honor of the Guadalupe Virgin is the biggest pilgrimage in Mexico, and one of the most crowded in the world. On the 11th and 12th of December 2023, eleven million people from several parts of Mexico gathered in the Basilica of Guadalupe to pay their respect, and to pray in front of an image of the Virgin. According to 17th-century writings in the indigenous language Nahuatl, the Virgin Mary appeared to the local indigenous Juan Diego several times between the 9th and the 12th of December 1531. The Virgin, allegedly, told him that a chapel should be built in her honor on the top of the hill, where had once been an Aztec temple to the goddess Tonatzin, la Madre de todos, the Mother of All. Armed with my curiosity and my Canon, I wanted to find out what brings together so many people from all different walks of life, and how faith and passion emotionally affect all these Virgin’s worshipers, making the Guadalupe Pilgrimage the most important religious gathering in Latin America.