Basílica de Ocotlán
Interesting facts
- The great gilded main altarpiece was designed so that, when lit, it would recall the burning ocote pine of the shrine's legend; it uses cedar and 23-carat gold.
- The eight-sided camarín plays on the number eight: eight Solomonic columns, eight angels, eight mirrors, eight dome windows and the eight letters of AVE MARIA repeated along its cornice.
- In the camarín stands a table of ahuehuete wood whose legs are carved with eight monkeys.
- The camarín's paintings were signed by Juan de Villalobos in 1723; its gilding survives from the original decoration, completed around 1740.
- The white façade is made of cut brick coated in lime mortar and whitewash, its fine plasterwork often likened to alfeñique, a traditional Mexican sugar-paste sweet.
- The façade converges on a star-shaped choir window framing a floating figure of the Virgin.
- The two towers carry about forty columns wound with vines and grapes, because their theme is the Eucharist.
- Experts examining the statue in 1755 declared it carved from a single block of solid ocote pine.
- According to legend, a sacristan removed the newly found image from its altar three times, and each time angels returned it to its place.
- About 400 metres from the sanctuary is El Pocito, the spring of the legend, whose water pilgrims carry home in small red clay jugs shaped like ducks.
Why it is worth it
On a hill above the city of Tlaxcala, a dazzling white façade flanked by two tall towers announces the Basilica of Our Lady of Ocotlán, regarded as one of the finest examples of the Mexican Churrigueresque, the most exuberant phase of New Spain's Baroque. The front is a dense, carved screen of estípites, the tapering pilasters typical of the style, saints, and scrolling ornament, and the towers, each about 33 metres high, carry figures of the apostles. The façade was raised and decorated in the second half of the eighteenth century.
The shrine grew out of a legend. Local tradition holds that in the spring of 1541, during an epidemic, a young indigenous man named Juan Diego met a lady on the hill of San Lorenzo who showed him a spring whose water healed the sick. Franciscan friars later found a pine, an ocote, that would not burn among flames in the woods, and inside it a wooden image of the Virgin; the name Ocotlán is usually explained as "place of the ocote pines". The statue, about 148 cm tall and carved from pine, remains the focus of the sanctuary. It received a canonical coronation in 1909.
Building on the present church began in 1670, when Juan de Escobar became its caretaker, and the interior was enriched in the eighteenth century under the chaplain Manuel Loayzaga. The great gilded main altarpiece and, above all, the eight-sided camarín behind it, the chamber where the Virgin's garments are kept and changed, are the work of the indigenous sculptor Francisco Miguel, who spent some two decades decorating the sanctuary. The camarín is a small explosion of gilding, painted figures and twisted Solomonic columns, and it is often counted among the masterpieces of Mexican Baroque.
Tlaxcala, capital of Mexico's smallest state, was the seat of the Tlaxcaltec people, who allied with the Spanish against the Aztecs, and one of the first places in New Spain where the friars built churches.
Getting there
The basilica stands on a hill about 1 km from the centre of Tlaxcala. The nearest airport is Puebla's Hermanos Serdán International Airport (PBC), about 23 km away. Tlaxcala is linked by highway to Puebla and to Mexico City.
On these lists
19.31790, -98.22796per Wikidata