Las Lajas Sanctuary
Interesting facts
- The church rises about 100 metres from the canyon floor to the top of its tower, and the bridge it stands on is 50 metres high.
- The back wall of all three naves is not masonry at all but the bare rock face of the canyon, with the venerated image at its centre.
- Beneath the church, inside the base of the bridge, lies a vaulted crypt in Romanesque style dedicated to the Sacred Heart.
- The first shrine on the site was a hut of wood and straw that stood for about 40 years before a brick chapel replaced it.
- The earliest known written mention of the shrine is in the travel chronicle of the Franciscan Juan de Santa Gertrudis, who journeyed through the region between 1756 and 1762.
- The neo-Gothic church was first designed in a Romanesque style before its builders changed the project entirely to Gothic.
- It was paid for by pilgrims' donations from Colombia and Ecuador, at an estimated cost of 1.85 million pesos, roughly a million dollars at the time.
- The walls lining the approach are covered with votive plaques of thanks, and even orthopaedic braces left as testimony of reported healings.
- On Holy Thursday many pilgrims arrive on foot from Pasto and other towns after a walk of more than 12 hours.
- In a 2007 newspaper poll it was voted one of the seven wonders of Colombia, second only to the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá.
Why it is worth it
In 1754 a woman named María Mueses de Quiñones was caught in a storm in the Guáitara canyon with her deaf-mute daughter Rosa. They sheltered in a cave, and María later told her neighbours that the Virgin Mary had appeared to her on the rock wall — and that in the same moment, her daughter, unable to hear or speak since birth, called out to her. Whatever happened in that cave, Ipiales took it seriously enough to build a chapel around it within the year, the first of several structures that have stood on the spot since.
What people still argue about is the image itself: a figure on the natural rock face that, according to the sanctuary's own account of a scientific examination, shows no trace of paint or pigment on the surface — the colour appears to run into the stone rather than sit on it. It is the kind of claim that resists easy verification, and it is worth treating as exactly that: a claim central to why pilgrims keep coming, not a settled fact.
The building that stands today is less a church with a shrine inside than a church built around a cliff. Construction on the current neo-Gothic sanctuary began in 1916 and took 33 years, and it does something unusual for a basilica: it spans the canyon itself, resting on a bridge that leaps from one wall of the Guáitara gorge to the other, with the original cave and its image left in place as the altar. You are not visiting a shrine near a canyon — you are standing on a bridge over one, inside a church.
Getting there
6 km from Ipiales. San Luis Airport (IPI) is about 11 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Sanctuary of Las Lajas is a Catholic minor basilica located within the canyon of the Guáitara River in Ipiales, Nariño Department, Colombia. The Marian shrine is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary as Our Lady of the Rosary. The architect was Lucindo Maria Espinosa Medina.
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