Basílica de Ocotlán

The Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Ocotlán sits on a hill in the village of Ocotlán, about a kilometre from the centre of Tlaxcala, and is one of Mexico's major Marian pilgrimage churches. INAH ranks it among the most remarkable works of Mexican churrigueresque. Its story begins with a tradition dated to 1541: a young Indigenous man named Juan Diego was climbing the Cerro de San Lorenzo to fetch water for relatives sick with the plague when a woman led him to a spring whose water cured them. She told him the friars would find her image there, and the Franciscans found an ocote pine burning without being consumed, with a carved Virgin inside. Three times the statue, taken to the San Lorenzo chapel, is said to have returned to the spot. The figure, 148 cm tall and carved from ocote, is still venerated in the basilica.

Work on the present church began in the late 17th century (INAH gives 1670) and it was consecrated in 1754. The façade, from about 1760 to 1790, is a stucco altarpiece under a great shell-shaped arch, with estípite pilasters and a star-shaped choir window framing a figure of the Virgin, set between two towers about 33 m high that stand on bases of red hexagonal brick.

Inside, gilded baroque altarpieces from the 1770s fill the nave. Behind the main altar is the camarín, the octagonal room where the image is dressed for feast days, designed by the chaplain Manuel Loayzaga and carried out by the Indigenous artist Francisco Miguel Tlayoltehuanitzin in the early 18th century. Its walls carry eight paintings of the life of Mary signed by Juan de Villalobos in 1723, and its dome swarms with polychrome carvings of apostles and archangels around a Pentecost scene. The big feast is the third Monday of May, when La Bajada carries the Virgin in procession through the city.