Santuario de San Miguel del Milagro

The sanctuary of San Miguel del Milagro, officially the Santuario Nacional de San Miguel Arcángel (National Shrine of St Michael the Archangel), stands in the village of the same name in the municipality of Natívitas, in the hills of southwest Tlaxcala, right beside the Cacaxtla archaeological site. With the basilica of Ocotlán it is one of the two most visited Catholic churches in the state, and pilgrims come every year to drink the water of its well, which they believe heals.

Tradition says that on 25 April 1631, during the procession of Saint Mark, Diego Lázaro de San Francisco, one of the area's early Indigenous converts, saw the archangel Michael, who asked him to have a church built and showed him a hidden spring under a great rock in a ravine between two hills. In the story Diego kept quiet for fear of not being believed, fell gravely ill and saw the archangel again; in the end he took water from the spring to the bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla, and the sick who drank it recovered.

A first sanctuary went up soon after, but in 1643 Bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza had it pulled down to build a larger one, the church standing today with some later remodelling, which he consecrated himself. By 1680 there was a hermitage and a hostel for pilgrims, and on 23 April 1683 the sanctuary became a parish, with San José Atoyatenco and San Bernabé Capula as its dependent villages. The red façade, built of tezontle and lava stone, has one of the finest old doorways in Tlaxcala; the church was renovated in 2000 in its original style.

In the atrium in front of the church is the well that tradition says St Michael blessed. A keeper hands out the water to pilgrims, although the spring has run dry several times and, because it is scarce, the well is often closed. The sanctuary keeps a painting of the archangel appearing to Diego Lázaro. In 2025 the sanctuary was one of the jubilee churches of the Holy Year.