Sanctuary of Las Nazarenas and the Lord of Miracles

A Wall, an Earthquake, and a People

In the middle of the seventeenth century, in the Lima neighbourhood of Pachacamilla where African confraternities gathered, an enslaved man of Angolan origin painted an image of the crucified Christ on the wall of a humble meeting place. When the great earthquake of 1655 brought down the buildings around it and the wall was left standing, the survival was received as a sign, and a devotion began to grow. Further earthquakes across the following century spared the image again, and the devotion spread through the city. In the eighteenth century a church was raised around the wall and entrusted to a community of Nazarene Carmelite nuns, and a confraternity, rooted among the Afro-Peruvian Catholics who had first honoured the image, took up its care. The Afro-Peruvian and Angolan origin of the Lord of Miracles is not a footnote to the devotion; it is its beginning.

The sanctuary is an eighteenth-century church, repaired after later earthquakes, built so that the surviving painted wall stands at its heart behind the high altar. The image kept for the procession is a copy of that wall painting, set on a heavy silver-framed litter, the anda, that is carried by the confraternity through the streets. The purple of the confraternity's habit colours the whole October season in Lima.