Most Brazilian cities trace their founding to a colonial land grant, a mining strike or a river crossing. Aparecida traces its founding to a fishing accident: three men working the Paraiba do Sul River in 1717, trying to feed a passing dignitary's entourage during a lean stretch, pulled up first the headless body and then, on a second cast, the head of a small blackened clay statue of the Immaculate Conception. What began as a devotional curiosity kept by one of the fishermen grew, over the following decades, into a pilgrimage destination substantial enough to need its own chapel, then its own larger church, then eventually a basilica among the largest Catholic churches in the world.
That growth eventually strained a simple administrative fact: the settlement around the shrine was legally still part of Guaratingueta, the older town nearby, and shared none of its own tax revenue or civic identity. In 1928 the district separated and Aparecida became a municipality in its own right, a rare case of a Brazilian city whose entire reason for existing as a distinct political unit is a single religious devotion rather than agriculture, industry or geography. Everything the city has built since, its hotels, its access roads, its Catholic publishing and broadcasting presence, exists because the shrine drew the population first and the city followed.