Costa Rica

The peoples of Costa Rica before the conquest looked in two directions, to Mesoamerica in the northwest, where the Chorotega kept versions of the Mexican gods and calendar, and to the Chibchan south, where the Bribri and Cabecar still transmit the world of Sibo, the creator who made humans from maize seed, through the awapa, the singing healers whose training takes decades. The colony that followed was a poor one, thin on gold and encomiendas, and its Catholicism grew correspondingly modest and parochial, centred on Cartago and the cult of its dark little Virgin, La Negrita.

Independence brought liberal and clerical quarrels, including the expulsion of bishops, but never the anticlerical ruptures of Mexico or Guatemala, and the 1949 constitution that abolished the army also kept Catholicism as the religion of the state, a provision that stands to this day. The modern country wears that establishment lightly: divorce, civil marriage and, since 2020, same sex marriage are law, a fifth of Costa Ricans profess no religion, and Evangelical churches have grown into a political force whose presidential near miss in 2018 turned a religious song and dance into a constitutional argument. The August pilgrimage to Cartago, when a large share of the whole nation walks to La Negrita, remains the annual measure of how Catholic the state church's people still are.

Costa Rica's patroness is a small dark image of the Virgin and Child, carved in grey black stone and barely twenty centimetres tall, known to everyone as La Negrita. Tradition sets her finding on 2 August 1635, when a young woman named Juana Pereira, gathering wood on a hillside at Cartago reserved for the mixed race poor, found the little figure on a rock; twice she carried it home and twice it returned by itself to the stone, and the same happened when the priest locked it away, until the message was accepted that the Virgin had chosen her own ground.

The basilica of Our Lady of the Angels now rises over that rock, and beneath the church flows a spring whose water pilgrims bottle and carry home. Pius XI declared her patroness of Costa Rica in 1926. Each year in the days before 2 August the country performs the romeria, walking to Cartago from San Jose and from every province, a river of people that in recent years has been estimated at as much as a fifth or a quarter of the national population, some finishing the last metres to the shrine on their knees. The walls beside the image hold cabinets of tiny silver votive limbs, hearts and houses, the exvotos of favours received. Chosen ground, found by a poor woman on the margins of a colonial town, La Negrita has become the one devotion that still assembles the whole of Catholic Costa Rica in motion.