La Negrita: Pilgrimage to Cartago, Paraíso, and Ujarrás

On 2 August 1635, a biracial girl whom myth calls Juana Pereira was collecting firewood in the forest when she discovered the small figure of the Virgin Mary standing on a rock by a stream. The statue was no larger than a doll and solid black. Juana took María home and placed her in a drawer wrapped in a cloth.

But the next day, she found the statue again in the woods, in the same place. Juana took her home again to discover the drawer was empty. On the third day, Juana brought the local priest, Alonso de Sandoval, and discovered the Virgin Mary once again in the woods. The priest took the statue back and placed her in a box. The next day, the priest discovered the statue had disappeared. So they went to the woods and found she was in her place again. They then brought her to the sanctuary to rest, but the following day, La Negrita, the little black one, had disappeared again. Once again, she was to be found in the forest.

So the people built her a fine basilica, the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles in what is now Cartago in the Central Valley of Costa Rica.

In 1824, the Virgin was declared Costa Rica’s patron saint. La Negrita now resides on a gold, jewel-studded platform at the main altar in the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles in Cartago. Each 2 August, on the anniversary of the statuette’s miraculous discovery, pilgrims from every corner of the country (and beyond) walk from wherever they are to the basilica. Many of the penitent complete the last few hundred meters of the pilgrimage on their knees. This pilgrimage is called the Romería.

This year, I started seeing pilgrims walking toward Cartago several days before 2 August, and I felt the fever reach a pitch. On my way to a friend’s farewell party in Santa Ana, I was waiting for a ride in my town San Pedro, watching literally thousands of people walk past on foot. The Calle Principal, an extremely busy and important highway, was shut down due to the sheer volume of people. They were very quiet, unlike the crowds that filled the streets during the World Cup. Barely speaking, just walking in the dark. Some of them had been walking for a long time. I watched as a girl tripped and fell over a low fence and lay there, exhausted and dehydrated. Other romeros stopped to help her up and give her a drink.

The next day, I packed a light backpack with water and a change of clothes. I walked out my front door in San Pedro and started walking.

San José and where I live, San Pedro, are in the Central Valley of Costa Rica. Around 4,000 feet in elevation but surrounded by mountains far taller, the weather is perfect for a long walk, warm in the days giving way to cool at night, and August is smack in the middle of rainy season. It started spitting rain when I left, but then it stopped, and although the gray skies threatened rain all day, it was an empty promise. I left at 10:45 AM.

About 20 minutes later I met my friend in Curridabat and we started toward Cartago. We decided to stay off the main street and walk along the train tracks instead. The grade is gentle as Cartago is in the highlands, and the street was choked with pilgrims. And so we walked.

We walked under surly skies among green, green hills.

We greeted unicorns in disguise.

We wandered beside rambling coffee farms, the branches heavy with unripe coffee beans, shaded by rainbow eucalyptus.

We walked through town after town. Towns that charmed me with their warmth. Each one boasted at least enough flat ground carved out for a football pitch, the neighborhood boys kicking around the black and white football with abandon. We stopped at mini-supermercados and bought milk and cookies and bananas to snack on.

The train went by only once. Fortunately it was not while we were walking across one of the bridges.

I eventually started to feel tired and perhaps a little cranky. This was perhaps after walking about 20 kilometers, when I realized I had forgotten to eat anything. We rejoined the road and stopped by a small roadside tent and purchased tamales. We donned our coats, as it was cool and foggy in the mountain air, and unwrapped our tamales with glee. We doused them with salsa Lizano and devoured every bite. My humor restored, we went back to the train line and kept walking.

Just before sunset, we reached Cartago. The train line dumped us into an extremely impoverished neighborhood utterly devastated by litter, and we kept walking as the sky began to stain gold in the late evening light. We explored the ruins of Cartago first. Dozens, hundreds of people filled the town square.

Eventually we came upon the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles in downtown Cartago. The sun was beginning to set and the plaza was packed with hundreds of thousands of people. Estimates put the number of supplicants between 800,000 and 2.5 million between 25 July and 2 August each year. I believe it.

As luck would have it, we found our way into the chapel at the commencement of some kind of ceremony, and La Negrita was being carried in her special glass case with her golden throne. I honestly wouldn’t have known it was her; she is so small and surrounded by so many loud and precious beauties. The faithful carried her out into the plaza to who knows where, and my friend and I walked out behind her to witness an understated rainy season sunset.

There she is!

We ducked into a seedy bar to have a small meal and stopped at a market before setting off again; it was full dark now, though the town still had the feel of an important day about it. We walked a ways until we could catch a short bus close to Paraíso. There we disembarked and walked another 40 minutes or so, mostly downhill in the pitch black through farmland, to a hostel that clung to the side of the mountain. The clouds were thick, but it was clear the view in the morning would be spectacular.

Spoiler alert: it WAS.

We let ourselves in around 10:30 PM and greeted the owner, who supplied us with home-brewed peach beer. We threw our things onto beds in the dorm under lurid paintings of superhero sloths and removed our shoes – having walked about 33 kilometers (20 miles). Meanwhile, a little boy wearing a cape zoomed around us. When I asked him what his name was, he said, “Power Ranger Mega Force ROJO!”

A campfire was lit that night and we sat beside it in the deep silence of the deep country.

The next morning my body protested movement. But eventually I pulled myself out of bed and took a shower and drank some fresh coffee. The view was indeed amazing.

We breakfasted and slowly prepared to leave. Power Ranger Rojo walked up to me and tapped me on my arm. I looked down to see him smiling shyly up at me, holding a tiny red flower in his hands. I exclaimed over it and put it in my hair. By the time I was waving goodbye, Power Ranger Rojo cried, “¿Dónde está la flor?” I stopped everything and waited for him to present me a new flower, as I had lost the old one, asked him for a little goodbye kiss on the cheek, and headed up the steep hill to the gate. Such a little Latin heartbreaker.

My friend and I walked away from town, down the mountain into the valley below. We cut through a workmen’s trail, barely usable for vehicles, though clearly it had been.

We walked all the way down into Ujarrás next to the Lago de Cachí, to see Costa Rica’s oldest standing church Nuestra Señora de la Limpia Concepción del Rescate de Ujarrás. It is a shell of a building now, originally built between 1651 and 1659. It is framed by tropical trees draped with Spanish moss, called barba de viejo or “old man’s beard.” It was beautiful, and the day was beginning to simmer with heat down in the valley.

Right and truly tired, my friend and I wandered into… honestly, I don’t recall the name of the town, just followed a road until we found a bus stop. We took a bus through Paraíso into Cartago, but it stopped and everyone was made to get off because there was a massive oxcart parade going through town and vehicles couldn’t get through.

We watched the parades and the weatherworn Tico cowboys for a while, and eventually got across to the main bus station. We caught the next bus to San José. We both fell immediately asleep for the ride back to the capital. My friend got off in Curridabat and I rode a tiny bit longer into San Pedro. I arrived at my gate just as it started to rain for the first time since I left.

Costa Rica is a complex and beautiful nation with a rich culture hidden from tourists under all the pura vida stuff.

We do live pura vida here, but it is not always in the way you might think.