Mexico Guide
Mexico City
Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe
The Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Metro La Villa Basílica, line 6) is in fact a whole series of churches, chapels and shrines set around an enormous stone-flagged plaza and climbing up the rocky hillock where the miracles that led to its foundation occurred. The basilica can be reached by Metro, by buses and peseros north along Reforma ("Metro La Villa"), or by trolleybus along Reforma from Metro Hidalgo ("Indios Verdes").
The Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's first indigenous saint, is still the nation's most popular – you'll see her image in churches throughout the country. The Virgin's banner has been fought under by both sides of almost every conflict the nation has ever seen, most famously when Hidalgo seized on it as the flag of Mexican Independence. According to the legend, a Christianized native, Juan Diego, was walking over the hill here (formerly dedicated to the Aztec earth goddess Tonantzin) on his way to the monastery at Tlatelolco one morning in December 1531, when he was stopped by a brilliant vision of the Virgin, who ordered him, in Nahuatl, to go to the bishop and tell him to build a church on the hill. Bishop Juan de Zumarraga was unimpressed until, on December 12, the Virgin reappeared, ordering Diego to gather roses from the top of the hill and take them to the bishop. Doing so, he bundled the flowers in his cloak, and when he opened it before the bishop he found the image of the dark-skinned Virgin imprinted into the cloth. Today the cloak hangs above the altar in the gigantic modern basilica, which takes its name from the celebrated (and equally swarthy) Virgin in the monastery of Guadalupe in Spain.