Chimayó in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is the best-known pilgrimage spot in New Mexico. An estimated 300,000 people visit the site throughout the year, according to a National Park Service history of Chimayó. Tens of thousands make pilgrimages on Good Friday. Famously, some people walk all the way from Albuquerque to El Santuario de Chimayó.
Chimayó was believed to be a site of healing before Spain conquered modern-day New Mexico. According to the NPS history, Pueblo and Tewa people used Chimayó for healing before the Spanish occupation.
In 1813, Don Bernardo Abeyta wanted to build a chapel dedicated to Our Lord of Esquipulas on land that he believed had healing powers. There were so many stories of miraculous healings that a larger shrine was built in 1816, according to the NPS history.
The Santuario de Chimayó is an adobe church nestled in the dusty hills of New Mexico, north of Santa Fe. Each year during the week before Easter, the secondary roads winding through these hills toward Chimayó are filled with pilgrims. Some walk only seven miles from Española while others walk thirty miles from Santa Fe. A few pilgrims walk more than seventy miles, all the way from Albuquerque. It is estimated that more than 60,000 pilgrims come to Chimayó during Easter week, making this the largest ritual pilgrimage in the United States.
It is sometimes referred to as the “Lourdes of the Southwest,” after the healing shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in southern France. The Pueblo Native Americans of this region have long known Chimayó to be a sacred place of healing, famous for its restorative mud springs. Then it became part of the world of early Spanish Catholicism. According to legend, on a Good Friday early in the 1800s, a villager found a cross buried in the earth at Chimayó. He brought the cross to his local church, but the cross disappeared. Once more the villager found it in the earth at Chimayó. The astonished villagers took this as a sign to build a church, which was completed around 1815. Hispanic Americans and Native Americans have been coming to Chimayó on pilgrimage for over a century.
Today’s Good Friday pilgrims wait for hours to make their way into the sanctuary of this simple, adobe church. They offer prayers, light candles, and receive words of blessing. The final destination of these pilgrims, however, is not the church sanctuary but a small chapel adjacent to the sanctuary. Here pilgrims enter only two or three at a time, ducking through a low doorway.On the floor is an open pit of earth just over a foot wide. It is said to be healing earth, tierra bendita. Pilgrims touch it reverently to their heads and limbs, sometimes gathering a bit of it in a plastic bag, before moving on to make room for a few more of the thousands who wait their turn. The walls of the room just outside this chapel are covered with the canes and crutches of those who have been healed here at Chimayó. Tacked up among them are notes of thanksgiving, testimonials, and little paintings called milagros, “miracles,” depicting some particular story of grace and healing.
Like pilgrimages the world over, the journey is as important as the destination. These Good Friday pilgrims are called penitentes; their penitential pilgrimage involves taking on some hardship, some deliberate suffering. As the priest explains, “In coming to Chimayó, people participate in Christ’s journey to Calvary.” Some penitentes do this quite literally, carrying homemade crosses along the road, some of them as much as eight feet tall.
This pilgrimage has gained increasing popularity in the past three decades. The Hispanic Catholics who have come from all over the Southwest for generations have been joined by a wide range of Christians-Catholic and Protestant alike-who are just beginning to discover the power of pilgrimage. They are joined by many from the Sikh, Buddhist, and New Age communities in New Mexico. In 1983, for the first time, Native ceremonial runners carried sacred earth from Chimayó to the “Atomic City” at Los Alamos to demonstrate religious opposition to the nuclear weapons that could destroy the earth. This was the beginning of a new era of ceremonial running that has linked Chimayó to the peace movement. Since the 1990s, Peace Prayer Day, sponsored by the Sikh Dharma, has taken place in the mountains above nearby Española and begins with the cross-country journey of ceremonial runners who start at Chimayó long before dawn.
Archbishop John Wester has a liturgy to lead on Good Friday, so he cannot spend the whole morning on a pilgrimage, but he does a shorter walk beginning about a mile from Chimayó.