Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe
— the cloak the empire could not explain.
Not only on a wall.
“The most-visited Catholic shrine in the world. The new basilica was completed in 1976 to a circular plan by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez; the old basilica from 1709 stands beside it, slowly settling into the soft lake-bed clay. Inside, behind the altar, hangs the tilma of Juan Diego, the image left, by tradition, on Tepeyac Hill in December 1531.
Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe stands on Tepeyac Hill at the northern edge of Mexico City, in the Gustavo A. Madero borough, about six kilometres north of the Zócalo. The complex draws roughly twenty million pilgrims a year, the largest annual visitation of any Catholic shrine in the world. The new basilica, finished in 1976, was designed by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, the architect of the National Museum of Anthropology, and seats around ten thousand under a circular green-copper roof. The old basilica, consecrated in 1709, leans visibly beside it.
The old basilica was built between 1695 and 1709 in the Mexican Baroque, with four octagonal towers and a façade of tezontle, the red volcanic stone used across colonial Mexico City. By the mid-twentieth century its foundations had subsided so badly that the building was closed in 1976. The new basilica beside it is poured concrete and steel with a fabric-like circular roof, deliberately columnless so the tilma can be seen from any seat in the nave. Pedro Ramírez Vázquez also designed the National Museum of Anthropology and the Aztec Stadium.
The feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe falls on the twelfth of December, the anniversary of the apparition tradition that locates the image's origin on Tepeyac in 1531. The vigil draws pilgrims from across Mexico and Central America for as long as a week, with around ten million people passing through the basilica in the days around the feast. Pope John Paul II canonised the visionary Juan Diego on July 31, 2002 in this basilica, in the only saint-making ceremony he conducted outside Saint Peter's.