Guadalupe
— — the hill twenty million walkers reach each year.
Not only on a wall.
“The basilica sits at the foot of Tepeyac Hill in the Gustavo A. Madero borough on the northern edge of Mexico City, on the site of a small chapel raised in the 1530s. The current circular basilica was finished in 1976 to a design by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez. Around twenty million pilgrims arrive each year, most of them in the days around the twelfth of December, walking the last miles on foot.
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 Basílica de Santa María de Guadalupe stands at the base of Tepeyac Hill in the Gustavo A. Madero borough of Mexico City, on a plaza shared by the older eighteenth-century basilica, a baptistry, a parish church, and the small chapel on the hill itself. The site marks the tradition of the 1531 apparitions reported by the indigenous farmer Juan Diego. By visitor count it is among the most visited Catholic shrines in the world, drawing roughly twenty million pilgrims each year, with the heaviest crowds concentrated in the days leading to 12 December.
Two basilicas share the plaza. The older one, dedicated in 1709 in carved tezontle and sandstone, has been sinking unevenly into the soft clay of the former Lake Texcoco basin for three centuries, and its bell towers now lean visibly. The newer circular basilica beside it was designed by the Mexican architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and consecrated in 1976. Its concrete shell rises without internal columns to seat roughly ten thousand worshippers under a single copper roof, with the framed image of the Virgin visible from every seat.
The plaza is open daily and free to enter; the modern basilica typically opens around six in the morning and closes around nine at night. Mexico City Metro Line 6 stops at La Villa-Basílica, a short walk from the main gate. The image of the Virgin is displayed above the main altar of the new basilica, viewed from a moving walkway behind the sanctuary. The road up Tepeyac Hill passes the older chapels of the Pocito and the Capilla del Cerrito at the summit, where the apparitions are traditionally placed.