Adventures in Pura Vida: Basilica de La Virgin de Los Angles

Today for Spanish class we went on a field trip to Cartago, the colonial capital of Costa Rica to see the Basilica de La Virgin de Los Angeles; the patron saint of Costa Rica, and their local market. Cartago is about a 30 min drive from Veritas and all the intermediate dos classes went together on a microbus. The ride down was pretty interesting because I got to talk to the one older married couple that is in the program too. The older man’s name is Charles and he is a doctor and director of a physician’s assistant program for a college in Massatustus. He came down here with his wife to work on his Spanish and set up an internship/intensive Spanish program for his students. They will come down here for a month, take Spanish classes in the morning and work at a local hospital in the afternoons. I thought that sounded like a great program, since there is such a need for Spanish language knowledge in the medical field right now.

We got to the Basilica in time to see the morning mass with the children from the cathedral school. This is two weeks before the biggest religious holiday in Costa Rica, and it’s centered on this church. Just this week many people began a pilgrimage walk from their homes to this Basilica to celebrate the Patron Saint (Virgin de Los Angles) of Costa Rica on Aug 2^nd. The whole cathedral was in preparation for this and they are having many celebrations leading up to it. Today was when the children dressed up in traditional clothes and made a procession to the church to celebrate the culture and history of one of Costa Rica’s oldest cities. We watched part of the mass before moving on to the place under the church where the Virgin appeared to a little indigenous girl. The Virgin came in the form of a stone stature which a little girl found while gathering firewood. She thought it would make a great doll and took it home. The next day she went out again to get firewood and saw the doll again “oh great! Now I have two dolls to play with” and she took it home. However when she got home and looked in the box for the first doll it was gone. She locked up the statue she had found this day and went to bed. The next morning it was gone as well. The little girl ran to the forest and found the statue in the same place; she didn’t know what to do so she took it to the priest. The priest didn’t pay much attention at first and just placed it on his desk to look at later. The next day he couldn’t find it and went to the spot in the woods and there the statue was. They decided that this was a special place and that they should build a church to the Virgin there. Since then the church had been reconstructed several times since its located close to a volcano and had been damaged by several earthquakes. This church is known for producing many miracles and every year people make the pilgrimage to visit the church and ask the Virgin to appeal to God for help. In the shrine there are lots of cases of miniature silver body parts and things that represent things that have been healed after supplicants came to the church. As I learned, places where the Virgin has appeared and have resulted in miracles often have springs of holy water. This is true of Los Angeles as well, I bought a little container in the shape of the Virgin statue that I could put some of the holy water in!

After the cathedral, we went to the local market to practice our Spanish. Our assignment was to find a fruit or vegetable and ask the vendor where and how it was grown, and what it was used for. There were so many choices and things I had never seen before. I picked a green circular vegetable that turned out to be a variant of a cucumber. The man was informative, it not very personable. However after I had finished I walked around (and got a cheesy bread empanada thing) and met up with Kim (another girl in my class). She is a combined Spanish and nursing major, and is interested in alternative medicine. For here food she had found a Costa Rican herbalist and was learning about the different natural remedies for various ailments. The vendor’s name was Victor, he was really nice and informative he showed us all sorts of different plants and their uses and he even gave Kim samples of everything to dry and take back to the US for her capstone project.

It was a really awesome class, but I wish we had had more time to spend at the market. We spent a lot of time waiting for one of the girls to be checked out. She had gotten a concussion a few months ago after giving blood (she fainted) and now experiences periods of sudden exhaustion and semi-seizures. They are worse if she stays out late, and she started to feel bad in the shrine. They called an ambulance to check her out. She turned out to be fine, but she needs rest and her blood sugar was very low. I think she might be anemic as well… It was unavoidable, but it did cut our trip a bit short. To make up for it I’m going to go to the central market in San Jose with some friends tomorrow so that I can see more of the new fruits and veggies.

My evening classes today got cancelled, but I am going to go back to campus this afternoon to watch the music and arts festival that’s happening today. Afterward, Randdie and I are going to the movies where were going to get VIP lounge seats and pina coladas!