Chalma

The Augustinian friars who reached this canyon in the 1530s found a cult already old. In one of the caves stood a dark, cylindrical idol the Nahua called Oztoteotl, the lord of the cave, a figure that tradition links to Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror and god of night and human fate. Pilgrims walked for days to reach it, carried flowers and incense, bathed in the river, and went into the cave to ask for healing.

This was not a quiet local shrine. The rite drew people from across the central highlands, and some accounts hold that it once included human sacrifice. When the friars set out to convert the region, they aimed straight at Chalma.

According to tradition, the friars pressed the local people to abandon the idol, and around 1539 the cylindrical figure was found broken to pieces. In its place, the account holds, stood a life-sized Black Christ of the same dark stone. No one claimed to have carved it.

The image stayed in the cave for about 143 years. In 1683 the Augustinians moved it down to a church built on the canyon floor and founded a monastery to attend to the pilgrims. In 1783 the Spanish crown placed the sanctuary under royal protection, and its full name still calls it the Royal Monastery and Sanctuary of Our Lord and Saint Michael of the Caves of Chalma. The image described in the old accounts was later lost to an 18th-century fire, and the Christ venerated today is a recreation.

Before most pilgrims reach the church they stop at the ahuehuete, an immense old cypress whose Nahuatl name means old man of the water. A spring rises at its roots and feeds pools where pilgrims bathe, often fully clothed. First-time visitors circle the tree, take a crown of flowers, and wash before going on.

At the sanctuary itself, groups dance at the entrance in costumes brought from towns all over the country, an act pilgrims believe helps cleanse them. The bathing, the flower crowns, and the dance are close to what pre-Hispanic pilgrims performed here, carried into a Catholic frame. A Mexican saying still names a hopeless task as one you could not manage even by going to dance at Chalma.

Chalma is a small town in the municipality of Malinalco that lives almost entirely to serve its pilgrims. It lies about 11 kilometres east of Malinalco and roughly 95 kilometres from Mexico City, reached by a road that winds down into the canyon.

On ordinary days it is busy. On the first Friday of Lent, during Holy Week, at Pentecost, and around the 1 July feast, tens of thousands of people arrive at once, many on foot and some on their knees for the last stretch. Across a year the sanctuary counts on the order of two million visitors, which places it second only to the Basilica of Guadalupe.