Chimayo, NM: America's Own Lourdes[Original headline: New mexico: Religious site draws tourists, pilgrims]
CHIMAYO, New Mexico - The line stretches halfway through the sanctuary, past rows of families kneeling and praying in simple wooden pews, past the colorful, primitive paintings surrounding the gold-embellished altar. Nearly everyone waiting patiently in line carries two things: a rosary and a small plastic bag.
The rosary's purpose is obvious; the reason for the plastic bag becomes clear the closer you get to the destination, a tiny room off the Santuario de Chimayo. It contains a small, shallow pit called "el posito," or Little Healing Well. And it is because of this room, with its makeshift altar and dirt floor, that this 200-year-old adobe church is sometimes called the American Lourdes.
Like that French shrine, the Santuario has become known as a place of healing. Legend has it that because the church was expressly built on land where a crucifix mysteriously appeared nearly 200 years ago, its dirt is sacred. Ever since, people have believed that touching this dirt, rubbing it on a wound or an affliction, could bring about a cure.
For years, this was largely a local place, somewhere people had to be told about by a friend or a family member, or stumble across by accident while driving the back roads. But today, like so many places in New Mexico, its fame has spread. Only 45 minutes north of Santa Fe on a road touted as a scenic route to Taos, it attracts the devout, and the merely curious, from all over.
Visitors on this recent sunny Saturday afternoon include tourists from Germany, New York and France, plus two busloads of Roman Catholic pilgrims from Albuquerque, two hours south.
All seem to have immediately grasped the procedure. After waiting for as long as 30 minutes, the pilgrims enter the tiny room two or three at a time, kneel beside the shallow pit, and use a metal cup to scoop dirt into the plastic bags. (Some use their hands instead.) Some stop briefly to pray; a few immediately rub the dirt on an arthritic hand or a sore foot.
The long room leading to the healing room is lined with old crutches and canes cast off by the cured, and its walls are covered with pictures, crosses, statues and handwritten testimonials and prayers of thanks. And many tourists and locals seem convinced the site is sacred.
Neither pilgrims nor locals, however, want to answer other, more nagging questions - such as, why there seems to be an unending supply of soft, loose dirt in the pit, no matter how many people line up to take some away.
Not that skeptics can't enjoy a day trip to Chimayo as well. The drive alone is worth the time spent, particularly if you take the roundabout way through Nambé, with its rust-colored adobe church perched picture-perfect on the side of a mountain.
Many plan trips around lunch at Restaurante Rancho de Chimayo, a sprawling hacienda turned restaurant, but people really come for the beautiful gardens and warm setting.
Others come to shop, particularly for the locally made weavings, which families have produced in the area for hundreds of years, passing the techniques from generation to generation.
Some come to see New Mexico as it once was, and still is in a few isolated places. One of the best spots for that is Plaza del Cerro, built about 300 years ago by Spanish settlers. Constantly at war with the Native American settlements, the Spanish built their simple adobe buildings right next to each other, forming a solid adobe rectangle with a large, grassy plaza in the middle.
The plaza was the center of the community then, says Chris Brown, the part-time curator of the small museum just off the plaza. People raised vegetables there, kept chickens there, gathered there to talk and celebrate, Brown says.
Today, the plaza is still home to a handful of people, although one side, the site of the former chapel, is somewhat dilapidated and forlorn, its adobe bricks crumbling and its roof caving in. But other homes are well-maintained and obviously lived in. This includes a corner ominously posted with "no tours" signs, warning visitors not to get too close.
Like so much in Chimayo, there's a story there, too.
A dozen years ago, Robert Redford wanted to film part of "The Milagro Beanfield War" on this plaza. Most locals were receptive, but a few didn't like the idea and fought it.
"They said all the attention would turn this into Disneyland," Brown says, smiling. "So he went to Truchas (a nearby village) instead. And it's exactly the same today as it was then. So it probably wouldn't have made any difference."
Then again, why take the risk? In Chimayo, there's something to be said for tradition.
• Story originally published in •
The Seattle Times / WA | Patricia Rodriguez - July 1 2001
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