Pilgrimage Sites in Argentina

Two million pilgrims walk to Luján every October. The neo-Gothic basilica 68 km from Buenos Aires holds Our Lady of Luján, patroness of Argentina, and the walk out from the capital is the country's defining act of popular devotion. At San Nicolás, upriver on the Paraná, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Rosary marks a series of approved Marian apparitions.

The north-east holds the older shrines. The Basilica of Our Lady of Itatí at Itatí raises an 88-metre dome above the Paraná, a marker visible to the hundreds of thousands who arrive each year. Nearby Corrientes, founded in 1588, preserves the Cruz de los Milagros — the founding cross that resisted burning — together with the cathedral, convent and churches that grew up around it.

Buenos Aires spreads its devotions across the grid: the Metropolitan Cathedral, where Santa María del Buen Ayre holds a caravel in her hands; the Basilica of Pilar in Recoleta; and the shrine of San Cayetano in Liniers, where the longest queue in Argentina forms every 7 August to ask for bread and work. In the hills west of Córdoba, Villa Cura Brochero keeps the body of St José Gabriel Brochero, the cura gaucho who rode the Valle de Traslasierra on a mule for forty years and was canonized in 2016; pilgrims reach him on foot over the 28 kilometres of the Camino del Peregrino.