The río Guadalajara comes down from the Cordillera Central and crosses the valley floor at Buga, a little under a thousand metres above sea level. A poor woman washing clothes at that water, in the account the shrine keeps, took a small crucifix out of the current. The river afterwards changed its bed and drew south, leaving dry the ground by the place of the finding, and the first church of the devotion was raised on it.
Tradition places the finding in the middle of the sixteenth century — the shrine gives 1550, the oldest printed telling 1580. What a pilgrim climbs the stairs to see is not carved wood: the figure is modelled from fine mud and grass like that on the banks of the Guadalajara, about a metre and a quarter high, a little over a metre and a half with its cross, dark, dressed in embroidered cloth and kept behind glass in the camarín above the high altar.
Buga is one of the oldest towns in Colombia and one of its heritage Pueblos Patrimonio, some 115,000 people in low colonial and Republican streets 66 km north of Cali. Millions of pilgrims come each year, and the blocks around the basilica are given over to stalls of medals, bracelets and printed images.
📜 History & Spiritual Significance
The woman of the story was a laundress who lived in a hut of thatch by the river, and she was saving to buy a crucifix — seventy reales, the price of one brought down from Quito. On the day she was to hand over the money she met a father of a family being taken to prison for a debt of exactly seventy reales, and gave him her savings instead. Days later, washing at the river, a small crucifix came to her hands on the current. She made a little altar for it and kept it in a wooden box. At night there was knocking, and the crucifix and its box had grown. The parish priest and the leading men of the town came, found she had neither money nor connections to obtain such an image, and held it for a miracle. The shrine puts the miracle in the charity rather than in the growth: before the image of the Lord, the image of the man in need.
Devotees broke fragments off the image for relics until it was ruined, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century an inspector sent by the Bishop of Popayán ordered it burnt. In the flames, the tradition holds, it did not burn but sweated for two days; neighbours soaked cotton in the liquid and kept it, and cures were reported. Luisa de la Espada, daughter of one of the men who paid for the first hermitage, swore that she had seen the crucifix in the fire unburnt and giving off an oily liquid.
The first building on the ground was small, and the town called it la ermita, the hermitage. Earthquakes brought down one hermitage after another, and of the last of them only the bell tower is left. The Redemptorists were given charge of the image and its cult in 1884, and they keep the shrine and its parish. The present church rose beside the old tower — close to five million bricks by the shrine's own reckoning, laid with Roman mortar and neither iron nor cement — and was blessed on 2 August 1907, the feast of St Alphonsus Liguori, founder of the order that serves it. Pope Pius XI gave the church the rank of minor basilica.
A machete opened the right side of the torso in 1937, and the gap showed the figure was not carved wood as the town had assumed; the artisan called in after a further attack in 1969 found it modelled from mud and grass. The image is kept behind bulletproof glass. The machete is in the shrine's museum with the three pieces of a dagger that broke in the air when a man went for a priest at the altar, and the shrine's own teaching is set against both objects: an image works no miracles, and Christ does.
The Señor de los Milagros is invoked for impossible causes and desperate ones, and is patron of the Colombian armed forces. Through the narco-violence of the late 1980s and early 1990s the image was carried through the principal cities of the country in public prayer for peace.
☩ Pilgrimage Sites in Buga
Basilica of Our Lord of the Miracles
Basílica Menor del Señor de los Milagros
The shrine of the Señor de los Milagros, kept by the Redemptorist community, stands in the centre of Buga with a broad plazoleta in front of it. Stairs behind the high altar climb to the camarín, the chamber where the image is venerated at close quarters; above the image on the high altar stands a figure of the risen Christ. Petitions and thanksgivings are left in the Capilla de la Milagrosa. Beside the church, the Museo del Señor de los Milagros holds ex-votos and written testimonies, old photographs, a model of the temple, furniture from the house of the woman who found the crucifix, the machete and the broken dagger. A terrace looks out over the historic centre.
The earthquake of 10 August 2026 cracked the central dome and brought material down. The interior is closed while the dome is repaired, with scaffolding inside up to the crown of it. The camarín took no damage: pilgrims reach it by entering and leaving from carrera 13, and the museum and the confessionals are open. Mass is celebrated in the open air in the plazoleta. The national government has committed money for the restoration, which the Ministry of Culture supervises because the church is a bien de interés cultural, and the reopening waits on the structural work. The shrine's own site carries the current position.
Waterfall of the Miracles
Cascada de los Milagros
The río Guadalajara comes down from the mountains east of the town, and the road towards the village of Alaska climbs 17 km beside it. From the old bridge at the place tradition gives for the finding, a walk upstream along the water reaches a fall the people call the Cascada de los Milagros. Buses and taxis run out to Alaska.
🕯️ Annual Feast Days & Celebrations
Our Lord of the Miracles — 14 September
The great day of Buga. A novena of nine days runs up to it, each day given in turn to the sick, to families, to children and the young, to the town's authorities and to its merchants, with a serenata and processions through the streets; the largest procession and the solemn Mass close it. Religious acts, music and traditional dances fill the city for the feast.
Day of Our Lord of the Miracles — the 14th of each month
The fourteenth of every month is kept for the Señor de los Milagros, and the shrine follows its Sunday and feast-day order of Masses on that day.
🛏️ Where to Stay
Hotel Casa Encanto (hotel) — A colonial house of eight rooms on Calle 3, a block and a half from the basilica, with air conditioning, private bathrooms and wifi. Website
Hotel Guadalajara (hotel) — On Calle 1 Sur, declared part of the architectural heritage of Valle del Cauca; single, double, triple and quadruple rooms, with a pool, a restaurant and a spa. Website
🚗 Getting There
By Air: Buga has no airport. The nearest is Alfonso Bonilla Aragón International Airport at Palmira, which serves Cali, 15 km away; from the airport the road to Buga takes under an hour.
By Bus: Buses leave Cali's terminal through the day and take an hour to an hour and a half. Expreso Palmira, Líneas del Valle and Expreso Brasilia run between twenty-two and thirty-four services daily; they arrive at the Terminal de Transportes de Buga on Calle 1 Sur. From Medellín the journey is about eight hours, from Bogotá about ten, and Buga's terminal is well connected to Armenia and Manizales in the coffee region.
By Car: From Cali the Troncal de Occidente — the Panamericana, on the right bank of the río Cauca — runs 66 km to Buga in about forty-five minutes, dual carriageway with two tolls. The left-bank alternative, the Panorama by way of Yumbo, is single carriageway and takes about an hour.
Local Transport: Buses and taxis leave for the village of Alaska, 17 km east, for the river of the finding and the waterfall.
📚 Further Reading
Online Resources:
Novena de Rogativas al Señor de los Milagros — The shrine's own novena, free to download: the history of the devotion, nine daily considerations written by the Redemptorists of Buga with biblical commentary, the gozos, the prayer for the sick and the hymns. In Spanish.
El Milagroso de Buga: una leyenda de resistencia. Lectura desde lo simbólico — Antonio José Echeverry P. of the Universidad del Valle on the origins of the devotion in the colonial Cauca valley. Open access, in Spanish.
🎥 Recommended Videos
Misa de Sanación Señor de los Milagros — Buga — A healing Mass at the shrine, broadcast by Telepacífico. In Spanish.
Presidente anuncia plan de reconstrucción tras terremoto — Blu Radio on the national plan for rebuilding after the August 2026 earthquake, and the money assigned to the basilica. In Spanish.
🔗 Useful Links
Basílica del Señor de los Milagros — The shrine's own site, with the order of Masses and confessions and news of the restoration.
Historia del Cristo de las Aguas — The shrine's account of the finding, the fire and the image, with its own reading of the first miracle.
Buga — Colombia Travel — The national tourism board on the town and its surroundings.
🧭 Nearby Pilgrimage Destinations
Venecia (238 km north) — The adobe Santuario de San José in the coffee hills of Antioquia, raised to a sanctuary by Pope Francis, with first-degree relics of St Vincent of Zaragoza and St Eusebius of Vercelli.
Chiquinquirá (335 km north-east) — Colombia's national Marian shrine, where the canvas of Our Lady of the Rosary was found renewed in 1586 and Dominican friars have kept the custody since 1636.
Las Lajas (372 km south) — The Marian sanctuary of the Diocese of Ipiales, in the far south of the country, built over the image of Our Lady of Las Lajas.
🪶 Closing Reflection
"Prefirió la libertad de un hombre a la posesión de una imagen." — "She preferred a man's freedom to the possession of an image."
— Basílica del Señor de los Milagros, Historia del Cristo de las Aguas
