The Basilica of Our Lady of Aparecida, in the city of Aparecida in Sao Paulo state, is the national shrine of Brazil's patron saint and, drawing seven to eight million pilgrims a year, the most visited Catholic pilgrimage site in South America. It houses a small terracotta statue of the Immaculate Conception, blackened by centuries of candle smoke and river silt, that three fishermen recovered from the Paraiba do Sul River in October 1717 while struggling to catch fish for a dinner honoring a passing colonial governor.
According to the traditional account, the fishermen's nets came up empty for hours until one of them, Joao Alves, cast his net a final time in frustration and pulled up the statue's headless body; a second cast recovered the missing head. Their nets are said to have filled with fish immediately afterward, and the discovery, followed by that abundant catch, became the founding story of the devotion that grew around the recovered image, which local Catholics began calling Nossa Senhora Aparecida, Our Lady Who Appeared.
Devotion to the statue spread through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries among enslaved and free Brazilians alike, cutting across the racial and class lines that structured colonial and imperial Brazilian society far more rigidly in most other contexts, and the shrine that grew up around it became one of the few devotional sites where that cross-cutting popularity was itself part of the story Brazilian Catholics told about the image.