Costa Rica's patroness is a small dark image of the Virgin and Child, carved in grey black stone and barely twenty centimetres tall, known to everyone as La Negrita. Tradition sets her finding on 2 August 1635, when a young woman named Juana Pereira, gathering wood on a hillside at Cartago reserved for the mixed race poor, found the little figure on a rock; twice she carried it home and twice it returned by itself to the stone, and the same happened when the priest locked it away, until the message was accepted that the Virgin had chosen her own ground.
The basilica of Our Lady of the Angels now rises over that rock, and beneath the church flows a spring whose water pilgrims bottle and carry home. Pius XI declared her patroness of Costa Rica in 1926. Each year in the days before 2 August the country performs the romeria, walking to Cartago from San Jose and from every province, a river of people that in recent years has been estimated at as much as a fifth or a quarter of the national population, some finishing the last metres to the shrine on their knees. The walls beside the image hold cabinets of tiny silver votive limbs, hearts and houses, the exvotos of favours received. Chosen ground, found by a poor woman on the margins of a colonial town, La Negrita has become the one devotion that still assembles the whole of Catholic Costa Rica in motion.