The national devotion of Honduras centres on one of the smallest cult images in the Americas, a cedar statuette of the Virgin barely six centimetres tall. Tradition holds that in 1747 a labourer named Alejandro Colindres, sleeping in a field near the hamlet of Suyapa outside Tegucigalpa, was jabbed in the side by something in the night and found the little image in the morning; taken home, it began to be credited with cures and favours, and a chapel rose over the spot.
Pope Pius XII declared Our Lady of Suyapa patroness of Honduras in 1925, and her feast on 3 February brings pilgrims in the hundreds of thousands to the shrine complex, where a vast modern basilica stands beside the older small church in which the Virgin, dressed in jewelled robes that dwarf her, is usually kept. The image has been stolen more than once, most famously in 1986, when it was recovered unharmed after a search that gripped the country, an episode Hondurans retell as proof that the little Virgin looks after herself.
Suyapa's crowds cut across the country's deepening Catholic and Evangelical divide as a marker of national identity: the armed forces hold her as patroness, buses and lottery stalls carry her image, and the february feria remains the one week when Tegucigalpa's attention converges on a figure small enough to hold in one hand.