Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Osogbo: A Grove the World Agreed to Protect

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Osogbo: A Grove the World Agreed to Protect

The spiritual home of Oshun's worship is the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove on the banks of her river at Osogbo, in Osun State, Nigeria, a forest dense with shrines, sculpture and sanctuaries dedicated to Oshun and other orisha. Once such groves ringed most Yoruba towns; Osun-Osogbo is among the last to survive largely intact, kept alive as an active place of worship and renewed each year by the great Osun-Osogbo festival, which draws worshippers and pilgrims from Nigeria and the diaspora to the river. In 2005 UNESCO inscribed the grove as a World Heritage Site, recognising it as a living sacred landscape rather than a ruin.

Across the Atlantic, Oshun is worshipped as Ochun / Oshun in Cuban Lucumi and Santeria and as Oxum in Brazilian Candomble, keeping her association with rivers, love, gold and fertility. As with other orisha, devotees under slavery paired her with a Catholic figure, in Cuba most often Our Lady of Charity (La Caridad del Cobre), the patroness of Cuba, as a means of continuing African worship; the tradition understands this as correspondence and survival, not the replacement of one figure by another.

Her presence in the wider world today, from the festival at Osogbo to diaspora communities across the Americas, marks Oshun as one of the most vital of the living orisha.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.