The devotion is inseparable from the mining town of El Cobre (Spanish for copper) in eastern Cuba, near Santiago, where royal copper mines were worked from the sixteenth century largely by enslaved and later freed Africans, the cobreros. The small statue of the Virgin, found floating in the Bay of Nipe according to the tradition, was brought to the mining district, and there a shrine grew around her. Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the community of El Cobre, and especially its people of colour, made her their own, and her sanctuary became a centre of Cuban Marian devotion drawing pilgrims from across the island. The Virgin is shown as a small crowned figure in golden or yellow robes, holding the Christ Child and standing above the three little figures in their boat, the three Juans, on the tossing waves of the bay.
Devotion crystallised into formal recognition twice in the twentieth century: on 10 May 1916, Pope Benedict XV, acting on a petition from veterans of the Cuban War of Independence, declared Our Lady of Charity Patroness of Cuba, and on 20 December 1936, during the Eucharistic Congress at Santiago de Cuba, her image received a canonical coronation. The shrine has since drawn three successive popes to Cuba, John Paul II in 1998, Benedict XVI in 2012 and Francis in 2015, each visiting El Cobre in turn, a continuity of papal attention unusual for a Marian devotion rooted so specifically in a single mining community's local history.