Honduras

Western Honduras holds Copan, one of the great ceremonial cities of the Maya world, where dynasties raised stelae to their deified ancestors and the ballcourt and altars staged a religion of calendars, sacrifice and royal communion with the gods until the city's ninth century collapse. The Lenca peoples of the highlands, whose compostura ceremonies still pay the earth for harvests, and the Garifuna of the north coast, whose dugu rites feast the ancestors with drumming, dance and cassava beer, kept distinct sacred worlds through and beyond the Spanish conquest.

Colonial Catholicism organised itself around Comayagua's cathedral and the mining and cattle towns, and after independence the liberal reforms of the 1880s disestablished the church early by Central American standards, leaving it culturally dominant but institutionally thin, chronically short of priests and reliant on lay delegates of the word in the countryside. That thinness is one reason the Evangelical wave that swept Central America from the 1970s ran strongest here: Pentecostal congregations multiplied through the barrios and villages, hurricane disasters and migration deepened the demand for tight communities of mutual aid, and by the 2010s surveys were finding Evangelicals at parity with Catholics or ahead, making Honduras one of the first mainland Latin American countries to approach a post Catholic majority.

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.