In December 1531, ten years after the conquest, a recently baptised farmer named Juan Diego met a young woman on Tepeyac hill who spoke to him in his own Nahuatl and asked that a church be built there. The image she left on his cloak — a woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, her face neither Spanish nor Indian — did what no sermon had managed: within a decade, millions of the peoples of Mexico had asked for baptism. Guadalupe is why the Church in the Americas looks the way it does.

The Basilica at Tepeyac is now among the most visited shrines on earth, and the tilma still hangs there, its pigment and its survival unexplained after nearly five hundred years. Our Lady's own words to Juan Diego remain the reason people come: Am I not here, I who am your Mother? Nearby Tlatelolco marks where she appeared to his uncle Juan Bernardino and healed him, and the Zócalo's Metropolitan Cathedral stands over the ruins of the Aztec sacred precinct it replaced.

Beyond the capital, colonial Mexico is a country of extraordinary churches built by communities that took the faith and made it their own. Puebla's Rosary Chapel is gilded from floor to vault; the sanctuary of Our Lady of Remedies stands on top of the largest pyramid in the world by volume; Oaxaca's Santo Domingo and Solitude, Taxco's Santa Prisca, and the Basilica of Our Lady of Health at Pátzcuaro each carry devotions that have shaped their towns for centuries. It is a pilgrimage through faith and culture at once.