Situated in southern Guatemala just minutes from the Honduran border, Esquipulas has evolved as one of the most sacred destinations for this entire Central American region, including southern México and nearby El Salvador. It’s believed the town was named after a Mayan lord that was ruling this area when Spaniards arrived, and they immediately began converting the people to Catholicism.
The first church was built in the late 1500’s, and included a statue of Christ carved from black balsa wood. Indigenous survivors continued coming to the area on religious pilgrimages, whether to worship in their disguised traditions or new-found Christianity. In 1737, a Spanish Archbishop visited to see the highly acclaimed Christ-statue, and became miraculously cured of a chronic illness. As they say, the rest is history.
The Vatican commissioned a Grand Basilica that was completed in 1758. The fact that it has withstood centuries’ worth of massive earthquakes only adds to holiness. The structure is enormous, and dwarfs everything within the valley. People, sometimes entire extended families or villages, come from around the region in search of miracles and divine intervention. I made the mistake of showing-up on a weekend, when lines just to get inside the church were wrapped around the park and block; some wailing and crawling on their knees in hopes of worthiness.
Unfortunately, religion had been turned into nothing more than a tourist trap! The entire downtown area is one gigantic outdoor market selling rosaries, bibles, candles, and other religious trinkets and icons. Prices for rooms and meals were some of the highest paid in the entire country! Yet the poor continue to “pour-in”, at all costs in hopes of a miracle.
Exterior of the basilica was very impressive; the associated exploitations weren't! The town certainly had it's fair share of spoils compared to wide-spread destitution of Central America; enough to understand why money-changers were once driven from Jewish temples! It was all part of the cultural experience, but I left in less than 24-hours on good faith of finding some place a bit more pagan - not in terms of the English and Spanish meanings of "heathen-like" but in terms of old-world Latin, where word signifies "rustic country dweller".
