#viseu

Viseu

Portugal

Santinhos (little saints), that is, holy cards of Nossa Senhora da Lapa (Our Lady of the Rock, roughly translated)

Liturgical feast: 8th of September

Our Lady of Lapa is a representation of The Most Holy Virgin Mary, widely worshipped in Portugal and Brazil. Her image usually shows the Virgin Mary standing on clouds, her hands together in an attitude of prayer, with a crown and a dove (symbolising the Holy Spirit) on her head. The history of devotion to Our Lady of Lapa is the subject of several popular local tales. According to the most widespread, it began in mid-982, when the Moorish general and statesman Almançor (from the arabic Al-Mansur, meaning “the victorious”), on one of his military campaigns in the Iberian Peninsula, passed by a northern monastery where he martyred some of the nuns who lived there. The nuns who managed to escape from the general took shelter in a lapa (that is, a rock shelter or a grotto), where they kept an image of Our Lady that they carried along.

For around five hundred years, the image remained there until in 1498, a young shepherdess called Joana, while herding sheep in the vicinity of the lapa, decided to enter and found the image, small and beautiful. The story goes that Joana approached the image and, enraptured, remained in prayer for a long time. The little shepherdess then noticed that the image's garments had been destroyed by the weather and damp and decided to erect a little altar there. She cleaned the image, placed flowers around it and never stopped thinking about her “treasure”. The next day, Joana took the image home in the basket her mum used to send her lunch in. Her mother, who didn't appreciate Joana wasting time making dresses for her “doll”, threw it into the fire. Desperate, Joana, mute from birth, shouted at her mother: No! Mum! It's Our Lady of Lapa! What have you done?.

Legend has it that the image didn't burn, but at that precise moment her mother's arm was paralysed. Repenting of the act she had just committed, she prayed with Joana and everything returned to normal. The parish priest, who knew the story, asked for the image to be placed in the parish church so that it wouldn't remain in the wilderness, but the image disappeared from there and appeared in the lapa where Joana had discovered it. That's where she wanted to be venerated, the people would say. There are several variations of the legend of Joana the Shepherdess, but they are all pretty similar. The rock shelter where the image of Our Lady of Lapa appeared is located in the Portuguese town of Sernancelhe, that belongs to the district of Viseu.