Alexandrina Maria da Costa was born on March 30, 1904 at Balasar, twenty kilometers south of Porto. At nineteen, on Holy Saturday 1918, she jumped from a first-floor window to escape three men attempting to violate her; the fall injured her spine and by 1925 had left her paralyzed. She would remain bedridden for thirty years.
From March 27, 1942 — Good Friday — Alexandrina consumed nothing whatever except the daily Sacred Host. To respond to skeptics, the Portuguese Bishops' Conference commissioned two clinical investigations. The first, at Foz do Douro Hospital in Porto in June–July 1943, kept her under continuous observation for forty days: she received no food, no water, no injection, and lost weight only in proportion to normal metabolism. The second, at the same hospital in April 1944, prolonged the observation for thirty additional days and included two doctors from state hospitals not associated with the Church. Both reports — signed by Dr. Gomes de Araújo, Dr. Carlos Lima, and colleagues — concluded that the abstinence was medically inexplicable and could not have been fraudulent.
Alexandrina reported repeated visions of the Passion each Friday, and stigmata that appeared and disappeared. She corresponded with Sister Lúcia of Fátima and with the Portuguese Bishops' Conference throughout the war. She died on October 13, 1955, the anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun at Fátima. Pope John Paul II beatified her on April 25, 2004. Her body rests at the parish church of Balasar; her cell has been preserved intact.