After the Spanish conquest, the Cospes tribe of the Llanos — the great Venezuelan grasslands — was being evangelized by Franciscan missionaries. The Cospes chief, Coromoto, had heard the Christian message but refused baptism and was leading his people against the encroachment of the missions.
Tradition records that on September 8, 1652 (the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin), the Mother of God appeared to Coromoto by a stream near present-day Guanare. She told him in his own language to be baptized so that he and his people might go to heaven. He returned to his hut to prepare; the apparition followed.
When Coromoto reached for the Lady to seize her in his anger at being commanded, she vanished, leaving behind in his hand a small image of herself with the Christ Child painted on a fragment of native parchment — measuring 27 millimeters by 22 millimeters, smaller than a postage stamp, the smallest miraculous Marian image known. The Cospes chief, struck by the wonder, was baptized — taking the name Ángel Custodio — though he died shortly afterward of a snakebite, refusing further help and asking only that the image be venerated.
The 'Reliquia' image, of such miniature proportions, has survived essentially intact for nearly four hundred years. It is enshrined in the National Shrine of Our Lady of Coromoto at Guanare. Pius XII proclaimed her Patroness of Venezuela in 1944; John Paul II visited the shrine and crowned the image in 1996.