Tradition records that in 1754, a widow named María Mueses de Quiñones was carrying her young daughter Rosa — deaf and mute from birth — along the road between Potosí and Ipiales in southern Colombia, near a deep gorge of the Guáitara River. A storm came on, and she carried the child into a rocky shelter cut by the river into the cliff wall.
Rosa, who had never spoken, suddenly cried out: 'Mamá! The mestiza is calling me!' Her mother saw nothing at first. The child pointed insistently at the cliff face. Then María saw, painted as if into the rock itself, the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child. To either side stood Sts. Dominic and Francis. The mother was amazed; the child, henceforth, could hear and speak.
Word spread; pilgrims came. A small chapel was built into the rock; later a larger one. The cult was formally approved by the Holy See, and in 1949 Pope Pius XII conferred the title of Minor Basilica on the sanctuary. The current sanctuary — completed in 1949 — is a stone Gothic-Revival basilica built into the cliff face above the Guáitara gorge, the original image still on the rock at its heart.
Multiple geological and chemical examinations have been performed on the image over the centuries. The most extensive (in the 1950s) reported that no pigment was found on the surface of the stone; samples taken from beneath the surface showed that the colors penetrated several centimeters into the rock — as though the image had been formed throughout the depth of the stone rather than applied to it. The Catholic Church does not declare the image itself supernatural in origin (no formal magisterial judgment has been made), but the sanctuary has been an approved object of devotion since the 18th century and is one of the most pilgrimage-visited Marian shrines in South America.