Gladys Herminia Quiroga de Motta, a grandmother in the river city of San Nicolás de los Arroyos, began on 25 September 1983 to report apparitions of the Virgin holding the Child and a Rosary, and to receive messages — nearly 1,800 over seven years, most accompanied by a passage of Scripture she was directed to. The Virgin asked for the Rosary, for the Eucharist, and for a sanctuary on the riverbank, and called herself 'the door of Heaven' gathering her children. A forgotten statue of Our Lady of the Rosary, blessed by Leo XIII, was found in the cathedral's bell tower and matched what Gladys had seen.
Bishop Domingo Castagna permitted the devotion early and built the sanctuary; the diocese's commission of theologians and physicians examined Gladys for years. On 22 May 2016 Bishop Héctor Cardelli of San Nicolás declared the events 'of supernatural character' and approved the apparitions — the first such approval anywhere since Kibeho in 2001. The sanctuary draws more than a million pilgrims each year, and the feast is kept on 25 September.