Mariana de Jesús Torres y Berriochoa was born in Biscay in 1563 and sailed as a girl with the founding sisters of the Royal Convent of the Immaculate Conception in Quito, then the capital of the Audiencia. She made her perpetual vows there on 21 September 1579 and never left, serving as abbess more than once, and died in the convent on 16 January 1635.
From 2 February 1594 she reported apparitions of the Virgin under the title Nuestra Señora del Buen Suceso, Our Lady of Good Success, which continued until 2 February 1634. In 1610 she was told to have a statue carved to the likeness she had seen; Francisco del Castillo, the leading sculptor of colonial Quito, worked on it for months and was not satisfied, and the convent's account is that he found it finished one morning by hands that were not his. Bishop Salvador de Ribera approved the apparitions that had occurred up to that point in 1611, and the statue has been venerated in the upper choir ever since. That much is old and local and was passed on by the convent from the beginning.
What made her known outside Ecuador is something else: a long series of prophecies about the twentieth century — about the Church, the priesthood and the family — attributed to those same apparitions. They do not come from any document of her own century. They reach us through <em>The Admirable Life of Mother Mariana de Jesús Torres</em>, written by the Franciscan provincial in Quito, Manuel de Souza Pereira, and published in 1790, a century and a half after her death. Bishop Ribera approved apparitions in 1611; nobody approved a text written in 1790. The site gives the devotion, which is real and old and locally approved, and names the distance between the two.