Isabel Flores de Oliva was born at Lima to a Spanish-Andean family of modest means — her mother a creole of mixed Spanish-Andean descent. Her childhood nickname 'Rosa' became her official baptismal name when Archbishop Toribio de Mogrovejo personally confirmed her at thirteen. From early childhood she practiced severe self-mortification — wearing a self-imposed crown of thorns, refusing all sweets, rubbing pepper on her face to disfigure her unusual beauty. She refused all proposals of marriage.
In 1606 she entered the Dominican Third Order as a tertiary and was permitted by her confessors to live as an anchoress in a small hermitage in the garden of her parents' house. From this small cell she spent eleven years (1606–17) in continuous prayer, embroidery (the labour by which she supported her parents), and care for the poor and the sick of Lima — whom she received daily in the family kitchen. She was the friend of Martin de Porres (the half-Spanish, half-Panamanian Dominican lay brother) and of Juan Masías (the Spanish-born Dominican lay brother), both of whom worked the same Lima streets she did.
Her mystical writings — only fragments survive, but they were celebrated in her lifetime — describe a sustained mystical marriage to Christ. She died at thirty-one on August 24, 1617, after years of progressive physical breakdown from her self-imposed penances. Her funeral was the largest in the colonial history of Lima — the magistrates of the city carried her body. She was beatified in 1667 and canonized in 1671 — the first canonized saint from the Western Hemisphere. Patroness of the New World by papal proclamation since 1670, and the personification of Latin American Catholic identity.