Sanctuary of Miracle
The story says that, on the 3rd of August 1458, the Mother of God appeared to a couple of young shepherds from Cirosa, who kept their herd near the Bassadòria. After playing with them for a while, with the appearance of a child Virgin, it disappeared at the place where in 1600 a chapel was built. This apparition promoted the construction of three successive temples that have been, since then, a place of holiness and pilgrimage, around which different constructions were built, among them the Casa Gran (the “Big House”, an ancient pilgrim’s inn, primer example of Renaissance civil architecture) and a Benedictine monastery.
The current church began to be built in 1652 and the final stretch, from which remain the lateral walls, was never covered. It is inside this place where one can see the remains of the old Gothic church, which was taken apart as the works on the new temple advanced and from which the organ, made by Antoni Bordons at the end of the 16th century, is preserved.
The hardships that impeded the finalisation of the temple, with several failed attempts until well into the 19th century, didn’t prevent sculptor Carles Morató from leaving, between 1747 and 1757, one of the most exuberant examples of Catalan Baroque altarpieces dominating the temple. Cohabitating with it discretely, in the chapel of the Santíssim (the Eucharist), we find the altarpiece of the first church, a thorough work by the Portuguese Pere Nunyes.
