At Copacabana on Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca shore, devotion to an image carved by Francisco Tito Yupanqui developed alongside accounts of extraordinary light, changes in the statue and recoveries attributed to the Virgin. The surviving evidence includes an early administrative report, later Augustinian chronicles and modern historical research. Comparing them reveals a documented religious history whose supernatural explanations remain claims made by its participants.
Map location. The pin is an approximate Copacabana town reference on Lake Titicaca, rounded from GeoNames’ locality record. It does not identify a particular historic chapel, altar, workshop or reported miracle position.
A report written in 1586
The Descripción y relación de la ciudad de La Paz, dated 8 March 1586, provides an unusually early reference. Its final substantive answer describes an image of Our Lady in Copacabana’s church. Miracles, it says, had occurred during the preceding year and a half and had been recorded in authenticated testimony. This is an administrative description prepared under Diego Cabeza de Vaca, rather than the much later shrine history.
The example concerns an unnamed mother and a son who required extensive care. The report attributes his recovery to her offering him to the Virgin and says that he subsequently served in the church. Its historical descriptions should not be converted into a modern diagnosis. The document establishes that a recovery narrative and a reputation for miracles were circulating by 1586. The underlying testimonies it mentions have not been independently examined here. Nor does its relative dating reproduce the chronology of every later story.
The difficult making of an image
Antonio de la Calancha’s 1653 narrative, reproduced with a modern introduction, tells a longer origin story. An early clay figure by Tito Yupanqui was accepted by Antonio de Almeida, then removed under his successor, Montoro. Yupanqui went to Potosí to learn his craft. Calancha dates the beginning of the later figure to 4 June 1582 and describes its light maguey material, damage, repairs and eventual gilding in La Paz with help from a craftsman named Vargas.
The account includes humiliation before ecclesiastical authority and resistance to accepting a locally made image. Francisco Navarrete, a friar who kept it in his cell, reportedly saw rays issuing from it. The narrative then follows its journey through Tiquina towards Copacabana. Calancha openly combines Yupanqui’s account with Alonso Ramos Gavilán’s history and his own additions. Those dependencies matter: this is a later devotional construction with identifiable sources, rather than a second contemporary eyewitness record of the whole sequence.
Acceptance, rain and the meaning of “first”
In her 2010 study, anthropologist Julia Costilla examines how miracle narratives helped establish the devotion. The Anansaya and Urinsaya divisions disagreed over a proposed confraternity’s patron. Her reconstruction places the image’s procession into Copacabana on 2 February 1583. A falling bronze cross reportedly failed to injure the corregidor. Another account concerns the child figure’s position changing before Yupanqui could make a requested alteration.
Costilla also analyses a 1587 rain narrative: crops dedicated by one division received rain while the other’s initially did not. In the story, wider recognition of the Virgin precedes rain for both. These episodes concern collective authority and acceptance as well as individual devotion. Her discussion of later records includes inquiries by friars, official information and letters from devotees. Such procedures belong to the history of how claims were certified. They do not supply the missing clinical, meteorological or material observations needed to establish a supernatural cause independently.
What the 1621 chronicle contains
The introduction to the 2015 edition by Hans van den Berg and Andrés Eichmann helps separate the components of Ramos Gavilán’s 1621 work. The accessible PDF is an introductory excerpt, not the complete chronicle. Van den Berg distinguishes the author’s account of Yupanqui from the relation attributed to the sculptor, noting differences between them. His modernised presentation should not be mistaken for an independently recovered autograph.
Excluding miracles involving the image itself and associated objects, he counts 134 miracle narratives covering 1583–1620. Forty-five fall in 1589–1592, during the early Augustinian presence. These are counts within a selected literary and devotional record, not verified event totals or a measured incidence of unusual recoveries. The introduction also discusses the alleged change in the child’s position, changes in the Virgin’s expression and the way the author chose stories to encourage devotion. That selection explains why the chronicle cannot be read as an unfiltered register of everything that happened.
A shrine with a continuing public history
Costilla’s 2021 comparison of three South American devotions combines historical material with fieldwork from 2008–2011. She treats image, miracle and sanctuary as interconnected aspects of religious symbolism. Copacabana is compared with Lima’s Señor de los Milagros and Argentina’s San Nicolás. Their different histories prevent the same explanation being imposed on every shrine.
The study also follows the devotion into national public life. On 5 August 1925, the Virgin was crowned and declared Mother and Queen of Bolivia in the independence centenary period. Her 1969 naval patronage associated the devotion with the lake and Bolivia’s maritime aspirations. These later uses show that the image’s meanings continued to change. They are evidence about institutions and collective identity, rather than new verification of sixteenth-century miracles. The two Costilla articles are different investigations by the same researcher, so their agreement should not be counted as wholly independent corroboration.
Reading the records together
The most useful comparison is between what each document can establish. The 1586 report gives an early date for the circulation of a recovery account. The later chronicle offers a developed story of artistic labour, rejection and acceptance, while disclosing its dependence on earlier narratives. Modern researchers investigate those texts’ organisation, social settings and subsequent uses. A report’s official format, a chronicle’s detailed names and an author’s sincere belief answer different questions from whether a supernatural intervention occurred.
Even “the first miracle” needs qualification. A writer may mean the first recorded recovery, the first prodigy during the image’s journey or the first change in the statue itself. Combining those categories creates an apparent single chronology that the sources do not actually provide. Copacabana’s importance as a historical case lies partly in that distinction: the surviving record preserves the making and interpretation of claims, while leaving their extraordinary causes unestablished.
Compare the separate documentary history of Lima’s Señor de los Milagros, or explore Spiritual & Psychic and the worldwide Case Files.