The Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows is a hermitage located at 1380 meters above sea level, in Sierra Nevada (Spain), built at the end of the 18th century. It is the only one preserved among the several shrines and hermitages built in that mountain range in honor of the Our Lady of the Snows.
History
Various texts recount the story of the priest Martín de Mérida, beneficiary of the Alpujarran town of Válor, who along with his assistant Martín Soto, on August 5, 1717, during a traverse of Sierra Nevada on their way to Granada, and while reaching the Carihuela pass, also known as Collado del Veleta due to its proximity to the peak of that name (the second highest in this massif and third in the Iberian Peninsula), found themselves lost in the middle of a sudden snowstorm at an altitude of about 3,200 meters. Desperate, the two began to pray fervently, and the Virgin Mary appeared to them with her Child in her arms, calming the elements, showing them the way, and thus saving them from certain death. Since then, the cliffs near that location are known as the Cliffs of the Virgin. At the foot of these cliffs, near the Lagunillos de la Virgen, the clergyman gratefully erected a hermitage the following year, which was quickly destroyed by adverse weather. In 1724, this first hermitage was replaced by another, located slightly lower, in the Prados del Borreguil, also known as the Hermitage Prados, at about 2,700 masl, near where the base stations of the Dílar and Laguna chairlifts of the ski resort currently stand; but this too succumbed to the onslaught of ice, prompting the building of a third hermitage in 1745 at a lower altitude (1380 m, on the Picón del Savial) known as Ermita Vieja (now reconstructed, it houses a Nature Center of the Sierra Nevada Natural Park), and subsequently, as it was still very far from the town of Dílar, to which all mentioned locations belong, in 1796 Mateo Benítez, beneficiary of this town, commissioned the master builder Manuel Garnica to construct the current Sanctuary dedicated to this Marian devotion, with Juan de Toro crafting the chapel in 1855. From that miraculous event, Our Lady of the Snows was deemed the patron saint of Sierra Nevada.
This tradition has remained alive to this day, with mountain masses and pilgrimages being very popular, commemorating that date by being held annually across various summits of Sierra Nevada (Mulhacén, Veleta…). And since autumn 1968, a monument constructed through public funds consisting of an altar made from local stones followed by a pointed arch of 9 meters, made of the same material, and crowned with a 3-meter-high image of the Virgin with the Child, cast in aluminum by sculptor Francisco López Burgos, presides over this mountain’s Ski and Mountain Station. The image was blessed on January 30, 1966, by the Archbishop of Granada, Monsignor Rafael García y García de Castro, at the University Lodge, close to where it was placed. However, when the feast was celebrated in 1961, a sketch of this same statue of Our Lady of the Snows, made of artificial stone by industrialist Nicolás García Oliveros, presided over the first mass celebrated at the summit of Veleta, where this sketch had been enthroned on December 4, 1960, by groups of mountaineers from Granada, although it too could not withstand much longer the meteorological harshness characteristic of such a high altitude (3,394 masl).
