The Miracle of the Sun at Garabandal

The path climbed steep out of the village, stones loose underfoot from the morning rain. I had come up with the corporal after the brigadier sent word from Puentenansa, and the four girls were already ahead of us when the change took them. Conchita stopped first. Her head jerked back as if someone had called her name from the pines. The others turned at the same instant. Their eyes fixed on the same patch of empty air above the path.

I kept walking until I stood level with them. None of the four moved. Their faces had gone the color of new plaster. Mari Cruz, the youngest, held one arm out straight, palm up, as though she expected something to be placed there. Loli’s lips moved without sound. Jacinta’s knees bent slightly and stayed bent. Conchita alone kept her balance without effort, though her shoulders had gone rigid.

Fr. Valentín arrived from the other direction a few minutes later. He had been told the day before that the girls claimed an angel appeared while they played marbles. He asked each one separately what she saw. They answered the same way: a boy about nine years old, dressed in blue with pink wings, hair parted in the middle, skin the shade of a chickpea. He smiled at them and told them he would return. The priest wrote it down in his notebook and said nothing more that afternoon.

Two days later the same four climbed again after the rosary. This time they said the figure was taller and wore white. They called her the Virgin and said she was eighteen. They pointed to a place in the air where she stood and described a crown and a rosary. When they came down they looked for Fr. Valentín at the church door. He listened, then told them to fast the next morning and return to the same spot.

On the morning of the twenty-sixth they went up fasting. They said the angel met them and gave each one communion exactly as the priest does at the altar rail. Loli and Jacinta stayed higher on the slope and reported that the Virgin appeared after the angel left. They said she showed them where she would stand the following day and motioned with her hand for them to come closer.

By the first week of July the village had counted nine separate appearances. The girls gave the dates in advance and the dates held. On the eleventh two doctors arrived from Santander. Dr. Morales told the corporal he would stand on the path and speak to the girls as they passed. If suggestion or play-acting explained the ecstasies, he would break it. The girls came up at the hour they had named. They walked past him without turning their heads. Seven minutes later they returned to themselves on the same patch of ground. Dr. Morales said nothing to the corporal on the way down.

The brigadier kept his own record. He had been in the district only two months when the first report reached him through the doctor in Puentenansa. He sent the corporal at once and later came himself on days when two or three appearances were expected. He wrote that the frequency made it impossible to note every instance, so he limited the report to what he had seen directly. Seven years later he still recalled the order of events without consulting the pages.

The girls continued to say they received communion from the angel on certain mornings. They described the motion of the hand and the words that accompanied it. On one occasion Conchita and Mari Cruz received at eight in the morning near the village. Loli and Jacinta received later on the slope above the Campuca. After the second communion the angel pointed and the Virgin appeared. The girls said she looked older than Conchita and held a crown in one hand.

No one in the village claimed to see the figures the girls described. The four alone entered the state that removed them from ordinary conversation and ordinary balance. When the state ended they answered questions in ordinary voices and remembered what they had been told. They repeated that certain things were secret and could not be told to the bishop, the pope, or any priest.