By Estefanía Camacho—-

Cihualpilli, also known as the Virgin Mary in her invocation of the Immaculate Conception, whose image is housed in the Cathedral-Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos in Jalisco, receives up to seven million pilgrims each year. In this representation, the Virgin “condenses the meaning that precedes motherhood,” as Felipe Gaytán Alcalá explains in his book Las semánticas de lo sagrado (The Semantics of the Sacred).

To get there, the so-called sanjuaneros (believers who set out from the Bajío region toward San Juan de los Lagos) walk approximately 80 kilometers over a period of nine to twelve days. Some depart from the Parish of Saint Anthony of Padua in San Miguel de Allende, others from Querétaro or San Luis Potosí, and those coming from farther away leave from Aguascalientes, adding up to a total distance of 200 kilometers or more.

They set out in late January. In 2026, they departed on January 21 from the well-known “Y,” an intersection formed by a famous roundabout in León, through which other pilgrims from nearby cities also pass. “I’m leaving from the Y,” they notify one another in a Facebook group of nearly 84,000 members, where they share everything from announcements to form departure groups in their hometowns to photos from the journey, weather advice, and, above all, blessings for the road.

In 2026, the passage of approximately 350,000 travellers through the state of Guanajuato is expected, a place referred to as “pilgrim transit territory,” according to Luis Antonio Güereca Pérez, the state coordinator of Civil Protection for the Secretariat of Security and Peace of the State of Guanajuato. These figures have been repeated over the past two winters, although the number, he says, has been declining.

“I should tell you that before 2020, before the pandemic, the number of pilgrims was much higher: around 450,000 to nearly 500,000 people passing through the state. However, when the pandemic hit and all this type of activity was suspended, something happened: the rhythm or the motivation was lost. We don’t know exactly what occurred, but we haven’t been able to recover the large numbers we used to have,” he tells me in an interview.

Not everyone stopped during the pandemic. That is the case of Paty, a 44-year-old woman who lives in León. She has made this pilgrimage for 30 years. The first time she went, she was 14. She kept going and never interrupted her visits after one of her children fell ill frequently and she asked the Virgin for his health. “Since then, he hasn’t gotten sick,” she says. That was 17 years ago.

“I promised that if my son didn’t get sick again, I would never stop going.” So, during one of the pandemic years, when there were very few pilgrims, she went with her daughter, without many supplies, because there was no one selling food or lighting the way at night with flashlights. They got lost.

“My daughter’s feet started bleeding halfway along the route. We stopped, and we got lost. Then the coyotes showed up. One of them was about to attack us. My daughter lit the way with her cellphone so I could throw a stone, but there wasn’t just one. There were about ten.”

They had to jump into a ditch. “The little Virgin is very miraculous,” she recalls, describing how they were able to see a military barracks nearby. From there, some personnel fired at the coyotes to scare them off and helped Paty and her daughter out of the ditch.

“Sometimes people don’t even have money for bus fare,” the matriarch of the Quiroz Aguilar family tells me. She has been a devotee for approximately 50 years, but now she offers food to pilgrims passing through on the night of January 23. She recalls that when she first began making the pilgrimage, people endured many hardships — cold, hunger, sleep deprivation, and exhaustion, and it was difficult to find water or food. That is why she wanted to offer some relief.

She offers her home —“tu casa,” as Mexicans say when we speak of our own home and offer it to a stranger— as a place of rest for approximately 40 people.

“They bathe here, we make hot chocolate at night so they can fall asleep, and for food, well, we give them carnitas, salsa, beans, rice, noodles, potatoes. I mean, everything we can, whatever we’re able to help with.”

In addition to offering her home as a place to spend the night, they also go out onto the route in a pickup truck to transport food. So that pilgrims do not have to stop and lose time, they prepare bagged lunches and hand them out to those who pass by. “Sometimes more people come, sometimes fewer, but everything gets eaten,” she explains, referring to the roughly 50 kilograms of food she prepares, not counting the 40 liters of salsa she cooks with the help of her grown children and now her daughters-in-law.

Throughout the year, they save together to be able to give away this food, which amounts to an expense of approximately 15,000 pesos, she confides.

Her altruistic work has brought her public recognition, to the point that she has appeared in television interviews, although María Concepción Quiroz (her full name) does not like to boast about her efforts.

According to the state coordinator of Civil Protection for the Secretariat of Security, the issues they pay closest attention to include traffic accidents on the highway, food poisoning, people who become lost, occasional fights, and elderly pilgrims.

This time, Civil Protection officially launched the coordinated operation among authorities from Friday, January 9, through February 5, when travellers stop passing through Guanajuato. Personnel from the Guanajuato Ministry of Health, the Red Cross (through its local chapters), state firefighters, and the National Guard are also present.

On January 20, 2026, the eve of the departure of most believers, the forecast indicated that the lowest temperature would occur at seven in the morning on the 21st, dropping to 9 degrees Celsius.
This January, pilgrims walked illuminated by lamps that provided enough light along the path, they crossed train tracks, sometimes alongside a stationary train, detoured around fields of maguey that lengthened the route, and walked for long stretches next to high-speed roads, where freight trucks sped past, often in blind spots. Some travelers coming from the State of Mexico spent up to a month away from home, according to television reports.

Arrival in San Juan de los Lagos
Ideally, pilgrims arrive on February 2, which coincides with the celebration of Candlemas. The Candelaria is a popular religious celebration that commemorates the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, the Virgin’s purification after childbirth, and the Virgin of Candelaria, another Marian devotion. Tradition in Mexico also dictates that whoever ate Rosca de Reyes on January 6 and found the small figurine (representing Baby Jesus) must offer tamales and atole to the rest. However, the Immaculate Conception is also venerated in May, on August 15, and on December 8, although the longest pilgrimage takes place in mid-January.

While San Juan de los Lagos awaits the arrival of tens of thousands, the Cathedral-Basilica (the country’s second-most visited Marian sanctuary, after the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City) is already hosting processions and dances. All of this is done to honor a figure measuring just 33 centimeters and weighing over 300 grams, adorned with eighteenth-century Baroque-style ornamentation –which is why Paty calls her with love “little virgin”. The Virgin, made from corn-pith paste, was crafted in workshops in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán.

According to testimonial records from 1623, the Virgin performed her first miracle by restoring the life of a young trapeze artist who had reportedly died after falling from a swing.

Estefanía Camacho is a freelance Mexican journalist working across media and digital magazines. She is a specialist in gender, SMEs, economics, and business.