Ermita de Nuestra Señora de Lourdes - Trujillo Alto - 2016 00017

Puerto Rico Historic Building & Drawing Society > Colección Pueblos > Trujillo Alto (PRHBDS) > Ermita de Nuestra Señora de Lourdes - Trujillo Alto

Trujillo Alto

2016

The Hermitage of Our Lady of Lourdes in Trujillo Alto is a Marianist grotto built in 1925 by Puerto Rican veteran Angel Rivero Méndez. Rivero was a soldier who served in the Spanish army and is recognized for firing the first shot against the Americans during the Spanish-American War of 1898. While Rivero was traveling through Spain with his wife in 1922, he decided to go to France in search of the sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, a Catholic Marian space for his wife to receive divine grace. Manuela Boneta Babel suffered from goiter, a thyroid disease, and was cured. Given their debt to the Virgin Mary, they decided to build a small grotto to pay her devotion in 1925, named after the French sanctuary. These lands were donated to the Catholic Church after construction. Rivero was a Catholic Hispanist who dedicated his entire life to honor the Spanish legacy and Catholicism, which go hand in hand. Their loyalty to Spain became a shield of Puerto Rican identity in resistance to US imperialism on the island. This ranged from opposing the English language to categorically rejecting Protestantism. The Creole elites in Puerto Rico were composed in the 20th century by peninsular Spaniards who were against the historical rupture with Spain since 1898 and a bourgeois class that had sympathies with the old autonomism. The development of this new cultural nationalism was built by anti-American discursive narratives, but they never abandoned the Eurocentric aspect.

• Arrighini , Enrico - Escultor
• Boneta Babel, Manuela (1866 - 1952) - Constructor
• Rivero Méndez, Angel (1856 - 1930) - Constructor
• Roldán Martinó, Francisco (1892 - 1988) - Arquitecto

English Rights. (hyperlink)

Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín

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