The Difunta Correa Shrine--An Argentine Cultural Oddity

After Mendoza, I headed to San Juan, an area known for its white wine and champagne, neither of which I had time to sample. The town itself was pretty ordinary, and hot, but I got to take an amazing tour to a nearby provincial park. On the way, we stopped at the Difunta Correa Shrine, which was a very interesting and odd experience.

The Difunta Correa Shrine commemorates the death of a woman, Deolinda Correa, who followed her husband's battalion through the desert on foot in the 1840s, carrying food, water, and their infant. When her supplies ran out, she died, but several days later, when her body was discovered, the infant was still alive, suckling at its dead mother's teat. The site of this miracle is
now home to a bizarre shrine that vaguely resembles a garage sale junk yard, as people leave gifts in exchange for supernatural favors from Deolinda. The movement is wildly popular with truckers, who often carry symbols of her in their trucks (the unmistakable symbol being a baby at its dead mother's breast). Also, if you drive along any highway in Argentina you will see roadside shrines for Difunta Correa (difunta means "defunct" in Spanish) and piles of water bottles left to quench her thirst. At the shrine itself, people leave all sorts of treasures, like wedding dresses, trophies, paintings, framed pictures, structures that resemble doll houses, notes and letters, model trucks, license plates, assorted car parts, and of course, mountains of water bottles. The whole experience was so bizarre, I had to devote an entire post to it, mostly so you can gawk at the pictures much as I gawked at the shrine in person.


There were roughly 20 of these little houses on the site. They were filled with all the offerings to Difunta Correa.

These small plaques covered almost every space on the outside of the small huts built to house the offerings for Difunta Correa.

Check out all those water bottles!

This walkway led to the top of a hill that held more offerings. The hill was covered with small structures the size of doll houses, presumably left as offerings of shelter for Difunta Correa.

The little houses.

The countryside that surrounds the city of San Juan and the Difunta Correa Shrine.

More shots of the site.

It's these kind of experiences that make traveling such a joy: those rare, wonderous places that are so distinct, you know you can't find anything quite like them anywhere else in the world.