On 2 March 1840, Dona Gertrudis Castaneda, having set sail, was caught in a furious strom at sea and in such a terrible predicament she invoked the Virgin of Soledad of Santa Cruz and in finding safety she dedicates this retablo.
Votive painting 1 – Museo Nacional de las Intervenciones INAH
The storm at sea (top left) is particularly strong. Also like the hospital scene.
I remember coming on the holy well at Madron some years back, after a lonely tramp across the moors above Penzance, and being quite staggered by the mass of votive offerings — notes, ribbons, toys and trinkets of all kinds — tied to the overhanging bushes. How much of this, I wondered, was testament to a real belief, whether pagan or Christian, and how much tantamount to throwing a few coppers into the ‘wishing well’ in your local shopping mall? As the well at Madron is quite hard to find and get to, I came to think there had to be a fair amount of belief involved.
Only a few miles from Madron you’ll find the famous stone-with-a-hole-in-it at Men-an-Tol: somehow you wouldn’t need an anthropologist to tell you that this is a fertility symbol. In April 1996 my then girlfriend, now wife, crawled through this three times while a gothy looking woman, who seemed to appear from nowhere, slunk about picking herbs and muttering strange mutterments.
They are now 13, 11, and 8.