On the road to Chimayo.

We leave our daily lives behind to follow in the footsteps of our Lord. This is the road of life that leads to our sanctuary. For us, walking to Chimayo is truly coming home. (A pilgrim's testimonial)

The chapel at Chimayo, New Mexico--El Santuario de Nuestro Senor de Esquipulas--is one of the spiritual centers of El None. The chapel is the destination of the largest religious pilgrimage in the United States, which culminates every year during Semana Santa (Holy Week) with the arrival of tens of thousands of visitors to the small village in the Santa Cruz Valley.

According to popular legend, the roads to Chimayo have been traveled by pilgrims since ancient times. Indigenous ruins near the Santuario predate the Spanish by at least 600 years, and the area figures prominently in the indigenous Tewa cosmology as the place where the sons of the Sun, the Twin War Gods, slew a giant that was threatening the people. Fire burst out of the earth and dried a sacred spring, leaving only mud.

According to their Pueblo descendants, the Tewas sought benefit from the healing earth to be found there. In the early 19th century, Spanish-Mexican settlers transformed this tradition into their devotion to the Lord of Esquipulas, a syncretic Guatemalan Christ figure whose leafy cross suggests the Mayan Tree of Life and whose veneration also involves pilgrimage and the use of sacred earth for healing. The northern shrine of Esquipulas, the Santuario de Chimayo, was completed in 1816.

A pilgrimage is a highly charged, symbolic journey in which the participant leaves behind the normal activity of everyday life and returns to the source of faith for a renewing encounter with the sacred. The symbols of the Christian pilgrim include the shell, the crook or staff, the water of salvation found along the path, the road, and the cloak. All of these are part of the iconography of the Holy Child of Mocha, the other Lord of Chimayo, who is the patron saint of travelers, captives, and children-the Christ Child, who is all things to all people. The other item taken on the journey is the cross itself, the ultimate emblem of sacrifice and a reminder of the pilgrim's promises and petitions.

Chimayo is one of myriad sacred sites in the vast Southwest. People of all cultures are naturally drawn to special places where geography and spirit converge. Hundreds of thousands drive their cars to the edge of the Grand Canyon to peer into the abyss, but there is something about the narrow mountain valley at Chimayo that compels comparable numbers of people to desire to arrive there on foot and even on knees in humble devotion with hopes for blessings and health.

This mystery has a name in Spanish, Santa Madre Tierra (Holy Mother Earth), as in the old prayers of the Penitente Brotherhood. In Tewa, the local indigenous language, it is Nam po'uare, blessed earth. Pilgrims on the road to Chimayo seek direct contact with the earth as they approach. The old and infirm hobble the last few yards. Others spend hours and days walking from nearby villages and more distant towns and cities. Chimayo is to holy earth what Lourdes is to holy water: a sipapu, or emergence place, a healing wellspring of blessed earth (tierra bendita) gathered by grateful pilgrims from el pozito, the inexhaustible little hole sheltered in the sacristy of the consecrated Santuario.

The Santuario de Chimayo was built literally on top of its sacred spring, the pozito, located not in the central apse or nave areas but in a small candle-lit room to the left of the altar. Following the design of other "fortress" churches in New Mexico, the timber-and-adobe construction is massive. Walls are 5 feet thick at the base, enclosing a space of 20 by 80 feet, with a viga, or long-beam, ceiling 20 feet high along the single-aisle nave and 30 feet above the altar. As with other New Mexican churches, directional alignment allows morning light to strike the altar. In Chimayo a long, low room adjoining the sacristy houses hundreds of exvotos--pilgrims' offerings of thanksgiving for cures and miracles.

Devotion to the dark Guatemalan Christ was bound to take root in New Mexico because of the sacred earth found in Guatemala. In Esquipulas, pilgrims seek a fine white clay from the mountains above the shrine. It is pressed and dried into small tablets embossed with holy images. Like the sandy earth of the sipapu of Chimayo, the clay is rubbed onto the body dry or in a paste. In a practice known as geophagy, the earth is also ingested directly or mixed with water and drunk. The faithful believe in the healing powers of this remedy and the psychic strength it provides.

The journey to Chimayo itself is more diverse every year. Thousands of immigrant Mexicans have found their way to the Santuario in recent years. Groups of Protestants regularly join in the journey, along with devotional Aztec dancers and enthusiasts of New Age spirituality, bikers, and low-riders. Faith and healing are Chimayo's constant themes, and the sacred earth is sought across the ages.

Behind the Santuario de Chimayo, children play by a carefully sifted pile of earth. The wind blows gently from the south and rustles the leaves of the arching cottonwoods. An aging priest quietly blesses a bucketful of earth and disappears inside.

MIGUEL GANDERT, CARY HERZ, SAM HOWARTH, and OSCAR LOZOYA are documentary photographers based in New Mexico. Along with oral historians ENRIQUE R. LAMADRID and TROY FERNANDEZ, they documented the Chimayo pilgrimage during Holy Week 1996. This photo story is excerpted with permission from Pilgrimage to Chimayo, a publication of the Museum of New Mexico Press in Santa Fe, New Mexico (800-249-7737).