Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Congonhas

The sanctuary was founded in 1757 when Feliciano Mendes, a Portuguese immigrant healed after prayer, vowed to build a shrine to Bom Jesus. The masterwork sculptures were created between 1796 and 1805 by Aleijadinho, colonial Brazil's greatest artist, who worked despite a disease that had destroyed his hands. UNESCO inscribed the site in 1985 as 'the apex of Christian art in Latin America.'

In 1757, in the gold-mining region of Minas Gerais, a Portuguese immigrant named Feliciano Mendes fell gravely ill. He prayed to Bom Jesus de Matosinhos—the Good Jesus venerated in Portugal, centered on a crucifix said to have washed ashore at the village of Matosinhos in the early centuries of Christianity. Mendes was healed.

In thanksgiving, he vowed to build a sanctuary. Using his own wealth and successful fundraising, he began construction on a hilltop at Congonhas do Campo. By his death in 1765, regular religious services were already being held. The devotion he established—seeking healing from Bom Jesus—would draw pilgrims for centuries to come.

The sanctuary's artistic transformation came later. In the 1790s, Antônio Francisco Lisboa arrived to create the sculptural program. Born to a Portuguese architect and an African slave, Lisboa had become colonial Brazil's most celebrated artist. But in 1777, a disease—possibly leprosy, possibly scleroderma, scholars still debate—began destroying his body. His hands and feet wasted away. He could no longer hold tools.

He adapted. Working behind screens for privacy, Lisboa had chisels and mallets strapped to the stumps of his hands. When he could no longer walk, slaves carried him to work sites. Between roughly 1796 and 1805, he created the 66 polychrome Passion figures and the 12 soapstone prophets—his final masterwork, completed in his sixties and seventies, his body broken but his vision undiminished. They called him Aleijadinho, the Little Cripple. His art made Congonhas the apex of Christian art in the Americas.