
Regla
Waterfront town founded around a hermit's chapel guarding a black Madonna tied to sailors and to Yemaya.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Regla in Havana opens around sixteen ninety, when a hermit named Manuel Antonio crossed the ocean from Lima and raised a chapel by hand on this shoreline, waiting for a black Madonna he had heard was coming from Spain. She did not arrive in time, and a hurricane flattened his chapel before he rebuilt it in stone and kept waiting for years on ground he refused to abandon. Stand at the church that eventually replaced his ruined stone walls, on the one patch of harbor shoreline he never let the water keep.
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