Santuario Nacional de San Lázaro
Modest pilgrimage church built as a leprosy hospital's chapel, where thousands crawl on their knees each December.
Location
About this audio guide
The Santuario Nacional de San Lazaro in Havana traces back to February 1917, when a nun named Sister Ramona Idoate was ordered to turn a roadless, electricity-less swamp at Rincon into a home for Cuba's leprosy patients. The guide follows her years of begging for donations to raise the wards, and the pilgrims who began arriving behind the first patients that same December, drawn to a church already dedicated to the beggar-saint Lazarus. It traces how Cubans came to see their own outcasts in his story, long before this ground became a place people travel to on their knees.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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