Basílica de Nossa Senhora da Penha

This guide to the Basílica de Nossa Senhora da Penha in São Paulo sets a sixty-meter concrete tower beside the squat, thick-walled chapel it was built to replace, dated to around 1801 and tied to a legend of a French traveler's small wooden image of the Virgin. It follows how that tiny sanctuary held centuries of pilgrims until the 1950s, when outgrown Sunday crowds pushed the archbishop to lay a cornerstone for something far larger, seating ten times the old chapel's capacity. Workers spent a decade pouring the cross-shaped concrete plan that surrounds you now. Look left toward the smaller building with the thick mud walls before you move on.