Parish Church, Andacollo City. Andacollo - CHILE

Direccion: Plaza Videla s/n
Phone: 56 51 243 1525
Web: www.santuariodeandacollo.cl

Devotion to the Virgin del Rosario is a tradition dating Andacollo area from the dawn of the Conquest. The site, located on barren hills, was already known by the Incas for its wealth of gold, which attracted early on to the Spanish. Already in the 1560s a group of them settled in the area and organized extractive activities with indigenous labor. One of the natives of the place a little later found a picture of the Virgin, which prompted the construction of the first church there, to reach in 1580. The early evangelization of the local population and by 1590 made the picture was the subject of a cult which was expressed mainly in dances.

The original image preserved in Andacollo disappeared early, mid-seventeenth century and the first pastor of the town commissioned a new image to Lima for the same invocation, carved in cedar wood. This is still preserved in the ancient church of Andacollo, built between 1772 and 1789 to provide a worthy shrine to the image. The Old Temple is a rectangular volume formed by a long narrow nave, 42 by 7 meters, mud walls 1 meter thick, and two towers. In 1925 he built a small craft comes from the area perpendicular to the priesthood and is called "Chapel of Men".

Marian devotion eventually spread throughout the region, so that the Virgin of the Rosary became patron saint of miners. The increasing influx of pilgrims exceeded the capacity of the Old Temple, so that by 1870 the church authorities took various steps to build a new church. The plans were commissioned the Italian architect Chelli Eusebio, who also designed the Church of Recoleta Dominica Santiago, Robert Parker took the helm of the works, monumental in character and large constituted a challenge for the time. In 1873 he laid the first stone, and twenty years later was blessed this new and impressive temple.

Of the basilica, stands on the transept area of Byzantine-style dome, octagonal, with windows arranged around the perimeter, which brightens the interior space. The dome, the apse and the transept arms, surmounted by a portico of ten columns offer from a beautiful play of volumes. The main façade has a portico with three spans entrance arches, those of the ends are capped by two towers whose height reaches 53 meters. The interior of the church, very large, is impressive Corinthian columns separating the naves, the arches, and galleries on extreme craft. The construction is of double wall of fir wood, filled with adobillos and covered by galvanized iron sheets. Douglas-fir are also the floors, columns, pilasters, cornices, moldings and drum towers.

As before, Andacollo festivities feature dance of the devotees, who are organized for that purpose in extras that the first Sunday of October and 24 and December 25 fill the place of music and color.