Calle de Nuestra Señora de Luján
Honours the Virgin of Luján, the Marian devotion who is patroness of Argentina and whose image, according to tradition, came to rest on the bank of a river near Buenos Aires in 1630.
The name crosses the Atlantic. The Virgin of Luján is the devotion Argentina venerates as its patroness, and her cult was born from a tale of oxen and fired clay. Around 1630, a landowner settled in Sumampa ordered an image of the Immaculate Conception, and two small terracotta figures arrived. As the cart carried them along, the animals stopped on the bank of a river and could not be moved; only when one of the images was taken down did the cart roll again. There the Virgin stayed, and she took the name of the river: Luján.
From that beginning grew one of the busiest Marian shrines in the Americas, with pilgrimages that draw more than a million people. Calle de Nuestra Señora de Luján, in the Nueva España district, brings that River Plate devotion into the heart of Chamartín. The surname Luján also sounds in Madrid: an old lineage whose ancestral house, the Torre de los Lujanes, still stands in the plaza de la Villa.