The image of Our Lady of the Pillar likely arrived with Bartolomeu Bueno's bandeira - one of the Portuguese expeditions that pushed from São Paulo into the central highlands hunting gold and indigenous slaves during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Bueno carried a statue of Nossa Senhora do Pilar with him. When his men found auriferous streams in the hills that would become Vila Rica, the statue was installed in a small chapel built in 1696. Gold was everywhere underfoot. The chapel became a pilgrimage destination almost immediately. Within a few decades the original chapel was too small for the booming population, and construction of a permanent church began - but the small chapel had to keep working until the new nave could be roofed, creating the unusual reverse-construction sequence that is documented in the parish records.

Eighteenth-century Brazilian Catholic life was organized not by parish congregations as in modern practice but by irmandades - brotherhoods - devotional societies that built their own altars, paid for their own ceremonies, and competed for prestige within the church building. The Livro de Compromissos, the parish's Book of Commitments, lists them: the Brotherhood of the Eucharist formed in 1712, the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Pillar also in 1712, Saint Michael and Souls in the same year, the Rosary of the Blacks in 1715, the Lord of the Steps in 1715, Saint Anne in the first quarter of the century, Our Lady of the Conception shortly after. The Rosary of the Blacks is historically significant: in colonial Brazil, African-descended Catholics - both enslaved and free - often formed their own brotherhoods when denied full participation in white brotherhoods. The Irmandade do Rosário dos Pretos at Pillar was part of that broader tradition of Black devotional self-organization within a racially exclusionary church.

The current church interior, with its polygonal 1736 layout attributed to Antônio Francisco Pombal, is among the most elaborate Baroque interiors in Brazil. The altars of Saint Michael, the Steps, the Rosary of the Blacks, and the Lord of the Steps, plus Saint Anne, were carved between 1733 and 1735 by the sculptor Manoel de Brito - every altar in the church except the one dedicated to Saint Anthony. The retábulo work is layered with gold leaf, much of it pulled directly from the mines whose owners paid for the construction. The wealth that paid for this building was dug up, often by enslaved Africans, in tunnels that sometimes killed the men working them. The beauty of the nave is inseparable from the suffering that made it possible. Today visitors photograph the gilding. The parish's museum preserves documents and vestments used in the Mass and during Holy Week - a quiet curatorial record of the brotherhoods' original function.

The physical building has required continuous intervention over three centuries. Records list: an urgent tower repair in 1781; the replacement of a rammed earth wall in 1825, because it had been threatening to collapse since 1818; completion of the frontispiece and gospel tower in 1848. Later generations added roof work and lightning rods. The colors on the exterior today follow a chromatic scheme documented in a 1988 photograph, the last time the temple was comprehensively painted - oxide red, fir green, ochre yellow on the windows, doors, and frames; pure white masonry; black railings; light yellow mass frames on the corners and architraves. Current restoration uses silicate-based paint mixed with lime, a formulation chosen for durability and impermeability in the humid subtropical climate. The church is doubly protected as heritage: listed by IPHAN, the federal heritage institute, and by IEPHA, the Minas Gerais state equivalent.

On 1 December 2012, in a solemn ceremony witnessed by the Archbishop of Mariana and a packed crowd of Ouro Preto residents, the Our Lady of the Pillar Mother Church was elevated to the status of Minor Basilica. The designation is granted by the Vatican to churches of particular historical, liturgical, or architectural significance, and it carries specific privileges - a papal umbraculum, a tintinnabulum processional bell - that mark the church as holding a distinctive place in global Catholicism. For a colonial parish that began as a gold-rush chapel in 1696, this twenty-first-century recognition was a confirmation of what Ouro Preto had known for three hundred years: that this small, shining, golden building on Monsenhor Castilho Barbosa Square was one of the great spiritual monuments of Brazilian Catholicism. The UNESCO World Heritage listing of Ouro Preto includes the church as a central asset. The pilgrims still come. The gilding still catches the candle light.