The settlement of Vazante began on a cattle ranch with the same name - vazante is a Portuguese term describing low ground where a river or lake recedes, the kind of seasonal feature common in the Brazilian interior. On this ranch, according to local tradition, the vision occurred. The date is not recorded, but in 1920 the site of the vision - Lapa - was legally separated from the ranch to allow a chapel to be built. A general store followed. By 1938 the settlement had been raised to district status. In 1952 it became a municipality, though not without controversy: Brazilian law at the time required a minimum of 300 solid houses for municipal status, and Vazante had perhaps 20 or 25. The law was waived. The town that emerged clustered around Lapa Velha and the chapel the pilgrimage supported. The first mayor took office in 1953. Nearly seventy years later, the pilgrimage continues - tens of thousands of people arriving over three days each May, camping in the town, praying at the grotto, buying religious souvenirs from stalls that close down once the anniversary passes.

In 1933, thirteen years after Lapa was separated from the ranch, geologists discovered zinc. The deposit proved enormous. By 1969, the first loads of zinc concentrate were shipping to the metallurgical plant at Três Marias, 200 kilometers south - the same hydroelectric project town Juscelino Kubitschek had rushed to completion in 1961. The Vazante Mine is today an open-pit operation owned by Votorantim Metais, with reserves around 2 million tons of zinc and annual production of 290,000 tons of silicate concentrate. Brazilian zinc mining is concentrated here almost entirely; the country's other deposits are trivial by comparison. The mine dominates the local economy alongside cattle ranching - 84,000 head grazing on 75,000 hectares of natural pasture - and farming of mangoes, rice, soybeans, and corn. For a small town, Vazante punches considerably above its weight in the Brazilian mineral accounts. Workers commute daily to the pit from the surrounding district. Trucks move ore down BR-354, the paved national highway that connects Vazante to the wider state.

Lapa Velha is not the only cave in the region. Vazante sits on karstic limestone, and the hills around town are riddled with grottos. Lapa Nova - the New Grotto - ranks as the fourth largest cavern in Brazil. Lapa da Delza, also known as Caçula (Youngest), is smaller but similarly notable. Local guides lead tours through the accessible passages. The caves were carved by water over millions of years, which ties directly to the town's name - vazante, again, meaning the zone where water recedes. In the wet season, streams pour into sinkholes and disappear underground. In the dry season, they run elsewhere or not at all. This same hydrology gave the region its Virgin Mary story: caves in Catholic folklore across Latin America have often been sites of Marian apparitions, from Lourdes to Fátima to dozens of smaller Brazilian examples. Vazante's version may or may not have begun with any real sighting. It began with someone reporting one, and with the people around that person deciding to believe.

Vazante sits at 680 meters elevation in the cerrado of northern Minas Gerais, 496 kilometers from the state capital of Belo Horizonte. The climate is humid subtropical with a rainy summer from October to April and a dry winter from May to September. September and October are the hottest months, regularly topping 35 degrees Celsius before the rains return. The Rio Claro drains the territory - its headwaters in the Serra de Chapadinha northwest of town - along with the Rio Santa Catarina, which feeds the Paracatu River. The landscape looks open and dry, dotted with palms and cerrado scrub, broken by gallery forests where streams run. It is classic high-plains Brazil, and it is where the country's zinc comes from, and where on every first weekend of May, the buses and pickup trucks converge on a cave to say their prayers.