In the midst of the devastating fires affecting the Punilla region (of Argentina), a surprising event caught the attention of the community. The flames devastated the Marian Center of the Holy Spirit, located between Ongamira and Quebrada de la Luna, but the image of the Virgin Mary remained intact among the ashes and ruins.
Photographer Ariel Luna, from InfoCórdoba, spoke with Infobae [Webzine] and explained step by step how he was able to capture such an image that went viral. “It was early Monday morning and I was looking for a fire source to go photograph in the middle of the night. And with a colleague we saw that in Ongamira there was more reflection of the fire and we went about 12 kilometers, into the mountains,” he recalled.
As he approached the area of greatest intensity, he saw a group of self-evacuees approaching him and telling him that some cabins and the Marian sanctuary were on fire. “There are no firefighters or anyone who can put it out,” the locals warned Luna desperately as he watched the fire advance. And that is where they went.
“We let the front of the fire pass and we found a structure on fire. The visual impact generated by that burning place was very strong, we saw how it destroyed all the wood on the walls and only a few burning sticks remained,” he recalled.
After about seven minutes, he began taking photos of the place, still without seeing the statue that went viral. “It was very difficult, because of the smoke and ashes it was difficult to see and focus in the distance, so I worked inside the fire, without large photography lenses, but short ones, in the foreground,” he added.
And, among the sparks, the unexpected happened, something that would later take on – due to the impact of his images – an almost divine character. “I began to glimpse a white figure in the smoke, but it was impossible to get close because of the fire,” he said. And then “the miracle” happened: a sudden change in the wind helped him get closer to what he recognized as a statue of the Virgin Mary. “There was nothing left of the sanctuary, only her, when I went to take the photo, I saw her totally white, as if she had not been there before and had been recently deposited,” he revealed.
What surprised this seasoned reporter, who already has experience in photographing forest fires, the most was that the plaster figure had no soot stains, nor was it even blackened, unlike another holy image that had recently been found in Los Cocos. “That one had turned brown, here it is just like that, so for believers it was shocking,” Luna commented, adding that the virgin was not displaced from the place. And he seeks to get closer again. “I am going to try to enter that area today, if the fire allows me.”
Luna confesses to being a believer (“although I have not been to mass for 15 years”) and stressed that “we have never had a repercussion of this nature, the fervent took it in an unusual way, no coverage of this fire had such a media magnitude, the photo that is going around everywhere,” he explained about the furor on the networks that the image of his authorship aroused.
When asked if he was able to approach the Virgin and touch her to try to understand why the figure was not harmed, he replied: “My companion told me that, ‘touch her’, she was boiling, but she had absolutely no damage.” And he added how the surprising divine encounter was: “First I saw her dark silhouette, among the flames, and I took several photos, and then I did it with flash and I saw her like this, she was not even brown: the live fire had just passed, it had destroyed everything.”
He had already been there from the first moments of the voracious fire, photographing what was happening in different towns in Córdoba. And he was able to photograph the “minute zero”, when the flames, which came from Dolores, crossed the border crossing with Capilla del Monte and crossed route 38, which was cut off by the passage of the fire.
As he took the photos, the wooden structures around him continued to burn, the sticks kept falling and his companion warned him to leave the place to avoid being burned. For Luna, having captured this image was not a coincidence. “I found out that there are people who pray to the image and believe that it is a miracle,” revealed the photojournalist.
The local community and those who saw the image on social media expressed their astonishment and interpreted the image as a symbol of hope in the midst of tragedy.