Divine Self‐Placement, Sacred Placemaking: The Virgin of El Rocío and Territorial Custodianship in Early Modern Spain

Abstract

Abstract

This essay argues that the Rocío hallazgo legend employs divine self‐placement to turn territorial uncertainty into sacred stewardship. The Virgin's miraculous refusal to move establishes the marshlands of Las Rocinas as a communal religious site, transforming a marginal and legally ambiguous area. The central evidence is the eighteenth‐century Libro de Reglas de la Hermandad Matriz de Almonte (1758), read here as both a devotional record and a legal instrument produced amid competing claims between villages and brotherhoods in the aftermath of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Building on William A. Christian Jr.'s account of local religion and shrine legends, the essay situates the Rocío narrative within the hallazgo tradition of the reconquered south—a tradition whose fourteenth‐century horizon is visible in the royal shrines of Guadalupe in Extremadura and the Virgen de Gracia in Carmona, and in the first documentary appearances of Las Rocinas itself under Alfonso XI. The Roman legal categories of res nullius and res communis provide the analytical vocabulary for the founding claim and its aftermath, while Elinor Ostrom's work on commons governance and Isidoro Moreno Navarro's anthropology of the Andalusian confraternal system explain how the claim was managed institutionally. Read alongside the scholarship on early modern sacred historiography (Simon Ditchfield, Katrina B. Olds, A. Katie Harris), the Libro de Reglas emerges as a Hispanic exercise in producing a usable sacred past: an account that transforms contested post‐conquest land into a devotional commons, legitimized through storytelling, ritual and the privileging of Christian spatial memory.