The Black Madonna of Chipiona

Our Lady of Regla (Nuestra Senora de Regla) is a Marian title attached to a dark-complexioned image of the Virgin and Child, one of the Black Madonnas of the Catholic world. Its origin lies at Chipiona, on the Atlantic coast of Cadiz in Andalusia, where a sanctuary of Our Lady of Regla, long in the care of the Augustinians, has stood since the late Middle Ages; a pious legend, unverifiable historically, ascribed the carving of the image to Saint Augustine himself, and the name Regla (meaning rule) was connected with the Augustinian rule of life. From Andalusia, a region with strong maritime and colonial ties, the devotion crossed the Atlantic with Spanish settlers and sailors to the Caribbean, where it took especially deep root at the harbour of Havana.

The devotion's arrival in Cuba is undocumented as to any single date, arriving instead gradually with the general traffic of Andalusian sailors and settlers through Havana across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a diffuse transmission typical of maritime Marian devotions of the period rather than the product of any one recorded voyage or founding event. The Chipiona sanctuary itself remains active today, still in Augustinian care, and continues to draw pilgrims independently of its much younger and now more widely known Cuban namesake across the Atlantic.