National Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche
Catholic shrine Florida, US
The National Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche is a Catholic Marian shrine located at the Nombre de Dios Mission in St. Augustine, Florida. Originally built in 1609 in honor of Our Lady of La Leche—a Marian apparition popular among the Spanish settlers in the area—it is the oldest shrine in the United States. It was elevated to national shrine status in 2019 and received a canonical coronation in 2021.
History
Background
Spanish explorers, under the command of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the spiritual chaplaincy of Fr Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, OFM, arrived in northern Florida in 1565. Grajalez celebrated there the first Mass in what would become the United States. The mission established there, Nombre de Dios, was also the first in that regard.
The settlers brought with them the Spanish devotion to Nuestra Señora de La Leche y Buen Parto ("Our Lady of the Milk and Good Delivery"). The name comes from the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary nursing the infant Jesus, hence the reference to "la leche"—i.e., (breast) milk.
Construction
The shrine was built in 1609 at the mission, in what was then Spanish Florida.
“National Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche” enters the record as catholic shrine Florida, US. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what National, Shrine and Lady can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q108582014. Authority coordinates are 29.905, -81.315. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1609, 2019, 2021 and 1565.
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This entry incorporates text from “National Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.