Antique & Vintage Postcards

The old Basilica de Santa María de Guadalupe blazes in warm afternoon light in this dramatic chrome-era view, its twin baroque towers and broad atrium plaza thronged with pilgrims and visitors — a scene essentially unchanged since the church was completed in 1709 and unchanged still today, even as the structure slowly sank into Mexico City's soft subsoil and necessitated the new basilica built beside it in 1976. Cars parked along the perimeter and the dress of the crowd place this image firmly in the 1960s, before the new rotunda basilica rose to its left. The Tepeyac hill rises behind with its own chapels visible on the crest. Published by Ediciones FEMA, one of Mexico's most prolific mid-century postcard houses, this unused example is bright and crisp — a handsome souvenir of Latin America's most visited Catholic pilgrimage site.