Mother Maravillas

María Maravillas Pidal y Chico Guzmán was born in Madrid in 1891. The daughter of marquises, she had a strong religious vocation from a very early age which was reinforced by the education she received. In 1919 she entered the convent of Discalced Carmelites in El Escorial, taking the name of Maravillas de Jesús. A few years later, she founded the Carmelite convent of Cerro de Los Ángeles and would go on to found nine others in Spain (including the ones in Duruelo and Mancera de Abajo) and one in India. On 1 December 1944, the new convent was inaugurated in Mancera, the construction of which she had personally supervised.

Mother Maravillas, who spent some time in Mancera, also helped to raise the money needed to repair the roof of the parish church, which had been closed after it collapsed. The town has a great memory of this Saint, canonised in 2003, whose name will go down in history as one of the great mystics of the 20th century.