Ermita de Zamarrilla

You find the Ermita de Zamarrilla in Málaga, tucked between the neighbourhoods of El Perchel and La Trinidad. It is a small Catholic temple that first took shape as a single octagonal room. Its origins lie in the Holy Rosary, a devotion that gained force after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Felipe Pérez Conde and Felipe Pérez el menor drew up the design. Construction began in 1757, funded by donations that the local sailor Antonio Barranquero collected.

Popularity made the original room too small, and builders extended it in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Work on a new chamber in 1792 produced a discovery: the image of a sorrowful Virgin. She became the titular image of the chapel. The twentieth century left its mark: in 1931, a wave of church burnings stripped the building of many devotional images. Enrique Atencia Molina directed the restoration of 1945 and gave the structure its bell gable.

The legend of the bandit Zamarrilla clings to this chapel. He hid inside, the story goes, and watched a rose change colour in a miraculous moment. Artists and writers have retold the scene in many forms ever since. Those same walls house the canonical seat of the Hermandad de Zamarrilla.