A Portuguese historian in the 1970s informed his Filipino colleagues that the Ermita image in Manila resembles another “Nuestra Señora de Guia” in a church also called “La Hermita” overlooking Macao. He added that the title “Nuestra Senora de Guia” is not Spanish but Portuguese in origin. Was the image, in fact, brought to Manila by Portuguese missionaries before Legazpi arrived in 1571 and claimed the Philippines for the Spanish crown? Why is there no historical record for the origins of the image?

To answer that we have to go back to a time described in Western history books as the “Age of Discovery,” when Spain and Portugal were rivals in the “discovery” of Asia and lands unknown to them. To settle brewing territorial disputes, the Spanish Pope Alexander VI, in 1498, cut the world in half like an orange by drawing an imaginary demarcation line north to south 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. Historians are still trying to explain what territorial rights the papal bull “Inter caetera” (Among many [works]) actually granted Spain and Portugal, but what is often forgotten in our classroom history is that the Philippines lay on the Portuguese side of the world. When Legazpi claimed the archipelago for Spain in 1571, the Portuguese challenged the claim and invoked this invisible demarcation line. The Virgin of Ermita, Nuestra Señora de Guia, could be more than a venerated holy image if it is accepted as a marker of the Portuguese claim on the Philippines. How and why we remained under Spain for close to four centuries afterward is another story for another column.

Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer