Nothing about the construction was easy. There was no moulding technology available for a job like this in the Ceará interior in 1969, so the whole thing was made by hand — the forms shaped from wood and agave, the concrete placed in blocks that rose slowly with the outline of the figure, crews working around the clock in shifts. Cement itself was the bottleneck. Brazil was in the middle of an economic squeeze and the material was scarce even in the regions that produced it, which left the mayor, José Mauro Castelo Branco Sampaio, hunting for supply abroad. The statue on the hill above Juazeiro was ultimately poured with Russian and Hungarian cement, shipped across an ocean to build a monument to a country priest in the Brazilian backlands.

The man on the hill was born Cícero Romão Batista in Vila Real do Crato on 24 March 1844 and ordained on 30 November 1870. What made him famous happened on 1 March 1889, when a consecrated host was reported to have turned to blood in the mouth of a beata named Maria de Araújo during Mass. According to the accounts, it recurred over roughly two years. Two Church commissions examined it and reached opposite conclusions: one, under padre Clycério da Costa, ruled on 13 October 1891 that there was no natural explanation and the events were miraculous; the second, under padre Alexandrino de Alencar, called the whole thing um embuste — a fraud. Bishop Joaquim José Vieira sided with the second, and Padre Cícero's priestly faculties were suspended. He travelled to Rome in 1898 and was received by Leo XIII, and the absolution he obtained was later reversed. He was suspended, and censured, but never formally excommunicated. He was also, by then, entirely beyond the Church's ability to make him small.

Barred from exercising his ministry, Cícero became something else: the political master of the Cariri. When Juazeiro do Norte was made a municipality in 1911 he was its first mayor, and he governed it for around twenty years. That October he signed the Pacto dos Coronéis, the agreement among Ceará's landowning bosses that carved up the state's politics. When Governor Marcos Franco Rabelo removed him in 1913, his followers rose — the Sedição de Juazeiro — and he was back in 1914. He served as vice-governor of Ceará, was elected federal deputy in 1926 and never took the seat, and died in Juazeiro do Norte on 20 July 1934, aged ninety. He spent nearly all of his last four decades as a priest under censure, in a city that had grown up around him precisely because of it.

The devotion did not wait for permission and has not needed it since. Juazeiro do Norte is considered one of the largest centres of Catholicism in Latin America and, after Aparecida in São Paulo, one of Brazil's foremost destinations for pilgrimage. On the major dates the city takes in more than twice its own population. The calendar is dense: Santos Reis on 6 January, São Sebastião on the 20th, Candeias on 2 February, Padre Cícero's birth on 24 March, his death on 20 July, Nossa Senhora das Dores on 15 September, São Francisco on 4 October, Finados on 2 November. Pilgrims — romeiros — arrive packed into the backs of trucks and in chartered buses, and roughly 2.5 million people a year make the climb to the statue. The road up the Horto is lined with stalls selling miniature Padre Cíceros, images of patron saints, toys and carved souvenirs, and that trade is a real part of how the city eats.

At the top there is a small church and the Casa-Museu do Padre Cícero, and a view that takes in the whole Cariri valley. What there was not, for most of the twentieth century, was any acknowledgement from Rome that the man being venerated by millions had ever been anything but a problem. That changed on 13 December 2015, when the Bishop of Crato formally rehabilitated him, calling him a man of extraordinary virtues and reconciling him with the Church. On 20 August 2022 a beatification process was opened with papal authorisation. Whether the 1889 host turned to blood remains exactly what it has always been: a claim, examined twice and answered twice in contradiction. What is not in question is what grew out of it — a city of hundreds of thousands, a pilgrimage economy, and a thirty-metre priest of imported concrete keeping watch over both.