The Difunta Correa has many faithful and devotees in Argentina and Chile. Deolinda Correa lived around 1840 in the La Rioja region of Argentina. She refused the attention of the local police chief and married Clemente Bustos, which she loved. Shortly after her resentful suitor, had her young husband recruited for the civil war.

It seems that Deolinda, wife and mother just since few days, was very worried about her husband’s fate. She then decided to follow the fighters and walked for many kilometers in the desert with her baby in swaddling clothes until she fell exhausted from fatigue and thirst, only to die shortly after.

When some muleteers found the poor woman’s lifeless body, they realized that her baby had managed to survive because he was still attached to her mother’s breast. This miracle aroused much emotion and the place where the woman was found immediately became a place of pilgrimage and commemoration.

Since then, more than one million people have celebrated the Difuntita Correa every year by offering bottles full of water to symbolically quench the young mother’s thirst. Thousands of bottles are also placed at the foot of small tabernacles that are found everywhere along the roads of Argentina and Chile. It seems that the Difuntita Correa particularly protects those who are traveling, which is why travelers and truckers donate the bottles.